The Alchemy of Transformation: What Happens Right Before We Shift
I’ve come to realize something profound about the discomfort that rises up just before we shift. It’s not a breakdown. It’s not regression. It’s a signal: that the unconscious pattern is about to become conscious, that the incoherence we’ve carried for years is ready to meet the light. And when it gets close to the surface, it flares—hard. Not because it wants to stay, but because it fears becoming obsolete.
This is the crucible. The friction before the flame. The space where lead meets heat and has the chance to become gold.
This transformation is alive in me now. For years I’ve been working with a deep-rooted pattern around money: earning, receiving, feeling safe in overflow. Layer after layer. But the deepest tone underneath it all has recently revealed itself. A root-root harmonic.
“If I fully express myself, I may not be supported.”
It didn’t begin with me. It came through ancestral lines as survival intelligence. It was never meant to limit me—it was designed to protect. But protection calcified into contraction:
I must over-effort to be safe
Receiving without struggle is dangerous
Overflow disconnects me from love
The shift? It’s here. I can feel it. And here’s what I’ve learned:
You don’t transmute patterns like this through force. You don’t overpower the nervous system. You alchemize by allowing a new tone to root deeper than the old one ever lived.
This work takes time. It asks for compassion—deep, ongoing compassion for yourself as you navigate the space between what was and what wants to emerge. This is where practices and rituals become essential allies. They allow us to work with the human biology as it is now, gently creating new pathways in the brain, regulating the nervous system, and helping us embody a new coherence.
New Tone:
My coherence is enough to call forth support
I no longer carry the duty of generational survival
I receive in overflow and remain deeply connected to love
This is where coherent embodiment applies:
“Whether fire or stillness—a tone that no longer fractures in the presence of its opposite. That is coherence. That is freedom.”
What was once shadow becomes signal. What was once contraction becomes capacity.
Recognizing Your Own Incoherence (Your Lead):
Where do you feel tension that repeats?
What situations trigger old patterns of shrinking, over-efforting, or self-abandonment?
What stories surface when you try to rest, receive, or express?
These aren’t blocks. They’re invitations. They’re the parts of you asking to be witnessed, not erased.
Alchemizing the Lead into Gold:
Feel it fully, without story. Put your hand on your heart and say: “I see you. You kept me safe. But I’m safe now to expand.”
Regulate the nervous system. Breath, movement, silence. Your body is the tuning fork.
Use beauty as a portal. Let art, sound, nature create coherence in your field.
Receive in small ways. Let someone help you. Say yes. Allow.
Speak new tones. Use phrases like: “I am plenitude.” “Overflow is safe.”
Give from overflow. Let your giving become a resonance, not a rescue.
This journey hasn’t been linear. It’s taken self-awareness, rewiring subconscious beliefs, mastering focus, tending to my energy hygiene, and learning to witness myself without judgment.
And I’m still learning.
But what I now deeply believe is this:
The truth of who I am is boundless, infinite, timeless.
And my human biology is undergoing a great evolution of consciousness.
We are all here to become whole. And wholeness isn’t about perfection. It’s about integrating contrast until your tone holds steady—no matter what it meets.
This is the alchemy.
This is the shift.
And we each walk it in our own unique way.
Let yours be beautiful.
Michelle Lee Kellar
