What It Costs to Be a Sacred Alchemist

Originally posted on substack.

Where pleasure becomes prayer, and boundaries become love

People often imagine alchemy as something luminous, elevated, reserved for those who walk only in the light. That has never matched my experience.

Being a sacred alchemist is learning to be comfortable in what cannot be seen, named, or controlled. It is allowing the light to emerge from within, rather than chasing it outside yourself. It is not a role you step into once and keep forever. It is a cycle you live through again and again.

My descent was not about one thing. It was about everything. There was no single loss, no singular heartbreak, no neat origin story. It was the slow collapse of structures I had relied on. Identity, attachments, beliefs, fantasies about who I thought I needed to be. Creation, maintenance, destruction, then creation again. Over and over. Each cycle asking for more truth, more presence, more embodiment.

That is where the alchemy happens. Not in avoiding destruction, but in staying conscious through it. Being a mystic is not about escaping the world. It is about seeing yourself as both everything and nothing at the same time. You realise how small you are, and how vast. How insignificant, and how deeply necessary. You learn to trust divine timing not because it is comfortable, but because resisting it only prolongs suffering.

Along the way, you learn discernment. The difference between ego, intellect, and intuition becomes essential. Ego wants protection. Intellect wants explanation. Intuition wants alignment. When you ignore intuition long enough, life corrects you.

For me, embodiment became the turning point. I stopped turning away from the shames inherited from others and looked them directly in the face. I began to meet my own pleasure and desires with curiosity instead of judgement, to become intimate with them rather than managing or suppressing them. I stopped trying to transcend the body and started listening to it. Sensuality ceased to be something external or performative and became something internal, lived. Sex magick began in solitude, through self pleasure that was intentional, slow, and devotional. Learning my own rhythms. My own edges. My own boundaries. My own capacity for pleasure without needing to be witnessed. Somewhere in that devotion, my divine feminine arrived. Not as softness, but as authority. I let her take the wheel. I let her take care.

Only after that did union become possible. Divine union is not about being completed by another, and this is where so many people misunderstand it. It is about meeting from wholeness. When you encounter someone already embodied in their divine masculine, regardless of gender, the dynamic changes entirely. The masculine enters not as a saviour, but as a mirror. Not to take, but to co create. True alchemy between lovers only happens when sovereignty is intact on both sides, when the feminine is not performing, and the masculine is not posturing.

The darkest truth I had to face was myself. I have many flaws, and I stopped treating them like stains to scrub away. I love them, because they are often the exact places other people try to shame in themselves. I learnt that being a mirror will trigger people, and shrinking to avoid that is just another form of self betrayal. Being alone taught me how to love myself properly, not in theory, but in practice, and that relationship became the standard for everything, how I let people speak to me, touch my life, enter my world. It taught me when to say yes, when to say no, and when to walk away without negotiating my worth. It also rewired my relationship with failure. What I used to call failure was rarely failure at all, it was redirection, a correction back towards my soul purpose.

That is where queen energy became real to me. Not loud. Not defensive. Precise. I could feel, in my body, when something was a yes, when it was a no, and when it was a slow leak disguised as loyalty. I stopped keeping cords attached to people who fed on my self doubt, who loved me most when I was pliable, convenient, easy to place. Some endings hurt, but they were clean, and the clean cuts brought my power back to my skin. Discernment is part of devotion, and devotion means I do not offer my life force to what cannot honour it.

The deities I work with are not aesthetic symbols. They are archetypal forces that have shaped my inner landscape and sharpened my discernment. Lilith taught me embodiment, authority, and refusal, the kind that does not apologise for taking up space. Persephone and Hades taught me sacred silence, the underworld seasons, and the truth that descent is not punishment, it is initiation, and return is earned. Isis and Osiris taught me devotion through fragmentation, how love can survive dismemberment, and how wholeness is sometimes rebuilt, not restored. Kali taught me how to let things die cleanly, without clinging, and how to recreate from the void when nothing familiar remains. Ma’at and Isfet taught me that order and chaos are not enemies, but collaborators in evolution, one builds, one breaks, both reveal. Shiva and Shakti showed me that creation only happens when polarity is honoured, not performed, and that life itself is the cosmic dance.

Being a sacred alchemist is not a title you earn. It is not something you are certified into. There is no doctrine, no hierarchy, no permission slip.

Whether you like it or not, you are already alchemising. Your wounds are raw material. Your desires are instructions. Your soul carries its own sacred blueprint.

The only choice is whether you engage consciously with the fire, or let it consume you unconsciously.

I chose to work with it.

You are choosing too.