✦ The Alquemie ✦
You’re excellent at the job.
And it’s killing what matters.
There’s a kind of burnout that doesn’t look like burnout from the outside. You function well. You deliver. But underneath your competence there is a void you can’t account for and can’t seem to fix. The part of you that knows how to make something real, to care about depth, to create from your own ground. That didn’t die. It just ran out of room.
“Am I still that person?”
The question you ask yourself at 2am, but never say out loud. It’s too painful to think that version of you might be gone forever.
This Is For You If
You’ve done everything right.
And something is still missing.
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You used to make things, you spent hours: writing, painting, building, designing, performing, and somewhere in the last decade, you realized that it’s been so long that it feels like another lifetime.
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You’ve done all the recovery work. The meditation, the therapy, the breathing. But the burnout persists because you’re trying to feel better without addressing what burned you out in the first place: the optimization of yourself.
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Somewhere between the job and the exhaustion, you stopped making things. Now you describe that version of yourself in the past tense. “I used to…” That’s the burnout talking, not the truth.
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You don’t need another system. You need someone who sees exactly where you are and knows how to ask what actually matters.
Work With Karen
Two ways in.
One conversation at a time.
Every path into The Alquemie begins with a real conversation, not a discovery call designed to sell you something, but a genuine hour of attention directed at what’s actually going on.
First Step · Free
Orienteering Session
45 minutes · No charge
A single conversation to locate where you are: what’s present, what’s been waiting, what the next right thing is. A real session, at no cost, for anyone who is ready to look at what’s actually going on.
If The Alquemie program is the right next step, you’ll know by the end of it. If it isn’t, you’ll still leave with knowledge and a plan.
Via Setmore · 45 min · Limited availability
Orienteering SessionDeep Work · $333
The Cartography
90 minutes · $333 · rebookable
A standalone 90-minute session for anyone ready to do the actual work: mapping what’s buried, naming what’s been running things, and leaving with a clear picture of the terrain.
The Cartography can be booked as a single session or returned to as needed. Each session builds on the last. This is where the real excavation happens.
Via Setmore · 90 min · Rebookable
The CartographyThe Recovery Method
Via negativa.
Emptying, not adding.
Why burnout recovery requires subtraction, not more practices. Most creative coaching asks you to do more: more practices, more accountability, more content, more courage. The Alquemie works in the opposite direction.
The philosophical tradition of via negativa holds that you approach truth by subtracting, by clearing away what’s accumulated until what remains is what’s underneath, what’s true.
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01
Name the burnout pattern
The system that trained you to optimize yourself for everyone else’s benefit, your employer, your organization, the market, didn’t disappear when you left. It lives in your body now. The first work is seeing it clearly, without blaming yourself for it.
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02
Recover the self before the burnout
Underneath the masks you built for survival, the Responsible One, the Practical One, the One Who Doesn’t Make Trouble, is the self from before the optimization took hold. Still there. Waiting for you to stop performing long enough to find it.
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03
The masks become the toolbox
The decades of adaptation weren’t failures. They were training. The person who survived corporate culture, caregiving, grief, reinvention has capabilities the uninterrupted artist never developed. The work is integrating all of it, not choosing between them.
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04
Stop the cycle. Reclaim what’s real.
The burnout system trained you to disappear. This work stops that cycle and relocates you in the self underneath the pattern. The person who survived corporate culture, caregiving, grief, reinvention didn’t lose the creative self. They buried it for safekeeping. The work is stopping long enough to let it back in, and discovering it never forgot a thing.
The Alquemie Cohort
Burnout recovery for the creative self.
8 people. 3 months. By invitation.
The founding cohort of The Alquemie is forming now. Join the waitlist and you’ll be the first to know when the Orienteering Sessions open for program candidates.
You’ll hear from us when there’s something worth saying.
Karen
Spies
Founder, The Alquemie
Host, Second Wind Women
Karen Spies spent twelve years as a working silversmith before a repetitive motion injury ended that practice. What followed was a long curriculum of practical decisions: graduate study in Buddhist philosophy, web development, a career in tech consulting, work at Stanford Research Institute, a stint supporting arts organizations. Running through all of it was a quiet burnout nobody named as burnout. The question that wouldn’t let go: what did I trade away, and can I reclaim it?
It came from stopping the cycle, locating the self underneath the burnout pattern, and learning to work from that foundation instead. She has also spent years inside engineering teams, building, managing, and translating between the people who make things and the people who assign the work.
The Alquemie is what she built from both. A practice for the professional who is exceptional at the job and completely burned out, the one who has become unreachable to themselves. The Alquemie is for people in burnout recovery who know the meditation isn’t enough. For people whose creativity was buried by the system, not lost to it. The work is rooted in via negativa, alchemical framing, and the knowledge of what it costs to keep running on autopilot, and what it looks like when you finally stop.
She is also the host of Second Wind Women, a podcast for people in creative and entrepreneurial pivots.
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