The Emotional Alchemy Podcast
Welcome to the Emotional Alchemy Podcast where safety is medicine, connection is never automated and everything is relational.
The Emotional Alchemy Podcast
140. Welcome to the Emotional Alchemy Podcast
Have you ever stood at the edge of a transformation, the kind that beckons you to shed an old skin and step into a new realm of possibilities? That's where I find myself as I unveil the reinvention of my podcast, an odyssey that weaves the thread that have always been a part of my work. Emotional alchemy has always been and always will be the backbone of what I share so by changing the name of my podcast, I am honoring the seed of the medicine that I've been circling around for over a decade.
This podcast is a space where we can explore together, fostering a sense of community as you, my listeners, become co-navigators on this voyage. I'm thrilled to share this growth, eager for the dialogue it will spark, and deeply grateful for the companionship offered by each one of you tuning in. So, I warmly welcome you to subscribe and join in as we move forward on this path of discovery, allowing the raw and real to guide us to a place where professionalism and personal growth are no longer separate entities, but facets of the same transformative journey.
Kat HoSoo Lee is an Emotional Alchemy Coach, Spiritual Business Mentor and host of The Emotional Alchemy Podcast.
She loves playing in the space where science and spirituality converge because this is where we get to experience emotional alchemy. In her work, she educates space-holders about somatic physiology and environmental biology so they can deepen their practices of listening and presence which ultimately helps them expand their capacity to hold space for others.
As a Spiritual Business Mentor, she guides soulful entrepreneurs to approach their business as a spiritual practice. The work bridges the emotional landscape with practical tools which allow them to cultivate businesses that are rooted in conscious values, relational marketing and purposeful service.
This podcast is made possible with sound production by Andre Lagace.
okay, now here's the episode. Andre, hello and welcome to the emotional alchemy podcast. Whoa, that feels weird to say out loud. Um, up until well yesterday this was the rooted business podcast and about a year before that it was the empowered curiosity podcast. If you've been listening for a while, you're about to see an evolution of my work.
Speaker 1:It's interesting sitting here because when I first started my business I had constriction around being seen sharing my voice, saying the right thing, the fear of being too big, because I grew up in a family where it was safer to be hidden in plain sight. So I had to work through a lot to share my thoughts and parts of my life with you. But what I've been feeling more recently is this frustration around niching. I want to share more about the land, the horses, insights from gardening, communication and relationships and didn't feel like it fit neatly within the brand in gigantic quotation marks, the brand of spiritual business mentorship and the brand of a podcast called the Rooted Business Podcast, brand of a podcast called the Rooted Business Podcast. I've also been hearing from the community that they appreciate when I share these different aspects of my life and that they're gaining different lessons and it's valuable on a different layer and so not sharing all this stuff was starting to poke at a different wound, this wound within me that whispers that I'm too big, that I need to fracture myself to be understood, and I knew that an expansion was needed for me to actually integrate and dissolve that wound. So, just coincidentally, this is also a death sentence for a manifesting generator. I think of myself not as a bonsai tree. I am like my land, I am a wild grassland where different things bloom through the seasons, and so this is my way of expressing that through the podcast. So here we go. I chose the name Emotional Alchemy Podcast because that's been the thread that's woven through my work from the beginning, or rather, that's the work that I've tried to weave through my work within systems that didn't support the concept of emotional alchemy.
Speaker 1:My first take on this was when I graduated from my master's program at Five Branches University in Santa Cruz. I failed the first time. I took my acupuncture licensing exam and I failed by one question. I felt completely defeated by all of my studying methods. I had spent hours and hours and hours with charts and graphs and flashcards and basically doing what everyone else said I should be doing around studying, and I failed by one question. So after that exam I threw everything out and I asked myself how I wanted to study. I took my flashcards on hikes, I recorded myself talking about points and herbs and then played them back to myself like a personalized podcast. And to this day, when I try to recall an herbal formula, I am transported to the place where I studied it.
Speaker 1:When I passed the exams on my second go-around, I was pissed. I made an appointment with the dean of students and ranted about how we're expected to cram all this information into our brains to be readily accessible to us at any given moment, and nobody was teaching us how our brains worked and how to study. The dean her name was Joanna. She listened and I remember actually wondering if she was getting it, because she kept this like neutral face the whole time and at the end she said thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Would you like to teach that class what we're saying that again? So I taught a class about how we all have different learning styles and what we are expected to absorb. Why is that so difficult to say? So I taught a class about how we all have different learning styles and we're expected to absorb information in this very narrow way. In traditional schooling I am an auditory and kinesthetic learner, which is why staring at charts and graphs didn't work for me. We also talked about the emotional blocks that get in the way of test taking and how to regulate our nervous systems in the face of necessary scary things. I realize now that even back then, which was almost 15 years ago now, I was concerned about helping the body and emotions be more receptive, so that the how-to's can feel a little more easeful. To me, this is one of the reasons why we need to bring awareness to our emotions, because it makes the how much easier.
Speaker 1:As an acupuncturist, my work wasn't just about poking with needles to get out of physical pain. I was always asking what is the body trying to tell us through these signs and symptoms? After all, our bodies are trying to communicate with us through the only language that it knows, which is discomfort signs and symptoms, and often what we found in the body were subtle emotional entrapments in the energetic system that had to move into the physical plane for the person to pay attention. I struggled in my role as a fertility acupuncturist because it felt like I was part of a system that said, do whatever it takes to get the baby. We were taking vulnerable women, throwing pain point, marketing at them at one of the most tender moments of their lives and telling them to override the signals, in addition to all the questions around saying that differently. Once they came into the clinic, though, I tried to do things differently. In addition to all the questions around their menstrual cycles and hormones, I would ask questions like what does this baby mean to you? Or what doesn't feel nourishing in your life right now? Or can we bring in a little bit of an exhale, just a tiny bit of surrender, to your next IVF cycle? Some of my patients were receptive, and we found the stories that the body had hidden, tucked away in their pelvises, their wombs, their hormone systems, but many wanted to treat fertility like another accomplishment that they can either fail at or succeed, which really only perpetuated their existing stories that they were running on.
Speaker 1:I have to admit that it wasn't just the long hours and being on call at the IVF clinic that burnt me out. It was working within a system that doesn't deem emotional alchemy as a valid form of medicine. So I have to take a little pause here, because I'm realizing that I haven't defined emotional alchemy and I am big on making words explicit. I think it's important to be operating with the same definitions when we're speaking about important things. So I grew up in a family where I was a translator. My parents spoke Korean and my younger brother spoke English and I was the bridge between. I saw so many times where disagreements would happen because things weren't explicitly stated. I learned in my teens that my role was to be the dictionary between the members of my family. So emotional alchemy feels like an important concept to define To me.
Speaker 1:I am working from the definition that emotional alchemy is the transformation of an emotion in its purest form to an integrated version of that emotion. When we fully integrate our emotions, we are no longer working from the part of us that feels wounded. We're able to see our feelings exactly as they are, understand their messages and integrate the lessons we can learn from them. The thing with emotions is that their nature is to evolve. They can mutate into something that feels sticky and dense, or perhaps pokey and sharp, or with consciousness and listening and awareness and practice oh my gosh, so much practice we can integrate our emotions and experiences into a well of internal wisdom anchored in experience. There are a lot of circumstances that will always feel a bit heavy. I can think of several in my own life right now as I say that out loud. But I know that those experiences, memories and emotions will compost, will continue to break down for me, to expand my own capacity to hold space for myself and for others.
Speaker 1:Emotional alchemy also wove its way through my first few years of coaching as a relationship coach. My first marriage ended in divorce. Throughout the relationship I was reading every communication book I can get my hands on and after we broke up I could see more clearly how we were both bringing our most wounded emotions into the relationship. We were not modeled what it looks like when resentment is integrated, when anger is heard, when distraction is an invitation to pay closer attention. So we were unkind, controlling and manipulative with each other. With some distance away from my ex-husband Matthew, I realized that I was trying to fix the marriage through technique. If I just learned these nonviolent communication techniques, I'll have a happy marriage right.
Speaker 1:The reality is that I needed to tend to many, many, many, many, many inner children. I needed to learn how to read my nervous system, I needed to integrate my traumas and I needed to listen to my intuition, who had been telling me that he wasn't my person. So I did all that worked with therapists, worked with coaches, read a lot, took courses, started getting into work with Bessel van der Kork and Gabor Mate and I sat down to write all the things that were missing in my education of somebody who really wanted to work on a relationship and at the time I didn't have an attachment to what shape it was going to take. At first I thought it was a book, but I went back to what I know how to do, which is teaching. The first group coaching program I created was the Heart Lab, where we examined the intersectionality of the anatomy of our relational bodies through a Taoist perspective nervous system regulation, attachment theory and communication techniques. From their business mentorship sprouted organically. It was like that random volunteer tomato plant that surprises you.
Speaker 1:In the spring some folks saw that my marketing was different from anything else they had seen on social media. The reason for that is because I despise pain point marketing. So I made an active decision to not do that thing. I started getting requests from clients asking if I could teach them how to run their businesses, and I was explicit with them in telling them that I can't tell you how to run your business, but I can walk beside you and ask 10,000 questions along the way so that you can have clarity on how you'd like to run your business. I found the same pattern that I had found with relational coaching, which is people know what they should do, but they're trapped in a vortex around particular traumas, stories and conditions that keep them feeling stuck.
Speaker 1:There are so many business coaches out there saying you know, just download my sales call template. Or you know, download my email funnel strategy. But no one was talking about that inner child who is scared to be seen, and so they freeze up when you sit down to write an email. Or the inner teenager who gets saying that again. Or the inner teenager who got straight A's and now feels like the world is caving in if there's a typo on an Instagram post. Or the mediator whose role was to make sure that everyone in the family was okay. So they feel like they have to be everything to everyone now, and that bleeds into their business work.
Speaker 1:And this is why emotional alchemy feels so important and so potent, because it asks us to examine why before we jump to how, and in this moment I am struggling to say that again. In this moment I am struggling to define who I am. So I'm just going to let it be, and I'm also just acknowledging that my inner perfectionist is screaming right now, by the way, because I want to talk about business as a spiritual practice. Absolutely, that's going to continue. But my life has expanded beyond anything I thought was possible. I am stewarding land and it's not always sunshine and rainbows and I want to talk about that. Just this week, I had a flock of wild turkeys walk through my garden and decimate all the beans I had planted. But there's a lesson there for me and maybe for you I am mama to four horses, two cats, a dog, 15 chickens and a turkey. I want to talk about those relationships because for me, the purest examples of emotional alchemy have come through my animal kin.
Speaker 1:I run this business with Andre, who was my first romantic partner after my divorce. He and I have moved through so many evolutions of our relationship and I'm inspired by him every single day. He knows the right questions to ask me, he knows how to poke holes in my rigid ways of being and I want to share what those collaborative conversations look like. I am married to Sean, who has challenged me on my identity of not being seen. He has shown me what safety looks like in relationships through how he listens, how he seeks to understand and how he puts the intangible into tangible practice. I want to share what it feels like to be truly loved and how fucking uncomfortable that can be sometimes, and how it is most likely the bravest thing I'm going to do in this life. I released my first podcast episode on May 15th of 2020, so we are just short of our fourth birthday here.
Speaker 1:This podcast has been an absolute passion project. Having a podcast is sometimes like speaking into a void, wondering if it's landing with anyone, but then I'll get on a connection call with a soon-to-be client and they'll tell me thank you for the podcast. I've been listening to Say that again and they'll tell me listening to say that again and they'll tell me thank you for the podcast. I've been listening for x amount of time. I love what you shared about well, cat. Okay, I love what you shared about x situation, and that never gets old. Not because I need the validation, but because this podcast has felt like a sanctuary for me.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes I take my literal journal pages and bring them alive here, and it is always simultaneously surprising and delightful to see that it feels like that for you too. So if you'd like to continue on this journey together, I'm so excited that you're here. If you're curious about where these tendrils are going, I want you to hit saying that again. If you're curious about where these tendrils are going, please hit the subscribe or follow button on whatever platform you're listening from. Please hit the subscribe or follow button on the platform that you're listening to this episode right now. Thank you so much for being here.