Our purpose

Many of us have had a taste of a different culture — one rooted in love and freedom — in containers like Burning Man, ISTA, and Highden Temple. For most people these remain peak experiences, divorced from everyday life. Alchemy Society was founded to root this culture into the day-to-day, and seed it in the Bay Area.

This is a residential temple in Oakland's Ivy Hill neighborhood: an 1896 mansion housing 18 residents devoted to weaving the sacred into ordinary life. It is also a living incubator — for your practice, your offerings, and the version of yourself that the retreat revealed.

Vision & Values

Cultivating Group Heart: We focus on the heart first. Everyone ultimately wants to belong to a community they can genuinely contribute to — and when that field of love is tended, the practicalities of shared living follow. When dysfunction arises, we ask what is blocking love? before we redesign the chore wheel.

Spiritual Practice in Community: This is a place to integrate practice into daily life, grounded in the strength and reflection of community. We celebrate community as mirrors — one of the most potent tools for shadow work available to us. Meditation, embodiment, shared ritual: all of it honored, all of it woven in.

Conflict as Opportunity: Conflicts reveal where there is room for more truth, more alignment, more aliveness. We are committed to building enough collective safety to face conflict directly and return to love — speaking withholds, using NVC, choosing honesty over the slow death of accumulated micro-resentments.

Eros-Positive & Kink-Friendly: We hold that eros is sacred. The house is explicitly sex-positive and erotically alive, grounded in consent and attunement as living practices — not rules, but the foundation of genuine safety and creative freedom.

Detailed values can be seen here: Values

The Space

Temple: A dedicated sanctuary — separate entrance, its own bathroom — designed for group practice, ceremony, and gatherings. Open to the wider community for public events; available to residents for personal and collective practice between. This is a real ~1000 sqft. ceremonial space, not a meditation corner.

Session Room: On-site space for 1:1 offerings — bodywork, coaching, facilitation, teaching. If you're building a practice, this is infrastructure that would cost you thousands elsewhere.

Outdoor Space: Large backyard with a large deck, fire pit, vegetable garden with raised beds, open gathering space.

Living spaces split across 4 units, including four kitchens and living rooms available for use by all residents of the house.

Infrared Sauna: For personal wellness and shared relaxation.