You can’t change what you can’t
see.Inner Alchemy is a self-guided way to look underneath the things you keep doing, avoiding, overthinking or repeating.
We’ve mapped 162 limiting beliefs across eight areas of life to help you start making sense of what’s happening underneath the surface and identify some of the beliefs having the greatest impact.
Free - 16 Questions - about 3 mins
Knowing the pattern isn’t always the same as
changing it.You probably already know some of your patterns. The harder part is working out what keeps them running.
You can:
Know you’re a people-pleaser and still hear yourself saying yes before you’ve even worked out whether you want to.
Understand that rest is important and still feel guilty the second you stop doing something useful.
Know somebody is inconsistent, have an impressive amount of evidence that they’re inconsistent, and still check your phone hoping they’ve messaged.
This is the part I’m interested in. Not just “what am I doing?” but “what lead to this being my first reaction?”.
The answer won’t always be one neat belief from childhood. Human beings are more complicated than that. But when you start looking underneath the behaviour instead of only judging yourself for it, you usually are able to changing your self beliefs.
The Inner Alchemy MethodNAME IT
Notice the pattern and find the area where it’s showing up.
TRACE IT
Explore the beliefs, fears and old rules underneath it.
ANSWER IT
Use practices and reflection to start responding differently.
Beliefs don’t stay neatly inside one part of life. A fear of rejection can show up in a relationship, at work and in the way you speak to yourself. Guilt can affect money, rest, family and success.
The eight Inner Alchemy areas are a way of narrowing down where to look first.
Where is it showing up?
You don’t need to work on everything at once.
There are 162 limiting beliefs mapped inside Inner Alchemy, spread across eight areas of life. That’s useful when building the work. It’s probably less useful when you’re sitting there wondering where the hell to begin.
The quiz narrows the starting point. Across twelve questions, it looks at where your answers are clustering and gives you the doorway that appears most relevant right now.
It isn’t a psychological assessment and it isn’t going to diagnose you or reveal the one hidden belief responsible for your entire life. It gives you a direction. From there, you can start looking at the actual beliefs that tend to show up in that area and decide what fits.
Free · about two minutes · no right answers
So what actually is Inner Alchemy?
It sits somewhere between the psychology I’ve studied, the therapy and support work I’ve been around, the years I’ve spent journalling, and the spiritual practices that have become part of how I make sense of my own life.
I don’t think all of those things are the same. They’re not.
When there is psychological research behind something, I want to be clear about that. When the evidence is emerging, I want to say that too. And when something is spiritual, symbolic or simply a practice I’ve found useful, I don’t need to pretend science has proven it for it to have a place here.
That’s a big part of what Inner Alchemy is built around: being curious without becoming gullible, taking psychology seriously without turning every normal human reaction into a diagnosis, and leaving enough room for meaning, ritual and spirituality without pretending any of us have all the answers.
The other part is knowing what a workbook can and can’t do. A page can help you notice something, question something and practise responding differently. It cannot keep you safe in a dangerous situation, diagnose you or process serious trauma for you. If something is bigger than a page, Inner Alchemy should tell you that clearly.
Start with the thing that’s actually showing up.
You can take the quiz first, or you can go straight to the area you already know you want to work on. The Inner Alchemy catalogue is being built one doorway at a time from the same underlying map of beliefs, fears, patterns and practices.
Reclaiming Self-Worth
You can know you’re capable and still spend an enormous amount of your life trying to prove it.
Reclaiming Self-Worth looks at twenty beliefs connected to worth and identity: the pressure to be useful, liked, impressive, easy to love, productive enough or somehow “enough” before you can properly relax into your own life.
This is the first full Inner Alchemy workbook.
Mini journal coming soon — the other seven doorways are being built from the same map.
Sometimes the right answer is to stop.
Some of these questions can bring up more than you expected. If that happens, you don’t have to finish the page because you started it. There is no prize for digging something up when you don’t have the support to deal with what comes next.
Inner Alchemy is educational and reflective work. It isn’t therapy, medical care or crisis support. The products include clear stop points and support information where the material gets heavier, and some subjects are deliberately referred outside self-guided work altogether.
Sometimes a journal is useful. Sometimes the better next step is an actual person.
Why I built it
Hi, I’m Sonya. I completed a Bachelor of Psychological Science, I’ve worked in trauma and support settings, and I’ve also spent more years than I can count being the person sitting on the other side of the room trying to work my own shit out.
I’ve kept journals for more than ten years. They contain pretty much every version of me: relationships I should have left earlier, work I gave too much of myself to, grief, terrible decisions, really good decisions, therapy, spirituality, relapse, rebuilding, ambition, love and a lot of me trying to understand why I could know better and still find myself doing the same thing.
Inner Alchemy grew out of that question.
I’m not building it because I’ve reached some final healed version of myself. I haven’t. I’m building the kind of work I kept wanting to find: thoughtful enough to take seriously, practical enough to actually use, open-minded enough to leave room for spirituality, and honest enough to tell you when a workbook isn’t the answer.
If you want to read first, start here.
I write about the things underneath Inner Alchemy too: beliefs, psychology, grief, relationships, work, spirituality, my own patterns and the things I’m still figuring out as I build this.
Some pieces are more personal. Some are more practical. Some are me thinking something through because writing is how I’ve made sense of most of my life.
You don’t need to buy anything to be part of it.
Start with what’s actually showing up.
You don’t need to explain your whole life today. Find the area that keeps asking for your attention and start there.