Our offerings are also intertwined with ever-widening circles of collaborators from interconnected disciplines including neurobiology, bodywork, functional nutrition, acupuncture, performing arts, community organizing, and environmental justice.

We approach all our work through the overlapping lenses of ecology, neurobiology, poetics, and radical compassion. To remember and reclaim the wild that exists within all us, we first need to understand how we came to be so distanced from it.

Similar to—but deliberately different from—traditional talk therapy, the interplay of our offerings provides unique ground in which to take root and grow. The alchemy of drawing from various parts of ourselves, our world, and our experience is generates what cannot be achieved by way of outdated, conventional pathways that keep us in the binary, the black-and-white.

We work from a place that is genuinely holistic and thoughtfully varied, so as to help us all re-orient to this home we call Earth and to a place of harmony with all her inhabitants.

In the face of our ongoing climate crisis, and the overlapping realities of devastation, our core ethics are all about love (like bell hooks taught), imagination, curiosity, awe, joy, delight, and play, to name some of our many guiding inspirations.

There is magic in this psychic + somatic re-wilding. We are all born knowing this magic and it’s only through a forced forgetting that we become anxious, depressed, isolated, and restless. We can heal and reconnect with the wonder-seeking beings we once were, but we must to do so in community and we must do so in right relationship with our shared planetary home.

Our Team

Emily Thornton, LCSW, MSW, E-CYT-200

Founder; non-traditional psychotherapist, yoga/meditation instructor, writer

Hi! I’m Emily. Good Alchemy is my creation, dreamt up with many dear friends and co-conspirators, some of whom you’ll meet within our offerings. I am, first and foremost, a witness, a soul in a body in the process of witnessing (which, per Ross Gay, is a kind of poetics, and, also per Ross, reporting on etymology, as he so often and so delightfully does, poetics comes from poesis which means, get ready for it…making). So, you might say alchemy is poetry is alchemy is life.

My deep love of reading, travel, music, and meandering through a forest or along a waterfront are among the most fundamental aspects of my identity, in that they lead me into incomparable ways of feeling, they fortify me to keep going, and they draw me back to the wildness that is our birthright, our destiny, and our most sacred responsibility. I didn’t make the connection until I recently read Ross Gay’s forward for a lovely book called How to Love the World, but my instinctive tendency to watch, attune, bask in the joy of witnessing, was/is my foundation for making—making art, making meaning, making connection, making this place for us to find each other.

Every being has within them their part of the unending fabric of the cosmos. We are inextricably linked with each other, with every lifeform, with the past, the present, and the future as we move through the spiral of non-linear time. Maybe, for some of you, this sounds too abstract or convoluted, and that’s okay. If you have an openness to learning and to being humbled, the rest follows from there.

We don’t yet have good mainstream conversations about the metaphysics and cosmic forces fueling our fates but there are fascinating, overlapping disciplines that help us talk about what we really mean when we try to talk about human psychology. For too long, study and discussion about human psyches and bodies has been segregated from discussion about the universe, the astral realities brilliant beings are encountering all the time, and the way faith must intersect with fact to bring us any kind of meaningful sense of purpose or relief.

There is a more effective way forward where we are more deeply connected to ourselves and, therefore, to each other, our Earth, and the infinite expanse beyond. No one I’ve ever met has wanted to spend their life kicking the can down the road or biding their time until there’s no more of it left. We want our lives to have depth and awe and resilience and tenderness and reserves of the stuff that’s required for growth. I don’t have all the answers but I’ve collected, and dreamt up, some very good questions along the way and I suspect that you have too.

Change happens slowly but in deliberate ways. We need a few simple (not always easy) foundational elements to move ourselves from where we are to where we dream of being. I’m walking the same paths as you and the only difference is that I might see things a little differently or have seen something you haven’t, and vice versa. We are each other’s guides and best teachers. As I continue to bear witness, and make sense of what I see, I am in this eco-integration journey with you, whereby I continually alchemize my findings and offer them, for whatever they’re worth.

All I ask is that you come as curious and as open-hearted as you can. I will meet you wherever you are. From there, the adventure begins…

I look forward to our collaborations and all we might awaken in one another.

with love, Emily

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Presently, I work with individuals and groups, offering one-on-one therapy, workshops, trainings, discussion forums/lecutures, guided hikes, prep/integration for non-ordinary states, asana classes, guided meditation, and support for creative expression in whatever form you can dream up.

Individual Eco-Centric Psychotherapy Session $200