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What Is the Alchemy of Life Process?

What is the Alchemy of Life process?

It is a five-step method Florian built and taught for working out what to do with your life, and it runs in a fixed order. Start from where you are now. Pull out the essence of attraction from that. Cut away the extraneous. Re-combine the essences. Connect the result to a higher purpose.

Underneath those five steps sit three older movements borrowed from alchemy proper: selection, purification, re-combination, all guided by intuition. His course slides carry that line word for word, and they state the goal of the whole thing in six words, find a true expression of yourself.

This page is the protocol only. The wider question of what purpose even is, the two kinds you actually have, why one of them is felt and the other is built, and the warm-up exercises for gathering raw material, all of that lives on the pillar page. Read that first if you have not, because this process assumes it. What follows here is the machinery: what each step asks, the actual questions to sit with, what people get stuck on, and how long each step honestly takes.

One structural note before the steps. In the original course, the five-step process is the middle of three phases. Phase one is preparation, understanding it mentally. Phase two is learning, working the process emotionally. Phase three is integration, real-life decision making. The five steps live in phase two, and nothing in your life changes until phase three.

A note on wording, since you may have seen the steps written differently. Four separate module decks from his Alchemy of Life course list the five steps in identical language, and that taught wording is what this page follows. His earlier working notes for the same process phrase step four as imagining a new vision and fold the re-aligning of essences into step three. Where the sources differ, the slides win here, because those are the words he actually taught from.

Where does the name come from, and why alchemy?

From a natural medicine teacher who worked with plants, and the plant work is the entire map. In his own telling:

"his idea was to take different medicinal plants and taking out the Essences... then purification taking out the Essences stripping away the extraneous and then recombining the Essences to a more pure holistic one"

Anyone who has made stock knows the move already. You simmer bones and vegetables for hours, strain out everything solid, throw the solids away, and what is left is a fraction of the volume carrying most of the flavor. Nothing was added. Something was removed, and what remained got stronger for it.

Your interests work the same way. Baking, coaching, engineering, teaching, running a team, none of these are the thing itself. Each one is a plant carrying an active ingredient somewhere inside it, wrapped in a lot of material that came along for the ride. The process selects the plants, pulls the ingredient, discards the rest, and recombines what is left into something more concentrated than any single interest was on its own.

Who is this process actually for?

For someone who can already name three or four things they genuinely care about and cannot see how any of them fit together into a life. That is the exact shape of problem the five steps were built to solve.

It also fits someone sitting in work that pays well and drains them, who cannot explain why, since nothing about the job is objectively bad. Step two answers that one directly. And it fits anyone who has read enough purpose advice to be tired of it and wants a procedure with an order to it instead.

It is a poor fit for two situations, and both get their own section further down. If you are in acute crisis, this is the wrong week for it. If you cannot locate a feeling about anything at all, step two has nothing to work with yet, and the fix for that comes before this process rather than inside it.

Step 1: Where are you actually starting from?

What the step asks. An honest account of your life as it currently is, before any improving. Not the version you would describe at a party. The real week, the real work, the real money you need, the real commitments, and the real wants, including the ones that sound ridiculous when you say them out loud.

The actual questions.

1. What did your last seven days actually contain, hour by hour?
2. What do you genuinely want, no matter how impractical it sounds when spoken?
3. Which of your current commitments would you keep if nobody would think anything of you either way?
4. Where in your week are you doing something because you decided to, and where because you should?

That last question is the load-bearing one. His course slides are blunt about it: shoulds are an emotional substitute for being yourself, shoulds take you away from being yourself, and there is always a way, so no should is valid. He traces the habit back to what he calls the childhood pattern of wanting to be different than we are. The pillar page covers that pattern and the inquiry that goes with it in depth, so it is left alone here.

What stuck looks like. People write the aspirational version. The inventory quietly becomes a plan. Or they cross out a real want because it is impractical, which removes the exact material the next four steps run on.

How to move. Write the week as a plain list of what happened, with no commentary attached to any line. Then, separately, write the impractical want and leave it on the page. Don't judge yourself for what the honest version says. Nobody's first inventory looks like the life they meant to build, and that gap is the working material, not a verdict on you.

Step 2: What is the essence of attraction, and how do you pull it out?

What the step asks. For each thing that draws you, find the thread underneath it. The activity is the container. The essence is what is inside.

The actual questions.

1. Across your work, your hobbies and whatever you read at midnight, what is the common thread?
2. Where does effortless effort happen for you, and where do your feet actually move without being told?
3. Inside each interest, what specifically attracts you, and what specifically repels you?
4. Which activities reliably drain you, and what do you believe they are taking you away from?

That last question is a diagnostic worth having even if you never finish the process. Florian's read on why things drain people cuts against the usual assumption that hard equals draining:

"the reason why activities drain you is because underlying your belief structure there's something that tells you this gets me more away from what I emotionally need and that's why it's draining to you"

Which is why an easy afternoon of admin can flatten you completely and a brutal day of the right work can leave you more alive at 9pm than you were at noon. Drain is a direction reading, not an effort reading.

His course gives two prompt lists for this step, and they help when the thread will not surface. The sectors of human interest: health and caring for others, leading and organizing, understanding people, teaching and learning, arts and sport and self-expression, business and creating wealth, philosophy and social interrelation, nature and animals and plants, theoretical science and planning, and building physical things. The human needs: love and connection, significance and competence, self-expression, balance between rest and movement, realness and depth, happiness and fulfillment, contribution, growth.

What stuck looks like. People name activities and job titles rather than essences. "I like teaching" is a container. "I like the moment somebody's face changes because a thing finally made sense" is an essence, and only the second one recombines with anything.

How to move. Strip the label off each interest and ask what would still attract you if nobody ever knew you did it. Then run the same interest through the drain question in reverse and see what part of it you were actually avoiding.

Step 3: What counts as extraneous, and how do you cut it away?

What the step asks. Purification. Every interest arrives bundled with material that was never the interest, and this step separates the two so the essence can be recombined cleanly.

The actual questions.

1. If this specific part disappeared tomorrow, would the attraction survive?
2. What did I take on only because it came attached to the thing I actually wanted?
3. What am I keeping here because of how it looks to other people?
4. What in this would I be relieved to never do again?

Work you genuinely love comes with a commute, a title, an inbox, a set of expectations, and a version of you that performs at meetings. Some of that is yours. Some of it is packaging that arrived in the same box and got mistaken for the contents. The test is the disappearance question, asked one component at a time rather than about the whole job at once.

What stuck looks like. Two failures, and they mirror each other. Some people cut the essence and keep the packaging, because the packaging is the part that pays and the part everyone congratulates them for. Others refuse to cut anything, on the grounds that it all comes together as a bundle. It does not, and the bundle is a habit rather than a law.

How to move. Take one interest, draw a line down the middle of a page, essence on the left, comes-attached on the right, and put every component on one side or the other. Is that comfortable to do honestly? No. Some of what lands on the right is the part you built your reputation on, and seeing that in your own handwriting stings for a day or two.

Step 4: How do you re-combine the essences into one expression?

What the step asks. Put what survived back together into one expression that holds several essences at once, meets your actual needs, and lets you work with what his slides call effortless effort.

The actual questions.

1. What single shape would hold three or four of these essences at the same time?
2. What is the most unreasonable combination that would still cover what I need to live?
3. Which of my combinations would I want to start on Monday, rather than admire from a distance?
4. Where has somebody already done something structurally similar, in any field at all?

Florian's own example of the output is deliberately odd:

"you might find that all you want to do in life is to bake beautiful little tartlets and cakes and make film yourself and sell online courses... there is always a way now I cannot tell you the exact way the beauty of that is you have to figure it out"

Three fields that share nothing on paper, combining into one working life. His process notes say plainly that a weird combination may be necessary, which is a relief once you understand why. Your essences were collected across a whole life, so the odds that they map onto a job someone already advertises are low.

What stuck looks like. Waiting for a combination that already exists as a posting you could apply to. Or re-combining before the cutting is done, which just reassembles the original bundle with better vocabulary on it.

How to move. Write three combinations, including one that sounds unreasonable, and check each one against two tests, does it meet your needs, and would you start it on Monday. Then let them sit for a week. Step four does not respond to being pushed.

Step 5: What does connecting to a higher purpose actually mean?

What the step asks. Look at where the pull comes from underneath, and let the motive change while the work stays where it is.

The actual questions.

1. What am I trying to get emotionally out of this?
2. If I already had that in full, would I still do this work?
3. Who does this serve besides me, specifically and by name?
4. What would this look like done from a settled place instead of a hungry one?

Florian describes a lower purpose as the feeling of "that's what I've gotta do", done out of compulsion, done to get a feeling out of it that is missing somewhere else. A higher purpose is that same pull with the wound behind it resolved, so the work becomes sharing what you have rather than filling yourself up. His module slides state the mechanism directly:

"The course of action stays the same, the motive changed and in that: the quality of our actions"

Does the actual work have to change at this step? Usually not at all. The baker keeps baking. The engineer keeps engineering. What shifts is the place the doing comes from, and everything downstream of that shifts with it, including how the same Tuesday feels and how the work lands on the people receiving it.

What stuck looks like. Bolting noble language onto an unchanged compulsion, which reads as service and behaves exactly like hunger. Or assuming this step demands charity work, when it asks a question about motive rather than about sector.

How to move. Name the emotional thing you are hoping this work will hand you. Then feel through that hunger directly instead of routing it through your career. Florian is honest that this one keeps moving for years. His own version, wanting the stage in order to be filled up, is by his account much quieter now and not fully gone, and he says so rather than presenting it as finished.

How do the five steps look side by side?

How long does each step honestly take?

Longer than a weekend and shorter than the decade people spend circling the question without a procedure. Here are honest ranges for a first pass, from watching people work through it.

Two honest notes on that table. First, the whole sequence repeats at every real life transition, so a clean pass at thirty does not exempt you at forty-five. Second, step four is the one people try to rush, and rushing it produces a combination assembled by the mind that collapses within a month of being tested. Give it the room it needs.

What makes this different from a journaling exercise?

Three things, and the third one is where most self-help exercises quietly stop.

First, the operating skill is intuition rather than analysis. His module one slides name intuition as the number one skill of the entire course, defined plainly as feeling, suggestion, and the intelligence of the whole system, with the job of guiding you back to balance. Every selection in this process gets made by a felt pull and then checked, never argued into place from a spreadsheet. The daily skill of reading that pull, and telling it apart from fear or wishful thinking, is covered on its own here.

Second, there is a subtraction step. Journaling adds material to a page. Step three removes material from a life, and removal is what concentrates anything, whether that is a tincture, a stock, or a week.

Third, it terminates in decisions. Phase three of the course is integration, real-life decision making, and the process is graded there rather than on the page. His own process notes are blunt about what happens if you treat it as an exercise:

"this process is a lifestyle, it is not a method. For it to really work for you you need to make it an ongoing practice."

Which is also why the decision style matters at the end of it. His teaching splits decisions in two, practicing no hesitancy on the micro decisions and intuitive evaluation on the macro ones, and holds both under one attitude he names on the slides: try courageously, evaluate truthfully.

Can you do this alone, or do you need guidance?

You can do it alone. Plenty of people have, and Florian's position on that is unambiguous, since the responsibility for your own life stays in your hands regardless of who is standing nearby. Now the honest part about where alone tends to break.

Steps one and three are where self-honesty runs out for most people. Both ask you to look straight at the parts of your life you arranged specifically so they would not be looked at. The should you have carried since you were nine does not announce itself as a should. It announces itself as obvious. The packaging you cannot bring yourself to cut is usually the exact part that earns you approval, which makes it the hardest thing in the world to see from the inside.

What another person actually adds is smaller than the retreat industry suggests and more useful than doing it alone. Somebody who will not flatter you, who reads your inventory back and asks why one line is written in defensive language, is doing about eighty percent of the available work. That person can be a friend, a therapist, a coach, or a group working the same process at the same time. A container helps mostly with pace, since step two needs weeks of noticing that a normal week actively fights, and with the emotional charge that steps one and five reliably bring up.

Florian's own line on his role here is worth keeping in mind: he cannot tell you the exact way, and the beauty of it is that you have to figure it out. Take what serves you from any guide, including him, and feel into the rest for yourself.

When is the Alchemy of Life process the wrong tool?

When the ground under you is moving, and when what you are carrying is clinical rather than directional.

If you are in an acute crisis right now, a job lost last week with rent due, a bereavement, a marriage ending, a health emergency, this is the wrong month for a life-direction process. It asks you to look honestly at everything while your footing is gone, and honesty under that much pressure tends to produce panic decisions rather than clear ones. Stabilize first, get the immediate thing handled, and come back. The process keeps.

If what you carry is a persistent hopelessness that does not lift even on good days, a loss of interest in things you used to love, or any thought of harming yourself, that needs a licensed professional directly, a doctor or a therapist, and it needs to come before any framework you find on a blog. If the thoughts are immediate, a local crisis line is the right call today. This matters more here than on most pages, because step two asks what attracts you, and a persistent low mood flattens exactly that signal, which means the process can end up reading an illness as your answer.

And if you cannot locate a feeling about anything at all, if everything reads flat rather than unclear, step two has nothing to work with yet. That is a numbness question rather than a direction question, and it gets answered first. What it takes to get back in contact with feeling in the first place is covered here.

What is one thing you can do today?

Take one interest, only one, the one you would defend hardest if somebody questioned it. Set twenty minutes and draw a line down the middle of a page. On the left, every part of that interest that is the thing itself. On the right, every part that merely came attached to it, the title, the admin, the audience, the version of yourself you perform while doing it.

Put every component on one side or the other, with nothing left in the middle. Then read the left column on its own and notice what it feels like in your body. That column is one essence, purified, which is step three run once on a small scale, and it will tell you more in twenty minutes than another year of thinking about your life from the outside will.

Don't be hard on yourself about what lands on the right. Everybody's right column has something on it they spent a decade building. Doing this properly takes freaking courage, and the people who work through it will tell you the same thing about what it opens up on the other side. If you want the whole five steps worked through slowly, with the noticing weeks that step two actually needs and other people doing the same work alongside you, that is what a week built around this process looks like.