How the Medicine Speaks

Some come to the medicine in search of healing. Others come to know themselves more deeply, or to open some part of their psyche, and others still to commune with the divine through this intermediary. Whatever brings a person, one thing holds constant: the medicine has its own wisdom, and it answers a heartfelt intention in the way that will best serve the one who carries it, which often looks quite different from what they imagined. Most hope to prune a few branches; the medicine, however, tends the whole plant, and given time it reaches the roots in everyone. At some point the principles a life was built around, and the very tenets of what constitutes reality, are challenged. Beliefs long held as truth can crumble, and a shift in perspective can bring the whole shape of a life into question. In every case, it is worth knowing beforehand that what grows from this work tends to be larger than what was asked for.

The medicine rarely announces any of this in plain language. It speaks through image, symbol, sensation, and a direct knowing that arrives whole, with its meaning already inside it, drawn from the living field that holds all of us and that this work moves within. This is worth saying clearly, because so many people come out of ceremony with the words "the medicine told me." When a message arrives already formed into sentences, it is wise to ask who inside is doing the talking. The ego is fluent in language, and the medicine works in a different register, one that asks to be felt and lived before it can be put into words.

What the medicine shows, in any of these forms, asks for a different kind of receiving than a diagnosis does. An image, a sensation moving through the body, a knowing that lands all at once, each has to be sat with, worked, carried into daily life and tested against it, because what is being shown lives beneath language. Take a vision as one example. Someone who believes they are unconditionally loving toward everyone might meet beings that appear grotesque, even frightening, and recoil from them. The recoil is the lesson. A being that comes in a disturbing form may be a guide or an ally, and the person has just turned it away on appearance alone, while trusting whatever came dressed in beauty. The vision is holding up a mirror, and what it reflects is the bias: a place inside them that sits at odds with the loving self-image they carry. Sometimes what they turned away is also a part of themselves, exiled long ago because it was too much, too dangerous, or too shameful to claim; exile distorts whatever it holds, so those parts tend to return in frightening form. In both cases the work is in recognizing what is being shown. Filing it away as a strange experience leaves a powerful few hours that fade, with everything underneath as it was.

Real change begins with seeing where a person stands and accepting what is found there, and most people can only take that in sideways. So the medicine gets creative. Sometimes it brings the shadow forward in a form that is hard to face. Sometimes it arrives as something beautiful, even flattering, and the value lies in what that beauty reveals about our hidden desires. Either way, the medicine can be a trickster in the oldest sense: it tricks for our own good, so that we come to see ourselves as we are rather than as we imagine ourselves to be.

This is why a person's response tells as much as the vision does. What they feel as the image appears, fear, grief, relief, the thrill of being shown something flattering, points to what the vision came to evoke. It is also where the misreads happen. The person who recoiled from those grotesque beings can come out of ceremony convinced they were assaulted by dark forces, when what they met was an honest reflection. Someone else can take a flattering vision at its word when it was a desire wearing a disguise. That misread carries real weight. It can shape how a person understands the entire experience, and whether they are willing to continue the work at all.

What the medicine sets in motion carries on well after the ceremony ends, and it can take many shapes. Three of them are worth describing here, because they catch people by surprise and because they tend to follow one another. The first is a loss. Much of what falls away is a personality built around survival, patterns a person picked up because they worked, at some point, to get through something hard, along with the beliefs that grew up around those patterns. When they loosen, the skills that came with them loosen too, and for a while a person can struggle with things that used to be easy while a new way takes shape.

The second is what tends to fill that space: a felt, embodied sense of how vast a person and reality are. Nearly everyone touches this at some point in the work, and it is the part most people try to describe afterward and find words too small for. Its value shows later, in how much more freely a person moves through life once they have felt it. And sometimes the revelation itself is what lets a long-held contraction go, which is where the third comes in.

The third is the gift. The medicine can open abilities and talents that were out of reach before. These were held closed by a contraction, and there are many reasons a part of a person can seal off. One of the most common is an internal conflict, and as the incongruence beneath it resolves, the conflict releases and what it was holding becomes available for the first time: a capacity, a sensitivity, a new way of perceiving. It arrives raw, and having access to it and being skilled with it are two different things. A word here for those who come wanting to force their gifts open: what is opened before its time carries consequences of its own, and those tend to arrive on their own schedule. All three take time to move through.

All of it, the images, the trickery, what falls away and what opens, is the medicine speaking. There is a deeper symbolic language beneath it, and learning to read it directly is a longer road, one I reserve for my apprentices. For everyone else, the essential part is simpler: the medicine speaks in its own way, and what it shows is meant to be worked and lived. It can turn over the ground a person stands on and leave them rooted deeper than before, sometimes in the same ceremony, sometimes across many. It is a long way from pruning, and it asks something real of the person living through it.