The Role of Medication in Spiritual Healing

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.