The Alchemy of Enough
To understand what is enough—sufficient to live well and meaningfully—is to step into what I call the alchemy of enough. The Swedes have a word for it: lagom, loosely translated as “just the right amount.” In a world that clamors for more and more, to live by lagom feels quietly rebellious. It is not resignation but a soulful practice: enough, just enough.
After seventy-two years of living and forty years of practicing depth psychotherapy and writing, I’ve discovered a simple truth—enough satisfies, and more leaves us slack-jawed and empty. What an empirical finding! William James, father of American psychology, would have called it radical empiricism: what is true is what works. And lagom works.
As a depth psychologist and author of essays and books on mysticism, trauma, and the evolving psyche—and as a writer of metaphysical fiction exploring archetypes, spirits, and the struggle between soul and soullessness—I’ve witnessed the strange alchemy of yielding to limits. Limits are not barriers; they are crucibles. They generate an inner fire that heals, strengthens, and transforms.
In the therapy room, I have sat with earnest souls exhausted by the pressure to stretch beyond what their lives are meant to hold. Their liberation often comes not from grasping more, but from daring to stop. When I turn to fiction, I walk through multiverses where magic and myth are as real as the ground beneath our feet, and what unfolds there reflects our own lives. Characters discover again and again that mastery does not lie in boundless excess but in the hidden power of enough.
I remember Marcus, a financier in his forties, who once confessed that joy had become a measurement—more clients, more status, more risk. He bought art he did not love because it signaled value. He wore suits that gleamed under showroom lights, yet his heart, he admitted, pounded in hollowness. He had equated potency with opulence. When he spoke of emptiness, his eyes were shadowed, his presence dim.
One evening, he and his wife hosted a dinner party meant to impress. He served a four-ounce filet instead of the lavish eight-ounce portions he usually provided. At first, he worried the choice would seem small. But to his surprise, the meal was celebrated. Guests praised its flavor and balance, grateful—many of them, quietly, had been struggling to eat more healthfully. At the end of the evening, rather than shrinking with embarrassment, Marcus felt steady, even radiant. In yielding to measure, he discovered strength not in scale but in proportion.
Then there is Lena, a writer who spends summers in a modest studio beneath the pines. She eats simply. Her furniture is secondhand. Her novels, woven with lore and natural magic, serve as both art and talisman against the endless hunger for more. Because she writes, she understands the mind as I do—how longing can become a hunger without end. She has learned to nourish her imagination while starving the idol of excess. In her quiet sufficiency, she glows.
The alchemy of enough is not abstract. In my clinical work, I see people wrung raw by the pursuit of more—more recognition, more feeling, more success—only to find themselves in psychic rooms of their own making, spaces that feel emotionally and spiritually rumpled. They live in inner shabbiness, despite outward polish, because their inner order has collapsed. The value placed on the external grows so inflated that anything less than a grand gesture feels like betrayal. Yet when they allow themselves small ceremonies—writing under lamplight instead of glare, eating simple food with gratitude, abandoning one unnecessary obligation—they begin to recover their soul’s architecture. They begin honoring lagom.
There is something I always pass on to patients, friends, or family who find themselves in such a psychological conversation with me: Lagom isn’t settling. It is not humility collapsing into resignation. It is fierce discernment. It asks: What is sufficient in this moment? What measure of comfort, beauty, indulgence, or connection does the soul truly need—not what the ego, driven by fear and image, demands?
As a writer working in the deep mental and mythic realms, I return again and again to this principle. My visionary fiction draws on folklore, trickster mischief, and archetypal conflict not to escape the world but to illuminate it. Myth teaches that overreach always exacts a cost. In countless tales, figures of great power fall because their appetites run unchecked. Tricksters, on the other hand, reveal the opposite truth: it is often the small, clever act—not the clash of armies—that changes everything. The power of myth lies not in boundlessness but in the wisdom of limits.
In my novel Goddess of Everything, a mother’s affection and her son’s struggle unfold against the loom of supernatural forces. There, suffering arises from excess—power wielded without compassion, love demanded rather than freely given and received. Yet redemption emerges through moderation, where truth takes precedence over grandeur. In Goddess of the Wild Thing, the lore of the land, the magic, even the horror, reveal another paradox: what appears small can be vast; what seems fragile can conceal immense strength.
What I teach and learn—because patients teach therapists, often more than we care to admit—always seeks to stir psychic depths, to awaken thought, and to nourish life. You cannot pour water from an empty cup. No project built on excess can endure without collapse. Enough, then, is not an endpoint. It is a foundation. When someone who has lived by exaggeration begins to shape their days around sufficiency, something shifts. Breath deepens. Posture straightens. Creativity renews. Relationships soften into truth. The philosopher’s stone is not some distant object of quest; it is the inner measure, the recognition of delight hidden within sufficiency itself.
The promise of “more” is haunted by the specter of “never enough.” As long as excess is mistaken for potency, the hunger never ends. But sufficiency whispers a different secret: real potency lies not in magnitude but in authenticity. It is found in the peace of truth-telling, in the quiet strength of refusing to be hollow vessels echoing society’s roar. To live by sufficiency is to say with confidence, “This is enough”—whether in art, in work, in love, or in the sanctuary of home.
Our culture rewards inflation. We applaud size, accumulation, spectacle. We live under the spell of “bigger is better,” as though magnitude alone could grant meaning. Yet myth, poetry, and psyche remind us of a deeper truth: they honor limit, attention, resonance. In myth, the quest is rarely for endless conquest—it is for what is missing: love, insight, spirit, belonging. And often that “missing” is not absent at all. It waits quietly at the margins, already present, if we will measure, refine, and attend. The soul does not hunger for more; it hungers for what is sufficient.
Here, then, is a small practice—drawn from both therapeutic work and the imaginative worlds of fiction—that guides us toward the alchemy of enough. Close your eyes. Picture balancing scales within your chest. On one side rests the heavy weight of appetite, of “more,” of image and spectacle. On the other, near the heart, lies the soft weight of sufficiency: the warmth of home, the laughter of close ones, the soil beneath your feet, words that teach and awaken. Breathe until the scale steadies. Then call to mind something in your life that you have accepted, though it is not aligned with your values. Perhaps it is a project that feels grand but hollow. Perhaps it is a space that signals ambition more than belonging. Imagine stepping away. Ask yourself: Does this serve my soul? Is this measure true to who I am?
When you open your eyes, let your coming choices—your acts of creativity, your gestures of kindness, your moments of rest—arise from measure. Let your writing seek what is essential. Let your therapy offer what heals rather than what dazzles. Measure your life in victories birthed by resonance rather than expanse. For within myth and psyche, within the complexity of human life and the pages of metaphysical fiction, the alchemy of enough is a bridge between who you are and who you might become. To live the alchemy of enough is not to diminish, but to discover—the philosopher’s gold hidden in sufficiency.
Live Deeply . . . Read Daily!
