The Causey Consulting Podcast

Alchemy & Your Business ⚗️

August 12, 2021 Sara Causey Episode 90
The Causey Consulting Podcast
Alchemy & Your Business ⚗️
Show Notes Transcript

I recently heard an episode of Jenn Stevens' podcast entitled, "Emotional Alchemy: Turn Sh*t Into Gold." I enjoyed it and it inspired me to record this episode about how you can turn poop experiences in your business into gold. 

Key topics:

✔️ In business as in life, sometimes 💩 is gonna happen. This is part of the human condition. No one gets a perfect life or a perfect business. 
✔️ It's good to perform an autopsy when something goes awry, BUT you need to do it in a way that is not punitive or blaming. Trying to figure out how every negative thing in the world is your fault is a waste of time and it makes you feel awful. I've done the leg work. I know!
✔️ Spiritual and emotional alchemy will invite you to do shadow work. One of the easiest ways to get started is to pay attention to your triggers. What are the things that get you hot under the collar?
✔️ Business is tough. The love & light only crowd might tell you that it's gonna be bliss all the time but no, no, it is not! You will have challenges to deal with and problems to solve. We don't have to walk into the office each morning saying, "Great. What fresh hell awaits me today?" But when something we dislike occurs, it's a waste of time and emotional energy to decide it's all your fault for not staying super positive about everything all the time.

Link to article I discuss: https://spiritualgangster.com/blogs/news/the-art-of-spiritual-alchemy


Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Unknown:

Welcome to the Causey Consulting podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. Today I want to talk about alchemy. I remember when I was writing my master's thesis on Faust and Mephistopheles, the idea of Faust trying to turn base metal into gold was really interesting to me. You may be thinking, well, that's something from a bygone era. Why on earth would it still be relevant to me, let alone relevant to me and my business will saddle up because I'm about to tell you. The official Merriam Webster definition of alchemy is a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold. The discovery of a universal cure for disease and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life. The second definition they offer is a power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. Recently, I was listening to an episode of Jenn Stevens' podcast entitled emotional alchemy turned shit into gold. Full disclosure, I have not worked with her before or utilize any of her programs. So this is neither an endorsement or a non endorsement of her work. It's just simply me discussing this podcast episode that I found really awesome. I will drop a link to this podcast episode in the write up for this podcast episode. So you can check it out if you want to. I want to read a bit from the episode description to you. "No matter how good at manifesting you are, eventually something, quote, bad is going to happen to you. So let's get this straight. It's not because you did anything wrong or that you deserved it. It's just that the negative is a part of everyone's life. However, it's up to you what you do with those events. You can let them define you and weigh on you for the rest of your life, where you can learn emotional alchemy, turn that shit into gold and get back to the good stuff with lightning speed." I think the universe definitely has a sense of humor. It's not so much that I found this episode. I think this episode was meant to find me. Because this is exactly the kind of work that I have been doing internally, as well as with one of my teachers, who's been encouraging me. First of all, not to make a mountain out of a molehill. Don't get into catastrophe mode, really be able to step back and take an honest appraisal and to have perspective on things. Not every minor crisis is a huge nuclear war. Not every setback is a permanent setback. It's just a bump in the road. Most of the time, we're really not faced with mission critical life or death decisions. Now perhaps if you are in the military or the highest levels of government, yes, you may indeed be faced with life or death choices on a daily basis. But for most of us that are out gigging freelancing during consulting work, we're not having to think about whether or not to hit the nuclear red button we're doing we aren't making decisions at that level, but yet it can feel so anxiety riddled and so scary day in and day out if we allow it to. So this idea of emotional alchemy as well as spiritual alchemy has been on my mind a lot. And yes, there are the law of attraction purists and the love and light only good vibes, a loud crowd, that will try to convince you that if something quote bad or negative, something unwanted has occurred in your life, it's your own fault, you somehow brought it in, you brought it on yourself, or you brought it on someone that you love, it may not even be you that's having a health crisis or a problem. It may be that your husband lost his job, or your child has COVID I mean, something bad has happened. And they're going to tell you that you attracted that in you worried about it too much. It became a negative self fulfilling prophecy. And so it's happening because it's all your fault. Be s and I'm so glad that Jen is recording this episode to tell people like No, please, please stop attributing everything that happens in your life as you being punished. You've done something wrong and you deserve it. That's just simply not true. It is like the bumper sticker says, shit happens. There's going to be times in life when the poop hits the fan and it's pointed in our direction. I'm thinking of the Scripture which says that the rain falls on the just and In the unjust, there are times when the bad guy is going to win times when the good guy is going to lose times when things are so much in a gray area that you can't really tell any in any given situation, who's the hero and who's the villain, maybe both people are have messed up in some way, or maybe both people are good. It's really difficult to live day in and day out. If you feel like oh my god gun to my head positivity. If I can't keep a good attitude, if I can't stay in high vibration all the time, something bad's gonna happen to me or loved one. I mean, that's a huge amount of pressure, isn't it? So this idea of emotional alchemy or spiritual alchemy, is essentially taking something that's been given to you. That's a base metal, it's not exactly what you really want. But you're trying to find the power within you to transmogrify this base metal into gold, so that you can take a situation that sucks, something that you don't enjoy something that is not wanted, and mine it for gold, even if you're not able to turn it into gold, is there a lesson that you can get out of it? Is there some way of getting past this block of opening that road to be able to move forward? I'm a big believer in performing an autopsy, whenever we lose a business deal, something goes wrong, we have a prospecting call that doesn't go the way that we wish that it would have somebody backs out, you should perform an autopsy to determine Okay, what exactly as best as I can tell, went wrong. But you want to do it in a way that's not condemning a way that's not playing the blame game, whether it's you trying to turn the lens on yourself and blame yourself, or whether it's you trying to blame the other person, oh, I showed up. And I was great. I was positive and I was super, but the prospect was a butthole. That that's not gonna do you any good. The overall idea is for you to be able to learn a lesson without making it punitive. This is not about taking a ruler and slapping yourself over the hand or over the wrist with it. It's just simply going next time around, I think I'll use a different phrase next time around, I'm going to do more background research. Again, not to condemn yourself for doing something differently this time, just saying next time, I think I'll tweak things around and try it out. Like conducting an experiment. You know, like when we're in the lab doing our testing and beta testing and figuring out how to approach marketing. What's our ideal demographic? What kind of clients do we do our best work for and which ones do we tend to not enjoy so much. as Bill Hicks, the comedian used to say it's just a ride, you can tell when somebody has gotten super miserable because they're taking life way too seriously. And in those moments, if you can just take a deep breath and remind yourself, it's just a ride, you can stop making everything into a nuclear meltdown. Spiritual alchemy can often be helped along by doing Shadow Work, then you may have heard that phrase before and wondering what does that even mean? Or is that just a bunch of psycho babble is that New Age Whoo, what what even is this idea of Shadow Work? Carl Jung came up with this idea of the shadow self. And your shadow self is essentially the parts of you that you have rejected and or parts of yourself that you just are sort of willfully ignorant towards you don't want to acknowledge that they're there, you may be able to see them and others and be triggered by them in the behavior of others. But you don't want to acknowledge that that part of you also exists. One of the easiest ways to begin the process of Shadow Work is to simply notice, what is it that triggers you? What grinds your gears? What is it that really gets you hot under the collar? And I'm not talking about big picture injustices that frankly, all of us should feel outraged by I'm talking about things at a more molecular personal level. I can't believe that she said that. Who does he think he is? Why would he even think that he could get away with doing that to me, things of that sort that happen in your day to day week to week life that trigger you and start to make you mad start to really get you pissed off. Just take note of those things. And then begin asking yourself these questions of well, why did that trigger me? Why did that make me so upset? Why did I go from zero to 60 in three seconds over that incident. And you'll begin to find these elements of your shadow self. And as you're making those discoveries It's not a race. It's not trying to work through your issues and integrate parts of your shadow as fast as possible. In my mind, that's a fool's errand. It's like the love and light only crowd, you cannot be positive and happy and perky 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Likewise, as you're identifying these triggers, and you're working to figure out like, Okay, what, what is this sort of hidden shadowy element of myself that I'm refusing to acknowledge, that is not an overnight process, nor should it be, I mean, you are plumbing the depths. And I once had a therapist who told me as you're going spelunking, as your as your plumbing, the depths and going down into the abyss, you should tie a rope around your waist to make sure that you can climb back out, you don't want to stay in the Abyss and really linger there, you want to make sure that you have a tether so that you can climb back out again, and get back on level ground. I think that's really sage advice. And a great warning, you have to remember that Nietzsche warned us about this many years ago, if you gaze for too long into an abyss, the Abyss gaze is also into you. So don't spend too much time spelunking around in your shadow, you want to make sure that you're allowing yourself to have small doses of it and not just lingering there. The blog at spiritual gangster.com offers a really great synopsis of spiritual alchemy. And I will also drop a link to that in the write up for this podcast episode. Stage One is calcination, to dissolution, three separation for conjunction five, fermentation, six, distillation, and seven coagulation. So that first stage of calcination is really when the breakdown starts to happen. We've realized that maybe we're engaged in behavior that's not serving us very well, our ego has been crushed in some way, we're at that precipice of like, oh, things are not really going my way anymore than what behaviors that worked for me in the past are not working. Now we're having that realization that something is off. dissolution is more of the observational phase where we take a step back, and we start to make an appraisal. Separation, I believe is a really important part of the process because we start to sift and sort and filter. And this is a great opportunity to to engage in your shadow work, what what is real, what's imagined? What is the story that I'm telling myself in my head? Because you and I could see the same event and have completely different perspectives and completely different interpretations about what happened. Bob might say, you know, I think you look nice on that dress today. And Sally may think, oh, because I don't typically look nice in the dress today. And Cindy might think, thanks, that's a great compliment. Of course, I look great. It's all a matter of perspective with these things. Number four, conjunction is when we are allowing things that have been buried to come to the surface so that we can begin to deal with them. Number five fermentation is that that death process, and death is not always a terrible thing, when it comes to metaphor. When it comes to the death of a habit that needs to die, a relationship that's gone way past its sell by date somebody that's rude, abusive, that needs to be punted out of your life. In order for the process of rebirth to happen, there has to be that death of toxic patterns and things that are no longer serving us that I don't think there's any way around that. Six distillation is the purification process. And I can tell you from different times, when I have been performing this kind of alchemy on myself, it can be a trial by fire, and it can hurt like hell, because these things are coming at you. And it's like the universe or your higher self is testing you going, Okay, if you're really done with this type of person, or this type of client or this type of scenario, you're going to get tested. And in order to really know that you're done with it, you have to make a different choice than you would have before. The final stage of coagulation is when we really have integrated, you might could also call it enlightenment or being a bodhisattva. It's this idea that we don't see any separation between ourselves and the outside world or the greater universe. We're really able to have a more direct manifestation so that whenever we're thinking something, we can manifest that into reality. We don't see a disconnect between I would really like to have x, y, z. But this is just not possible. For me. That kind of thoughts not going on in our mind. We know that If we can think it, it's already possible. It's already happened somewhere in the quantum realm and there's a future you living that life. I don't know too far down the physics rabbit hole. But suffice it to say that last phrase, or that last phase of the process is when you realize that you're not separate from the world at all You are a part of this Spiritus Mundi. So what does a l this crazy talk about a chemy have to do with your b siness? business is tough. There's going to be days in your life as a freelancer, a solopreneur, a small business owner, when you feel like you are most definitely between the Scylla and the corruptness, you've got hard choices to make you feel like you're getting poop thrown at you in every direction. This client wants to pay late, and your assistant suddenly needs time off. And the bookkeeper miscalculated something. And it's like, you know, all the wheels are trying to come off the wagon and you want to hold everything together. Poop is most definitely going to happen in your business. I don't know of any way around that in the same way that nobody gets a perfect life, where you never ever, ever experience rainfall, you never have it have a bad day. Nothing unwanted ever occurs. Same thing in your business. There will be times when you have problems to solve and challenges that you have to deal with. I just don't know of any way around that. That being said, the more that you can take those challenges and those problems and those setbacks, and use them to your own advantage. Figure out is there a way that I can transform this into into power? Can I take pain and turn it into power? Can I rewrite my story so that I'm not a perpetual victim, I don't feel like fate is just all the time putting poop into the fan and blowing in in my direction. It makes you a stronger person, it not only makes you a better business person, and it makes you more savvy so that potentially you can weed out problem child clients before they come in. It also helps you in your spiritual, your emotional and your business development. I remember hearing Joyce Meyer say you can either pick the pain of growth, or you can pick the pain of trying to stay stuck forever. The choice is yours. But you're either going to have to experience growing pains, or you're going to have to experience the pain of trying to remain stagnant changes the only constant. So if we dig our heels in and just No, no, this moment here is perfect. This relationship is exactly how I want it. The house is exactly how I want it. My car, the kids, the job, everything is exactly how I want it. Now I want to keep this moment frozen in time. It doesn't work. I remember in the Sex and the City movie, how Charlotte said, I have everything I ever wanted. And I'm so happy that I'm terrified. I will warn you this idea of transforming your pain into power. Sounds great. It sounds very victorious. And yes, that I can do that. It's going to hurt like hell. Because the the human animal is conditioned to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. It is hardwired into us. So you're having to rewrite your own code, rewrite your own system protocol. Because we're conditioned to avoid pain, we're not going to go running into the burning fire. We want to run away from the burning fire. And so when we're in this process of emotional or spiritual alchemy, and we're being purified, and we're going through distillation, or fermentation, it's like oh, I don't know that I should have done this. I don't know that I wanted this. It sounded great when I read it in a book or it sounded great when I saw it on some of these motivational posts or heard about it in somebody's podcast, but now that I'm actually having to do it, I'm having to actually try to somehow turn this pain and this ball of anger, frustration, hatred, bitterness, into something different. It's kind of sucking, that's going to happen. I want you to think about it like a weapons arsenal. Each time that some poop gets flung out you try and lose my voice, Oklahoma allergies, each time that some poop gets flung at you, and you're able to transform that into personal power. It's like putting another weapon in your own personal Arsenal so that you have everything that you need. You have armory of swords, you have shields, anything that you could possibly need. to slay the dragons that come up in your life. You'll know you'll have the confidence and you'll know that you know that, you know, I'll handle it. Much like the book by Susan Jeffers that I love so much feel the fear and do it anyway. You will know that when these things come up in your life in your business, which invariably they will, you will know. I can handle it. Friends, if you can get to that point of alchemy, where you know that whatever's coming out of the unknown be a good bet that you can transmogrify that into personal power. You will be a bad ass. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you haven't already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.