I began my spiritual practice at the age of 16 when I picked up my first deck of tarot cards. (Or rather, when they fell on my head in a bookstore during a school trip to New York, but that’s a story for another time). It began as a solitary practice as I finished high school and went on to study more traditional subjects at a handful of colleges and universities (theater, English, sociology, psychology, chemistry, and finally biology). But the tarot has always remained my true passion. For decades, I have studied this pack of cards, have given countless readings, attended numerous conferences related to the cards, read and wrote about the tarot daily, taught others how to read them and about the wisdom they contain, studied directly under the modern masters of tarot, and so on.  As a gateway into many other spiritual and esoteric subjects, the tarot eventually led me to other divination systems, sortilege, qabala, and astrology. Over the years, I’d met various readers and psychics who'd kept telling me I had healing gifts that I needed to tap into and share with the world. Unfortunately, for quite some time this was always met with resistance. Even though I could dive head first into occult studies and embrace the concepts of energy healing, auras, and such, something was holding me back from embracing the role of healer others kept telling me to step into.  ​ For a long time, I told myself it was my academic background in biology and chemistry—I could not untrain my brain from that line of thinking. I couldn’t practice anything that deviated too far from the ideas of Western medicine. After a lot of work on myself and really exploring what was going on, I eventually understood that the resistance was the fear of taking on that responsibility, that role in someone else’s life--and some good old imposter syndrome we Millenials seem to all be plagued with. From there, I noticed that the tools I learned to use over the years acted like a buffer between me and that responsibility. In their own way, the practices that I had established and which I offered in service to others were wonderful for helping people heal and grow; however, I realized what they excelled in was identifying specific areas that needed attention, and offering some strategies or advice that might be necessary—but they had no real-time effects. In other words, these tools were mostly catalysts for the work to be done, which is excellent and certainly serves a purpose; but beyond that, their usefulness for actual, experiential healing was… limited. With this realization, I finally felt the call to learn a more direct healing method I could help others with. It was around this time that I kept hearing about Reiki. I’d never heard of it before, and it suddenly kept popping up. I met Reiki practitioners and Masters; I had friends who began looking into it and taking classes; it was suddenly everywhere. I began searching for classes while trying to decide if this was for me or not. Each time I found a class, something on my calendar would interfere. This happened for years, but it was because it wasn’t time. When I was finally ready, the teacher appeared, as the saying goes. I studied under the same Reiki Master/Teacher from my First Degree training through my Master and Teacher training. Now, in addition to my other metaphysical interests, I have established a daily Reiki practice based on the traditional Usui Shiki Ryoho. However, I do include other non-traditional elements as I feel necessary (such as the chakra system, supportive crystals, aromatherapy, etc.). That is one of the beautiful things about a Reiki practice: each practitioner can make it their own. ​ Intrinsic Alchemy was born of my love for all of the tools I have picked up over the years and a desire to combine them all into a service that could help others heal and grow during every step of the journey.