For a long time, I struggled to understand the role of pharmaceutical medication on the path of spiritual healing. For me personally, I worked with medication for over a decade and a half before letting go of my daily usage of it. As such, I speak these words today both from personal experience as well as professional experience as a Medicine Woman.
I am not a doctor or clinical medical professional; I am simply sharing a perspective and it should not be taken as medical advice. My perspective is largely from a spiritual standpoint.
In truth, I believe medication isn’t something we should need, except we have collectively brought ourselves to a place where some people do. We have separated ourselves so far from the natural world and from ourselves that we need artificial or inorganic structures to help keep us from falling down in a place we simply can’t come back from.
Or do we? This is where I get stuck.
I frequently have conversations with friends and clients about what would happen if they came off their medication. We playfully inquire with a sense of curiosity and non-judgment because these questions need to be asked. The answer is often about how bad they would feel, how intense their anxiety would get, how they would lose sleep, etc. And I have to wonder– what if we need to feel those things? What if by suppressing all those things with medication we are only making those emotions bigger and harder to handle when it’s finally time to process them? That’s exactly what happens by the way. And eventually, we do need to process them. If we don’t, they turn into disease, illness, treatment-resistant conditions, and a general sense of hopelessness we can’t shake.
Let me start by sharing that everyone has an array of literal constructs in the astral world around them. We all have more than a few mind palaces (as Sherlock Holmes likes to describe them), villages, or towns that are constructed through our experiences and belief systems. We have basements full of shadows, doors that haven’t been opened yet, and lights that haven’t been turned on. Sometimes we have structures that look more like prisons than houses — something I see with people who have been in the military or raised with strict religion. This is one of the things that can also reveal itself to people in their dreams. When we keep revisiting the same house or other building during dream time, we know it’s one of our astral structures.
As Shamanic practitioners, we often know that a person needs a soul retrieval when they keep dreaming of the house or yard where they grew up. Those places still exist in our astral space long after we have moved away when we have attachment there. Then we have other structures like malls, schools, hospitals, etc. and some of them are modeled after places we have seen or experienced in real life. They all have memories and beliefs stored in them, and sometimes they are places where we meet other beings while dreaming.
Ok, so what’s my point? My point is that those structures are there all the time, not just when we are dreaming. They are supporting your physical reality here and are connected to you.
When I see someone who is on medication, I see scaffolding and other bizarre structures on some of their astral buildings and sometimes I see it around certain parts of their body. Just like you would see scaffolding/propping on structures here in the 3D. In the astral space, the role of the scaffolding is to keep the person or structure propped up so that it doesn’t fall over. Sometimes it’s to keep it contained.
In extreme cases of medical intervention, I see it artificially keeping someone alive who should have passed on.
Now pause for a second, and ask yourself what would happen if we as humans propped up dilapidated houses and buildings instead of taking them down to rebuild? What if we filled buildings beyond their capacity and put clamps on them to keep them contained instead of expanding them through construction?
Here’s where medication comes into play. I know that sometimes we need the structure and all its scaffolding — it just feels like too much and we aren’t ready to have it destroyed yet. This is especially true with primary belief systems we constructed during childhood. It is also true when we aren’t in a safe space in our life to process the destruction. Such as if we don’t have stable housing or are in an emotionally unsafe relationship.
The nature of this reality really contributes to that issue as well. We don’t have community support or sympathy for hard times that we all go through in life. The average person can’t afford therapy or support while we gently deconstruct these structures. We are not taught to be compassionate and patient with those parts of ourselves who are scared and sensitive through those hard times.
And then the other part of me wants to discuss how we can grow our society to support things like this without the need for medication. That’s a different rabbit hole I suppose. I have big dreams for how society can look if we wanted it to — and I would start with cultivating community as fast as possible.
So, back to the scaffolding. This is also why some people would do better in the clinical setting of Ketamine or Psilocybin work. This is a slow and somewhat limited introduction to the other world (psychedelic world) that doesn’t go too deep because it literally can’t in the clinical or non-spiritual setting. In a regulated clinical setting, someone(s) has control over every step of this process and there is also significant profit involved. This will always present limitations in a foundational way for the individual having the experience. However, this setting is great for people who have massive amounts of trauma or very little tools or support to process their trauma and need to take small bites at a time. You can get 10% of the way while still on medication, put emotional and physical support in place, and then come off medication slowly to keep going deeper.
Microdosing can also play a beautiful role in this process, but not in the way most people think. I will write another blog on that one soon because trust me when I tell you we are doing microdosing wrong.
This is one of the reasons I feel it is so important for people like me to be able to and be encouraged to work with doctors and therapists who have lots of structure in their modality. That would be step 1 in trauma healing and what I do would be step 2. Instead, the clinical model is considered to be the only acceptable way to practice this work in the mainstream — really limiting the depth to which we can go personally and making the healing process so much longer than it needs to be (and more expensive, surprise!). In fact, as a shamanic practitioner, the new laws and measures going into place will likely prevent me from operating all together in the future. Ah I could rant forever on this one!
Now I want to discuss the drawbacks of medication. With this scaffolding structure I am discussing, it prevents you from falling down, but it also prevents you from letting go of things that need to be let go of (destroyed). It prevents you from expansion and getting to the root of any issues you are having because you will be disconnected from that depth. It often prevents you from going deeply into certain areas for healing because we can’t even get those doors open when they are nailed shut. In my Ceremony space, it interferes so greatly on an energetic level that it can cause someone to have a traumatic experience or no experience at all. This is including some of the medications that clinical studies show are “ok to combine with psilocybin”.
The moral of my story here is that I do believe meds have a place in spiritual healing, at least in the reality most people are currently living in. There is no guilt or shame to be had, just understanding around what medications do and how to use them efficiently as part of your healing, not as a punctuation to it.
