✦ The Alquemie ✦
You never stopped
being your creative self.
You just edited her out.
The creative self you set aside wasn’t lost. She’s been waiting: quietly, patiently, and with increasing insistence. The Alquemie is where you stop avoiding her and invite her back in the room.
“Am I still that person?”
The question you ask yourself at 2am, but never say out loud. It’s too painful to think that version of you might be gone forever.
This Is For You If
You’ve done everything right.
And something is still missing.
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You used to make things, you spent hours: writing, painting, building, designing, performing, and somewhere in the last decade, you realized that it’s been so long that it feels like another lifetime.
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You’ve been doing all the practices. The meditation, the journaling, the breathwork. But the thing that’s truly consistent is just not feeling better.
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You describe your creative self in the past tense. “I used to be someone who…” You’ve stopped finishing that sentence in front of people.
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You don’t need another course, another system, another framework. You need someone to ask the right question and stay in the room while you answer it.
Work With Karen
Two ways in.
One conversation at a time.
Every path into The Alquemie begins with a real conversation, not a discovery call designed to sell you something, but a genuine hour of attention directed at what’s actually going on.
First Step · Free
The Prima Materia Session
45 minutes · No charge
A single conversation to locate where you are: what’s present, what’s been waiting, what the next right thing is. A real session, at no cost, for women who are ready to look at what’s actually going on.
If The Alquemie program is the right next step, you’ll know by the end of it. If it isn’t, you’ll still leave with something useful.
Via Setmore · 45 min · Limited availability
Book the Prima Materia SessionDeep Work · $333
The Cartography
90 minutes · $333 · rebookable
A standalone 90-minute session for women who are ready to do the actual work: mapping what’s buried, naming what’s been running things, and leaving with a clear picture of the terrain.
The Cartography can be booked as a single session or returned to over time. Each session builds on the last. This is where the real excavation happens.
Via Setmore · 90 min · Rebookable
Book The CartographyThe Approach
Via negativa.
Emptying, not adding.
Most creative coaching asks you to do more: more practices, more accountability, more content, more courage. The Alquemie works in the opposite direction.
The philosophical tradition of via negativa holds that you approach truth by subtracting, by clearing away what’s accumulated until what remains is what’s actually true. That’s the work here.
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01
Name what’s actually running things
The patterns that trained you to make everyone around you comfortable: your employer, your family, the market, didn’t disappear. They went underground and set up shop. The first work is seeing them clearly, without diagnosing yourself as the problem.
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02
Recover the base layer
Underneath the useful masks: the Responsible One, the Practical One, the One Who Doesn’t Make Trouble, is the self that was there before the practical decisions told her that her input wasn’t important. She isn’t gone. She’s been waiting for you to stop performing long enough to find her.
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03
The masks become the toolbox
The decades of adaptation weren’t failures. They were training. The woman who survived corporate culture, caregiving, grief, reinvention: she has capabilities the uninterrupted artist never developed. The work is integrating all the parts of herself, not choosing between them.
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04
She waited. Now you’re ready.
This isn’t about becoming someone new. The woman who survived corporate culture, caregiving, grief, reinvention — she didn’t lose the creative self. She buried her for safekeeping. The work is stopping long enough to let her back in, and discovering she never forgot a thing.
The Alquemie Cohort
The program is coming.
8 women. 3 months. By invitation.
The founding cohort of The Alquemie is forming now. Join the waitlist and you’ll be the first to know when the Prima Materia Sessions open for program candidates.
You’ll hear from me when there’s something worth saying.
Karen
Spies
Founder, The Alquemie
Host, Second Wind Women
Karen Spies spent twelve years as a working silversmith before a repetitive motion injury ended that practice. What followed was a long curriculum of (sometimes) practical decisions: graduate study in Buddhist philosophy, web development, a career in tech consulting, work at Stanford Research Institute, a stint supporting arts organizations, and, running through all of it, a persistent question about what she had traded away and whether it was too late to get it back.
It wasn’t. But the answer didn’t come from adding more practices. It came from stopping, locating the base layer underneath twenty years of adaptation, and learning to work from there.
The Alquemie is what she built from that. A coaching practice rooted in via negativa, alchemy, Buddhist philosophy, and the knowledge of what it costs to keep the creative self waiting, and what it looks like when you finally stop.
She is also the host of Second Wind Women, a podcast for women in entrepreneurial and creative pivots.
