Meet Loriann Zuzak

The Emerald:  Claiming the Second Half of Life

I set out at midlife to create Alchemia Wisdom School in answer to a call I have felt in this last season of my own life.

Over a stretch of seven years, I watched my life dismantle itself through a series of necessary decisions and endings—businesses, pursuits and people I had poured my heart, time, attention and creative energy into.

One by one, they were gone.

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In the midst of it, I had a dream: 

I was on the ground, on my knees, in a beautiful jewellery shop, picking up the pieces of an emerald that was mine. It was in shards. Police officers stood over me, and yet, for some reason, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that those pieces were mine.

It didn't matter that they were broken.

They were mine.

They belonged to me.

And I was going to see to it that I got every last one.

I walked out of the store rattled, but in full ownership of all those little pieces.

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I had been working with my dreams for years by that point. When I wrote the dream down that morning, I understood that the emerald was something I could not yet fully name: my own heart, my gifts, my lived experience, all the parts of myself that remained when so much else had fallen away.

The dream showed me that I still had the will to go on.

I could claim what was left of my life.

And I could begin again from there.

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What must you become?

There seemed to be two familiar ways of responding to an experience like this: armour yourself against it, or build an identity around what has been done to you.

I didn't want to live in either place.

I didn't want to disregard the pain I had been through. But I didn't want to feel sorry for myself indefinitely, either.

How do we hold compassion for our own suffering while remembering that others are carrying burdens we may never see? How do we acknowledge heartbreak and still choose to grow through it—even while we're still angry about it?

How do we resist becoming bitter?

And perhaps the deeper question:

 

Now that all of this has happened, what must you become?

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One part of me vowed, out loud, "I'll turn this into the best thing that ever happened to me."

Another part simply wanted out.

Life can be like that—a series of moments in which we hold on, let go, and try to make sense of what we are all doing here. It seems to be part of the human condition that we do not have the whole picture while we are living it.

What we do have is the opportunity to meet what is here.

There is always another opportunity to grow. Another opportunity to change. Another opportunity to become more fully ourselves. Another opportunity to be honest and cut through the spin and branding we like to put around things.

We wake up to this every day.

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The way we meet the opportunity becomes our life.

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The Work

This is where my understanding of what I now call The Work began to deepen.

The Work is not about making life easier. It is not about becoming invulnerable, positive or endlessly resilient. It is not about pretending that difficult things are secretly wonderful.

Sometimes life gives us lessons we would never have chosen.

Some take years to see.

Some arrive at midlife carrying the unmistakable consequences of a lifetime of avoidance. Some ask us to grieve. Some ask us to change. Some ask us to relinquish an identity, relationship, career or way of living that once made perfect sense.

And sometimes there is nothing for it but to acknowledge that the thing we don't want to have to be our lesson right now is, in fact, the lesson.

Then we get on with it.

For me, The Work is the understanding, practice and honest reckoning that helps us decide how to go on.

It is learning to develop greater self-understanding, self-trust and inner capacity so that we can meet the life we actually have—not the life we thought we would have, not the life someone else thinks we should have, and not an idealized version of life in which difficulty has somehow been removed.

The choosing and the deciding are always yours.

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A life lived before it is taught.

While I was in the worst of my own upheaval, I used everything I had learned.

When I am fearful or dreading something, I learn about it. I've always tempered fear with curiosity. I read. I study. I practice. I pay attention.

Throughout my adult life, I have studied and trained in a range of approaches to understanding human beings and the passages of a life: dream analysis, life coaching, the Enneagram, behavioural work, polarity processing and shadow integration, hands-on and remote energy work, and, most recently, death doula training for end-of-life support and grief care.

But certification has never been enough for me.

Before I bring a framework into my work with another person, I want to know what it asks of a life. I use it. I live with it. I pay attention to what it reveals, what it changes and where it falls short.

Your life's response to an idea is as much a part of the learning as the book, the training or the certification.

This is also why I pay attention to where life gives me a yes and where there is no forward motion.

I think most of us know the feeling of being embraced by life—and the opposite feeling of somehow being apart from its movement. I've had to contend with those wastelands too, and with finding my way through them on my own terms.

There is wisdom in learning to tell the difference between something that requires perseverance and something that requires release.

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The Wider View

My work has a mystical and spiritual dimension that I no longer want to ignore or play down.

I have been a devoted student of mysticism throughout my adult life. I believe there are dimensions to human experience that cannot always be explained through the ordinary frameworks we use to understand a life. I am not afraid to say God anymore, either.

That may not look like everyone else's way of seeing things, and it doesn't need to.

I take a wider view when I feel it is warranted.

At Alchemia, spiritual and metaphysical perspectives may have a place in the work, but your worldview remains your own. You are in charge of what you believe, what you question, what you accept and what you leave behind.

I offer frameworks, questions and ways of seeing.

What you leave and what you take away is always yours.

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Why Alchemia

I began Alchemia Wisdom School as a larger expression of this work.

It is for the self-led seeker navigating the second half of life while contending with the demands of being human.

This is the terrain of changing identity, career endings and reinvention. Aging parents. Illness. Grief. Empty nest. Changing relationships. Loss. New beginnings. The question of what comes next.

The circumstances are different for each of us, but the underlying invitation is often the same:

How will you meet this life?

What do you need to understand now?

What can no longer be avoided?

Where do you need new footing?

What remains yours to carry forward?

What is this season asking of you?

And, perhaps, what must you become?

Alchemia is not a place where someone else tells you what your life means.

It is a place to undertake deeper work—to develop the capacity to listen, discern, choose and meet your life with greater honesty and self-trust.

The Work isn't always pretty or comfortable.

But it has helped me stay centred, clear and honest with myself when life has asked difficult things of me. And I have seen what becomes possible when others undertake their own work with the same willingness.

Ultimately, each of us has to answer the call of our own life.

We have to decide what to make of this precious life we have been given.

I cannot make that decision for you.

I don't believe anyone should.

But I can offer what I have learned, the frameworks I have lived, the questions that have mattered to me, and a place from which to undertake The Work.

The choosing is yours.

The life is yours.

And so is what comes next.

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The Work of Alchemia

Through Alchemia Wisdom School, I work with self-led seekers in 1:1 sessions, through books and articles, and through introductory online classes.

The Alchemia Wisdom School Press publishes books and course content that extend this work beyond the individual session.

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The aim is simple, though the work itself rarely is:

to help you find your own footing, return to the centre of your own life, and develop the capacity to meet what it asks of you.