Daoist Alchemy
When insight alone isn't enough. When the pattern lives not in the mind, but in the body and spirit. The Nine Stages begin with a conversation.
Daoist Alchemy is the transformational process of becoming a realized human being: the creator of your own reality. No longer a victim of life's randomness. A soul-level remembering that everything happens for you, not to you.
The ancient Daoists believed we are born perfect, like pure gold. You can bury it, freeze it, heat it, and when you wipe it clean, it shines all the same. It remains as beautiful as it's always been.
Most people today think we're more like silver, or worse, lead. We rust, corrode, and expect to fall apart at a predictable expiration date. Not because it's inevitable, but because we believe it is.
Alchemy is the process of remembering you were born perfect. The medicine that helps you release the mental grime that's dulling your gold.
Ask yourself: Is there more to life than this?
If you feel in your bones that the answer is yes, you may be already looking for Alchemy.
Perhaps your life feels like Groundhog Day: the same patterns repeating, wanting things to change but unable to create a different outcome. You have something to offer the world, but you can't get enough momentum to take off.
If you want more meaning, more vitality, and to discover your full potential, Daoist Alchemy could be a path to explore.
You may have conscious awareness of your limiting beliefs. But if those patterns still persist, it's because they don't just live in your mind. They're encoded in your body and spirit; a sort of celluar program. Alchemy treatments address what therapy, somatic treatments, and acupuncture alone cannot reach.
The Treatments
The 9 Stages, the 13 Ghost Points, and the 9 Heart Pains are among the offerings drawn from this lineage of alchemical medicine passed down through generations, directly from my teachers to you. The list grows as the work deepens.
The complete framework for spiritual cultivation, the work of years. The early stages release resistance: your deepest fears, the armor around the heart, the ancestral and karmic burdens you carry. The fourth asks a kind of death, of the ego and its preferences, its likes and dislikes. The stages beyond bring you to a single recognition: that you are the boat, the rudder, and the wind in your own life, the author of your own suffering and of its release. Challenging, yet worthwhile work.
This treatment addresses what the ancients called "spiritual possession": patterns, beliefs, and traumas that feel encompassing and beyond your control. It releases self-sabotage, addiction, intrusive thoughts, and deeply rooted obstacles that keep you from expressing your authentic self. For those who know their gifts but can't share them, who know their path but feel blocked.
This protocol opens the heart to self-love and authentic connection. It releases old beliefs, coping mechanisms, and pain (self-inflicted or inflicted by others) that keep you from living vulnerably and sincerely. If you've done years of healing but still feel guarded, this treatment creates the opening.
Alchemy goes deeper and further than acupuncture, and the changes can be intense, even uncomfortable. It asks for a sincere heart: a true desire to change, the willingness to give up the comfort of your discomfort, and the courage to meet your fears and the deep material beneath them. You do not need to be spiritually advanced. What it asks is honesty, and the willingness to keep asking better questions. If you are not ready for that yet, the Ghost Points or Heart Pains can build the capacity for it.
Daoist alchemy is a journey we each take alone, together.
For all that alchemy asks of you, it offers, at a minimum, the gift of perspective in return, something my patients and I have learned never to take for granted.
When engaged in alchemy, shifts can be immediate or unfold over months. You might feel lighter, clearer, more yourself. Old patterns might simply stop showing up. Ghost Points work can take six to twelve months to fully integrate. The 9 Stages unfold over years, not months. There is no rushing spiritual evolution.
The Treatment That Changed Everything
About five years after graduating and getting licensed, I was practicing TCM and gradually burning out. The medicine I learned had been reduced to a cookbook approach, and I was following the recipes with very disappointing results. "Poke-and-pray acupuncture" is what I called it at the time. I was treating maybe two patients a month, doing primarily fitness coaching work, and avoiding stepping into my path as a healer because I was not feeling authentically aligned with the healing itself. The magic I had felt as an early student, the reason I got into acupuncture, felt like it had boiled away.
By luck or serendipity, I found Leta Herman's class on the 13 Ghost Points, and my ears perked up immediately. This was the material I'd been curious about in school. The theory we'd barely glossed over with a warning that set of points were "reserved only for serious mental derangement" before moving on. The class blew me away. Leta shared that she had been using the points to help people root themselves in authenticity as well as to deal with the more serious mental health conditions discussed in school. I reached out to Leta right after, initially not to study under her, but because I felt stuck, entrenched in inauthenticity. She presented the treatment as a way of releasing cellular patterns of doubt, self-sabotage, and a means to clear the slate so the body can return to its naturally vital state.
I requested the treatment because I knew my calling but couldn't move forward. I knew my gifts but was terrified to share them. I doubted my capacity, my worthiness to step into the world as a healer.
Leta agreed to perform the 13 Ghost Points treatment a few months later, and from that point on, nothing was the same. I felt like myself again. For the first time in years, I felt inspired by the possibilities ahead of me. I felt an eagerness, almost a compulsion, to share what I had to offer with the world.
The magic I'd carried so strongly as a child had rekindled. I wasn't just unblocked. I was alive. I am a recreational saber fencer and that weekend I proceeded to compete and win a medal in a local tournament. I was moving and seeing the world in a different way. It felt like I was no longer getting in my own way.
I decided I needed to understand what took place and that I wanted to help Leta bring this into the world as well. I enrolled in Leta's three-year Master of Alchemy Apprenticeship Program the Fall after my treatment. What followed felt like lifetimes of spiritual growth and learning compressed into three years of intensive study, clinical practicum, personal experience, and transformation. After my Ghost Points, that belief in myself was so strong that I found a space and signed a lease, set up an office, and began offering acupuncture and alchemy in earnest. I'm proud to bring these rare offerings to San Diego, a truly magical and beautiful community in its own right.
Diego Garcia, L.Ac., in his own words
I offer and live these treatments. I continue my own journey through the 9 Stages. I continue studying with Ann Cecil-Sterman in classical acupuncture and take ongoing classes from Jeffrey Yuen. I continue working with Leta Herman. I maintain a dedicated qigong practice as a Xi Sui Gong (Bone Marrow Washing) student under Master Kao of the Little Nine Heaven school of internal Kung Fu.
I study Chinese metaphysics and Daoist philosophy as the foundation of how I move through the world.
You're working with someone who was transformed by this medicine, holds a deep reverence for and is dedicated fully to the practice.
Daoist Alchemy
Alchemy is deeper, more personal, and not for everyone. It begins with a brief call to decide, together, whether this is the right work for you.
A complimentary 15-minute call to talk about where you are, what the Nine Stages are, and whether this work is right for you.
Your entry into the Nine Stages. Up to ninety minutes: your full picture, your constitution, and your first alchemy treatment.
Up to seventy-five minutes of dedicated stages of alchemy work, for active clients.
Many patients choose to work in a container, a set of prepaid sessions committed to together, at a rate that honors the depth of the work. Ask about it anytime; we'll find the right fit in conversation.