About LaCheka

Being in community with others is healing for me. There is something sacred about sharing what has guided, challenged, awakened, or changed us and trusting that something from our experience might illuminate a path for someone else. That is much of my why for creating Alchemizing Life—a blog and virtual community circle that meets monthly via Zoom. I am not here because I have mastered life. I am here because I have learned to pay attention to it.

Alchemy is the process of transforming something into something else, often in ways that feel mysterious, unexpected, or even remarkable. Paulo Coelho’s book, The Alchemist, helped give language to something I had already begun to recognize in my own life: the importance of dreams, signs, intuition, unexpected teachers, and having the courage to follow what feels true even when you cannot see where it will lead.

Over time, I began to understand alchemizing life as a way of being. It’s about working with what life gives me and allowing it to become wisdom, clarity, healing, freedom, or something new.

Writing has been one way I do that. I am the author of Dear God, Am I a Witch or Whore?, which explores the intersection of spirituality and sexuality from a woman’s perspective, and Don’t Call Me Strong: The Inadvertent Illusion of Strength—a challenge to survival mistaken for strength. Both books grew from questions I needed to wrestle with for myself before I could offer them to anyone else.

I am also a student of theology who attended seminary and a former ordained Christian minister. My spirituality continues to evolve. These days, I find myself alchemizing much of my former religious experience and biblical understanding and keeping what gives me life, questioning what does not, and allowing what I have learned to serve my elevation rather than confine it.

I am a seeker of deep things and an enthusiastic traveler down a good rabbit hole, especially when it involves spirituality, nature, yoga, technology, metaphysics, astronomy, consciousness, and so much more.

That expansive curiosity has taken on an entirely new dimension while navigating my own physical health journey. When the body is vulnerable, it invites a different kind of spiritual presence. I am currently awaiting a kidney transplant, and I have a potential living donor moving through the screening process. In this season, I have become increasingly aware that healing is not only something I am waiting to receive. Creating this space, writing the blog, gathering in our monthly community circle, sharing my stories and truth, and allowing myself to be seen are also part of my healing. Alchemizing Life is something I offer, but it is also something I am living.

So when we gather here, I am not standing on the other side of transformation telling you how to get there. I am in it too and I’m listening, questioning, learning, releasing, becoming, and paying attention to what life is asking of me.

I see myself as an alchemist because I am intentional about participating in that transformation. And I believe, in our own ways, we all are alchemists if we accept the invitation.