What is the Medicine?
All of life is a medicine if you set the intention to heal. You may currently label only certain substances or treatment modalities as “medicine” based on your conditioning and the societal ideas around what heals. Maybe you have expanded the the notion of medicine to include food, or even the absence of food in the practice of fasting, since it has profound effects on the mind, body, and spirit. If you are open to connection with the spiritual world, and rewiring the brain’s trauma responses, you may consider things like psychoactive plants, meditative states, and energy healing work to be medicines as well. The truth is that all of life’s circumstances present an opportunity for medicine, but the choice to perceive them as such remains up to you and your intention.
In addition to all of the modalities I mentioned, and many I did not, relational experiences offer one of the most potent forms of medicine as it triggers emotions and beliefs meant to be released. Some relational experiences are pleasant, some are not so much. Both provide windows into what ancestral or early life emotions and beliefs you are carrying within you. When you see glimpses into these emotions and beliefs, they can be hard to tolerate, especially while the brain latches onto a story about why such feelings were elicited and who or what was at fault. However, the practice of healing takes on new meaning when you allow yourself to see the medicine in every situation that arises. The more triggering the situation is, the more medicine there is to be received.
Your mind body experience is not simply a collection of random events that create chain reactions within you, but invitations to heal various unhealed parts or trapped emotions and beliefs you have been carrying. From an energetic perspective, the frequency of the emotions and beliefs you carry will continue to attract similar types of people and situations until you are able to learn the “lessons” meant for you in this life. Your brain has been wired by continuous messaging from ancestry and early life and, therefore, will continue to perceive you, others, and the world through that filtered lens until you begin to say “Yes” to the medicine. With practice, you begin to rewire the brain and use its power to support your highest intention for this life rather than allowing it to remain limited in fear and other toxic emotion states.
You may choose to go through life seeing every negative interaction as an unfair slight against you for no other reason than the unfairness of life. In this case, you may be holding some beliefs about inherent unfairness or poor treatment from others, as well as associated emotions that align with this frequency. Your brain may convince you that the best way to solve this problem is by becoming more entrenched in a competitive energetic frequency and belief that you must look out only for yourself and take what you can because one will support you. The belief and emotion you are carrying may shape your worldview and become a vicious feedback loop in your personal reality. From an energetic perspective, the negative emotion energy will continue to attract such events, thereby reinforcing the beliefs around unfairness and poor treatment. From a neuroscientic perspective, your brain’s wiring, which I refer to as trauma, will continue to perceive and interpret events through this traumatized lens, limiting you from seeing the opportunities for higher states of love, gratitude, and joy. The medicine in this example is to practice recognizing that the source energy of this production is living within you. It is not to excuse others behavior or tragic situations, but rather to invite you to identify the power you have within you to change your brain, your environment, and your life. By releasing the blockages of emotion and belief energy keeping you stuck, you create space to move toward the frequencies of love, abundance, and opportunity that will create new neural patterns in your brain. The combination of your upgraded nervous system and emotion and belief energy will allow you to expand into the truth of who you are and who you have always wanted to be. This is the medicine of life. It does not always taste good, but it is the greatest gift you have to give yourself - to recognize that you have the power within you to take these medicines with intention in order to grow and expand. From this place of readiness and intention, there is no stuckness, only medicine.
One personal example is that I have always carried ancestral beliefs of lacking support and, as a result, rarely trusted that others or systems would be there to help me. Even though my parents were always supportive, I rarely trusted an authority figure in my life and, to no surprise, often experienced contrast with such figures. Though I have known about these aspect of my personal reality and mind body experience for most of my life, I only discovered the ancestral roots of the core beliefs and associated emotions recently. The difference now being that I do not blame myself or even identify with these parts as the truth of who I am, but instead see them for what they - energetic matter and bundles of emotion memory I have been carrying and allowing to define me. Much of that has changed as I have exposed and transformed my life in more ways than one, but limiting beliefs and attached emotions continue to surface as I chart new territory in my life’s design. I notice how triggered I get when I sense others are attempting to dictate or influence my vision. Of course, I am human and I react poorly at times, but with practice I continue to recognize such beliefs and emotions as opportunities to be cleared. I can choose to stay in blame and judgment, which I have spent more than enough time in throughout my life, or I can take the greater medicine and practice owning what lives within me in order to expand.
By saying “Yes” to the medicine and a readiness to practice, the collection of emotion memories that shape different parts of who you believe yourself to be can actually be dismantled and reconfigured over time. As you heal, soothe, and release these aspects of your experience that no longer define you, your environment will naturally adjust to meet the rising truth within you. No life happens in a bubble and there are many forces at play that create the majesty and wonder of existence, but your capacity to receive the medicines emerging all around you, in every moment, is the most powerful force you have to transform.