Incarnate: An Alchemy Retreat
Four days outside Austin for people who know what their patterns are costing them - and are ready for actual change.
It might be in your relationship. You want more intimacy, but you still struggle to ask for what you actually need. You still feel responsible for managing others’ reactions.
Maybe you’re grieving a relationship that’s ending and realizing there are parts of yourself you don’t want to carry into whatever comes next.
Or it might be something you want to create in your work, and you keep hesitating, playing smaller than you know you’re capable of. Or maybe there’s a decision you keep circling, because choosing it could turn everything upside down.
And the most frustrating part is that after all your growth, you’re still asking why you’re stuck here. Because you’ve done the work. You’re self-aware, you understand your patterns.
And yet, in the moments that matter, you hear yourself second guessing, doubting, overthinking. You suppress what you really feel. Maybe you abandon yourself to try to feel connected or pull away to try to feel free.
Awareness is vital. And it’s only one part of the equation.
Underneath the pattern is an identity, formed through years of learning who you needed to be to stay safe, loved, and accepted. This is where the real change happens. The kind that continues when you get home.
More intimacy. More freedom. To tell the truth without abandoning yourself or the relationship. To trust your own knowing and create what you’re here to create. To be present with the people you love.
One of my clients put it like this: “I’m designing my life now instead of triaging it.”
That’s what we’re here to bring to life.
The one that has you swallowing what you feel, managing everyone else’s emotions, and abandoning yourself to keep the peace. The one that keeps you playing smaller than you know you are capable of.
This equation is the product of a decade of guiding real, lasting transformations in leader’s lives. It’s why the change doesn’t stay contained to a single breakthrough, it actually changes your inner world and the life, relationships, and work that you’re building on the outside.
Awareness + Acceptance + Expression + Aligned Action = Alchemizing Identity
You’ve read the books, invested in coaching or therapy, participated in retreats and maybe ceremonies already. You can probably tell me why you do half the things you do. This is where most people are when they arrive, and it is where most work stops.
Many people try to transition directly from awareness to aligned action, bypassing the feminine-based steps of acceptance and expression. And then aligned action doesn’t become aligned action at all. The action comes from trying to avoid or outrun the wound, which means the wound is still driving.
You understand the pattern, but when the moment actually comes, you still shut down. Swallow what you feel. Take responsibility for their reaction. Opportunities stay invisible, your standards don’t actually rise, and you show up trying to be different without feeling different. This is the part that cannot be reached by understanding it, and it is why this happens in a room with other people in it.
This is why Incarnate includes every step of the equation and the integration afterwards. It is not only the four days in Austin. There is a private call and a group call before the retreat, and a private call and a group call after it. We begin the work before Austin and stay with you as you integrate it into your daily life.
We prepare you to change your life when you leave.
So much of what we struggle with as adults was learned from our relationships in childhood.
We learned which parts of ourselves were welcome and which created conflict. You became incredibly good at reading the room and anticipating everyone else’s needs. You learned to swallow your anger because it wasn’t safe.
You took on the identity of the easy one who suppresses, or the difficult one who reacts, the peacemaker who takes care of everyone or the problem child who causes the chaos.
That’s why Incarnate happens in a small group of no more than four to six, with both men and women in the room.
Because the deepest version of this work isn’t understanding something new about yourself, it’s experiencing what happens when you tell the truth and people stay.
Most of your original wounds were formed in relationship with the Masculine and Feminine, and so, there’s something powerful about being held by both while you heal.
At Incarnate, you get to let go and be held in your mess and in your power.
You arrive separately. The group becomes the work.
You’ve done a lot of work on yourself. You’re self-aware, capable, independent, and yet you still wonder about things like:
You’ve done a lot of work on yourself. You’re self-aware, capable, successful in your own right, and yet you still wonder about things like:
This is not a couples retreat. This is about doing the inner work that changes how you show up in all of your relationships, and in what you create. Come married, partnered, dating, divorced, or single.
From previous retreats facilitated by Alex and Jakob.
“It feels so much better to be alive.”
“When I started working with Alex, I was becoming more aware of how disconnected I had been from my emotions. One of the deepest stories I’d carried for as long as I can remember was simply: ‘I’m bad.’
Today, I genuinely believe I’m a good person. It sounds simple, but it’s been a profound change for me. I forgave and repaired with my parents. I’m more able to experience love from within myself rather than constantly looking outside myself for it, and because I’m more connected to that love internally, I’m able to express it more openly to my children, family, and friends.
I’m designing my life now instead of triaging it.”
“Alex’s guidance has truly changed my life.”
“Working with Alex sent my life on an entirely new path. Not only did I finally create the business vision I actually wanted, but the biggest shift was releasing my inner judgment and perfectionism and learning to honor every part of me.
Alex’s retreat is phenomenal. She creates a space where all of you is welcome.”
“It has been very freeing.”
“The transformation that came from Alex’s retreat is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I’m learning to stop stuffing things down during conflict in my relationship and to recognize my limiting patterns. It has been very freeing.
I’m also charging more money than I ever have for my services, and I’ve built out a waitlist. This work has opened my eyes to a whole new level of growth that I didn’t even know existed.”
“Alex held a room of men in a way I won’t ever forget.”
“What started as a facilitated conversation on acceptance and grief evolved into an hour-long somatic meditation experience, deep, personal, and unlike anything I’ve been part of in a group setting. She has a rare gift for holding others through the heaviest of human experiences, especially men who aren’t often given that kind of space. The world needs more of this gift.”
“He deeply embodies what he teaches.”
“Jakob fuses together deep somatic and nervous system knowledge and practices along with powerful tools from countless different modalities. He makes you feel extremely safe in his presence, and lovingly calls you forward into your best self.”
Transformation coach and creator of the Alchemy Equation
Alex Pursglove is a transformation coach, spiritual guide, and creator of the Alchemy Equation, developed through a decade of stewarding inner and relational transformations for committed leaders and entrepreneurs. Her clients have healed decades of shame and resentment, repaired relationships with parents, multiplied income in collapsed timeframes, and become freer to be and express who they really are.
Alex lives this work herself, from growing her business 10X in under 14 months to radically transforming her own patterns of codependency and self-abandonment in intimate relationship, dismantling the religious identity that once defined her, and rebuilding her relationship with God from the ground up. She has invested well over half a million dollars into her own development and pursuit of mastery as a transformational guide.
Her work today is devoted to helping people radically accept and trust themselves, God and life, so they can live with deeper intimacy, fully express who they are, and embody their soul’s purpose. She is known for staying and holding people in the places that are the most painful to confront, bringing grace to suffering and restoring power where it was sacrificed.
Founder of Vortex Retreats
Jakob Gricar is a somatic and ontological coach and the founder of Vortex Retreats. He works one to one with a small number of founders and leaders each year, people who are up to something big in the world and are being run by something they cannot name.
He came to this work through his own body. Chronically ill at thirteen with no answer from any doctor, he taught himself out of library books on medicinal plants and self-hypnosis and found his first real relief in meditation. He left school at fifteen, spent years moving through Europe and South America, studied Advaita Vedanta and yoga philosophy in India, and worked for years in the Amazon with plant medicine and old lineages.
In 2023 he met Judith Johnson, a pioneer of the somatic field with more than fifty years in it, and trained directly under her. He describes the turn in his own work as being face down on an eighty-three year old woman’s massage table, screaming, while she held his body. In late 2024 he lived in her house for three months, recording her practitioner programme and co-facilitating her certification work.
His work is somatic, nervous system and ontological. Clients describe him as gentle with no coddling in it, and as someone who makes it safe enough to go where they have been avoiding, then stays there with them rather than talking them out of it.
This is for people who have already done a lot of inner work and are committed to their own transformation. There must be something high stakes for you that you are genuinely ready to change.
A relationship you don’t want to lose.
A relationship that’s ending that you don’t want to repeat.
A direction-changing decision you need to make, but you’ve been too afraid of the consequences to move forward.
A business or body of work you’ve already built successfully, but sense is now capped by something in you, not your strategy.
A codependency pattern of shutting down, proving, or abandoning yourself that you’re tired of bringing into the things that matter most.
You don’t need to know exactly what’s underneath it. That’s part of the work. But there needs to be something you are genuinely ready to change.
