Internal alchemy for beginners

One of the classic goals of alchemy was to turn lead into gold. In golden elixir practice you're doing the same thing but with your own energy, feelings, thoughts and body. So you want to cultivate as much positive energy, feelings etc in yourself, and remove as much negatives as you can. Also you want to be able to turn the negatives into positives.

One way to think of doing this is to think in terms of magnets, and how if you hold one magnet in the correct position, you can use it to push away another magnet without touching it. Similarly you can build up a positive feeling in yourself and use it to push away a negative one. We do this is small ways without thinking much about it, like when something irritates us a little but we quickly shrug it off.

We can, however, be more conscious about this process and turn it into something of an art form. The basics of which are:

- sensing the 'lead', or becoming aware of something that is bad or could be improved

- bringing in a positive energy to counter it - like bringing in another force that will repel it

- repeating the process over and over again until the area is fully cleared or transformed

So as a practical exercise, if you sense a negative in you somewhere, e.g.  some kind of bad feeling, try to get a sense of where in your body you're feeling it, how long its been there, how large it is, how entrenched it is etc etc. Then while being aware of this on the one hand, start bringing in a positive on the other.

You can bring in a positive either using the imagination, or memory, or some combination of both. So you can run through a bunch of positive experiences you've had in life, or go over a few very powerful ones, or you might want to imagine a really positive future.

Then you want to start replacing the old negative with the new positive. If its something really simple and short term you might get this to happen really quickly and easily. For something more long term you might only be able to work on it bit by bit. Like slowly working away at a lump of clay with a toothpick.

Anyway this is a basic way of looking at some of this process, and it can be expanded on in different ways as you come to get a feel for it and use it in real life, and/or as you practice with it.