The Center for Alchemical Studies
The Center for Alchemical Studies is an umbrella project of EarthWays.org, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Founded in 1997 by Monika Wikman, and later joined by Tom Elsner, the Center was created as a nature-based retreat and educational community dedicated to deepening both the study and lived experience of the alchemical psyche. Its work supports the individuation process through education, contemplative practice, community, and relationship with the natural world.
The Center hosts in-person and online seminars, community gatherings, scholarships, publishing initiatives, and writing projects. Located in Tesuque, just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, it is housed in a lovingly restored nineteenth-century building that originally served as a brooder house for chickens. Today, surrounded by organic gardens and the wildlife of Tesuque Creek at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it offers a quiet place for reflection, learning, and community.
As the old barn was being transformed into a gathering space—largely through the craftsmanship of Ray Hillis—and the oak floors were being laid, Monika had a dream. Morning light streamed through an east-facing window, and there stood C. G. Jung, saying, “May I have the first dance?” Together they began to dance in the newly finished, empty room. That dream has remained a guiding image for the Center.
Jung’s work with the living imagination and the transformative depths of the psyche continues to inspire and inform the Center’s mission – the alchemical evolution of consciousness, inspired also with the work of Henry Corbin, W. B. Yeats and the Romantic poets, Stanislav Grof, Taoist contemplative traditions, and the wisdom of Indigenous cultures, etc…
Like the Well of the I Ching, the Center seeks to be a place where people gather to co-create the living waters of the psyche. Growing an experiential, energetic taproot into the chthonic depths of imagination and the mystery of the soul, the aim is to help people anchor into relationship with the creative depths of the psyche, to nourish and reinvigorate individual lives and the soul of the world in these times.
Please visit our Speakers page for the depth and diversity of programs and presenters who have been part of the Center over the years.
Monika Wikman + The Center for Alchemical Studies - Santa Fe, New Mexico