Kia Ora,
I'm Becs,
I created Alchemy for women curious about what helps us feel more alive, more present in our bodies, more able to experience pleasure, more trusting of our own choices, and a little more willing to play.
I'm a student of Alchemy too
Like most people who have made it some distance through adulthood, I've loved, lost, worked hard, cared for people, changed direction, got things wrong, started again, and discovered that knowing something intellectually isn't necessarily the same as being able to live it.
As I’ve smashed up against life, I've become less interested in endlessly improving myself. I'm much more interested in inhabiting my life. Noticing, feeling, and making choices within it. Finding pleasure in ordinary things, building capacity to sit with anger, discomfort, and disappointment, remaining open to tenderness and silliness, and holding onto agency, while occasionally loosening my grip on how I want everything to unfold. Alchemy has grown from my curiosities. It isn't a philosophy I've mastered and now teach from the mountaintop. I'm practicing too.
Why explore with our bodies?
We spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about our lives. Analysing, planning, remembering, anticipating - trying to work it all out. It has its place. But we also get to experience human life through a body - through sensation, breath, movement, touch, sound, emotion, impulse, pleasure, and response. Sometimes another round of thinking isn't what we need. Sometimes it's more interesting to ask: What if I just notice what's happening in my body? Can I stay with it with curiosity and care and see where to from there? That's the territory I'm interested in.
More about Alchemy
Alchemy’s four pillars are radically simple yet surprisingly comprehensive:
Presence. awareness, regulation, and connection to what is happening now.
Pleasure. sensation, beauty, enjoyment, and aliveness.
Power. agency, boundaries, self-trust, and choice.
Play. curiosity, creativity, experimentation, and possibility.
There are a few things you can expect from Alchemy.
Curiosity over certainty. I won't tell you what your body means.
Agency over authority. I bring experience and ideas. You remain the expert on you.
Invitation over instruction. You can adapt, decline, pause or change your mind.
Experience over performance. There is no prize for doing embodiment particularly well.
Humanity over perfection. Mine included. My role isn't to fix you, it's to create thoughtful experiences where you can notice, receive, choose, explore (and perhaps discover something interesting about yourself along the way).
Come as you are.
You can experience Alchemy in different ways - independently through A Year of Alchemy, privately in-person through Mindful Massage and Body Alchemy, and together through intimate Seasonal Retreats. There's no particular kind of person you need to become before you belong here.
More about me
An eclectic education
I've always been curious about people. How we communicate, connect, change, what we want, what gets in our way, what helps us feel more alive. Curiosity has taken me down more than one professional rabbit hole.
Over two decades, I've studied several massage modalities, embodied movement, somatic sexology, consent, coaching, and facilitation. I've benefited greatly from Wheel of Consent, Somatic Sexology, and Qoya-inspired movement teachings.
In parallel, I've worked for the same length of time in strategic communication. Work that has taught me a great deal about how humans make meaning, navigate uncertainty and change, communicate with one another, or not.
At first glance, strategic communication and somatic work might seem like rather different worlds. To me, they're connected by the same curiosity: What helps humans understand themselves, one another, and the experience they're actually having?
And then there's ordinary life
I'm a mother. There is washing, school things, shopping lists, bills, early mornings, and sometimes late nights when the day needs unpacking at 10pm.
I walk by the sea when I can, I read, I listen to music, I love coffee, make tea, anf drink a little red wine. I think too much. I occasionally have excellent ideas, and occasionally I make questionable decisions. I can be deeply reflective and annoyingly silly. Sometimes I want depth and beauty, sometimes I want Ugg boots, and sometimes I try to dress up and wear heels. I love spontaneous experiences with the kids. I am lucky to have so many wonderful people around me. I love my best friend.
I don't believe embodiment or a life of meaning requires withdrawing from ordinary life. Ordinary life is where we practice Alchemy and share it with others.
A note on origins
Alchemy is shaped by many teachers, traditions, and bodies of knowledge. I live and work in Aotearoa New Zealand, and I want to practice here with respect for tangata whenua and the depth of mātauranga Māori.
My work has evolved primarily through my own lived experience and the Western somatic, therapeutic, educational, and movement traditions I've trained in. I do my best to honour the origins of practices and people.
I'm interested in the wisdom carried through our own ancestral stories and places equally, and what can happen when we become curious about the lands and cultures we come from, rather than reaching automatically for traditions that have not been handed down to us.
Let’s connect.
