Existential Exploration

What Is Medicine, Anyway?

As a Doctor of Chinese Medicine and sober coach, my answer might surprise you.

Medicine arrives in many forms, often in unexpected people, places, practices, and choices.

In whatever form, Medicine encompasses all that offers moments of hope, faith, and clarity amidst darkness and despair. All that helps us find our way back to ourselves and into something bigger.

Often, Medicine is sourced from wounds themselves. Often, there’s no other way to receive it.

Sometimes it requires impaling yourself — on other people, things, places, beliefs. Sometimes, all it takes is asking. Or listening.

Medicine is part of a Yin-Yang whole and part of a whole we share with others. It is a pursuit, a partaking, and most of all an exchange. It requires receptivity, responsibility, and most of all movement.

Ever changing, ever in flux. This is the way of water and life. This is the way of healing.

Showing up. Opening to what is and what isn’t. Allowing the world here and beyond to move through. Allowing self and soul to be and become.

Doing and undoing. Space…and spaciousness.

Surrender and sovereignty

We begin with a Yin-Yang whole. We begin with surrender then sovereignty then back to surrender again.

Nothing finishes here. Nothing is separate and nothing linear. All circular. All To Be Continued.

By surrender, I mean to Nature, the Universe, to our very human-ness and our very being-ness.

I mean surrendering to the truth of what we know but are afraid to admit. Also relinquishing the notion that we know anything, anything at all.

Easing our death grip on opinions and imagined rightness, we admit we are out of control to make space for what’s within and what’s beyond. We open to stars and worlds and spirits.

All here. All immediate. All real.

This is the Yin part — surrender and receptivity in ways large and small. On a healing path, it can look thusly:

• Asking for and receiving help from sources known and unknown.
• Being really honest — most of all, to ourselves.
• Choosing discomfort when discomfort is expansive.
• Getting sober from anything that has us hooked — alcohol and other drugs, overeating or under-eating, over-consuming, shopping, scrolling, distraction, beliefs, stories, identities, unhelpful relationships and unhelpful ways of being in relationship with Nature, others, and ourselves.

What is connecting in the sense of true intimacy with self, others, Source? What is not that? What is disconnecting?

The disconnectors hold the hook. The disconnectors keep us from our fullest, most whole expression. They are a loss and a violence.

To ourselves, to other beings, to the body and Earth we call home.

Surrender is often frightening at first. Naming what has us hooked and where we are hiding takes courage.

Leaving behind what doesn’t serve and isn’t loving, skillful, or connecting is painful and sometimes seems impossible.

It’s not impossible — just scary, just uncomfortable.

Doing it anyway is part of the deal. Doing it anyway is part of the Medicine.

Here I am. Naked and raw and before you in all my human-ness and all my being-ness. Imperfectly perfect. Broken and in that brokenness beautifully whole.

This is where Medicine begins. This is where we begin. In this place of stillness, wholeness, truth, listening, connection.

Then comes the Yang part. For now, let’s call it sovereignty. It’s not separate from surrender — they share the same root and define one another within a singular whole.

Round and round they go and we go, Yin transforming into Yang and back again. An un-ended dance of precisely complementary opposites. Each essential to the other and containing the seed of the other.

Polarity housing infinite possibility. Polarity engendering harmony rather than division.

Declaring sovereignty is not saying we’re in charge. We are nothing of the sort. But similar to Inheritance, Medicine is neither passive nor something simply given to us.

Receiving Medicine is an act of communion. By choosing to partake, we learn to inhabit a more complete expression of ourselves. We learn to come Home.

But first, we have to choose and we have to partake. Not once, but repeatedly. Each choice. Each step. Added up, making a life.

With each dose, we say No to the pull towards numbing out and staying asleep. We leave behind addictive patterns and cycles if only for an instant.

Every instant counts. Every moment of Medicine helps us wake up, come to, and commune with ourselves, with spirit, with others.

Which finds us at surrender again, completing the circle.

Others and self

The path of Medicine comes down to us, in the end. To our particular dance of Yin-Yang, surrender and sovereignty.

Will we choose courageously, or will we not?

Our answer won’t always be the same, and there’s no judgement in the question.

Sometimes, for ten thousand reasons, a person does not have the capacity. Sometimes, for ten thousand reasons, I do not have the capacity.

But I also see that, most times, the matter is less about capacity than willingness, commitment, and devotion.

Generally, we are capable of more than we imagine or let on (most of all, to ourselves). Generally, capability is not the issue.

Here too, no judgement (at least not from my higher self, though my human-ness at times has opinions).

So, us. Our willingness, capacity, devotion. Also, others. Because while we are our own main character, we are not alone in this story and we cannot do it alone.

The Medicine dance is one not just of Yin-Yang, surrender and sovereignty. It is one of self…and others.

There’s no separation, of course. Here again, we draw lines for the sake of shorthand, meaning making, and mustering something intelligible.

From there, we tease out the self. Tracing boundaries around our most obvious edges. Conjuring the crudest take on what we think we perceive.

We call this me. We call this I am. We erect our universe and envision all that orbits thusly. All around us. All around our prodigal Sun.

From this docking point, we witness and invade the worlds of others. Sometimes without notice. Sometimes with galactic explosion. Judging insistently and ruthlessly along the way.

Good. Bad. Neutral.

The smallness of I am appraising suchness. Always subject to change. Always up to I am’s point of view at the moment.

Generally, Medicine requires deconstructing this story. Generally, Medicine requires investigating and exposing the self even as we learn to let go of I am, us-them-ness.

There’s the inner-outer work of searching, learning to stay with the hard parts, learning to imagine something different, learning to un-imagine the self we thought we knew.

Of finding the courage to relinquish parts of ourselves, our world, our cherished identity — most especially, perhaps, the identity of victim.

In so doing, we change I am and we change how our orbit pushes and pulls the orbits of others. In so doing, we dare the radical undoing of old agreements and rejection of prefab stories.

We step out of old, tired cycles and into something original. Changing the warp and weft of karma. Changing the course of things.

From here — from a place of imagination and imagining something different — resistance to Medicine falls away.

Possibility and wonder flourish. Hope and faith have a chance.

Even if you have to fake it. Even if you have to imagine feeling something before it’s arrived.

All manner of support will arise to help you in this state. Known and unknown. Seen and unseen.

Healers, guides, teachers. Connections. Strangers no longer strangers. Ancestors. Other beings. Nature. The Universe. All that we try to name and all that we cannot name.

This is Medicine not just to ourselves, but to anyone else along our path. Loved ones. Those we believe we hate. Those we pass in darkness but do not know.

By showing up fully and honestly, by taking responsibility and being more responsive, more listening, more in practice, we give a great gift to the world. Perhaps, the greatest one.

Which finds us with others again, completing the circle. Completing the whole.

Thank you for reading. I’m a doctor of Chinese Medicine and write about sobriety and soulful living. Find all my links here: