The Medicine You're Meant To Carry
It's forged by your willingness to feel what most people spend their entire life avoiding
"The gold is in the dark. What we most want to avoid holds our deepest medicine." - Robert Johnson
Most people spend their entire lives running from what they're meant to feel.
You can see it in their eyes - that glazed-over look of someone who's checked out.
In their constant scrolling.
In their perfectly curated feeds about 'doing the work' while carefully avoiding any real descent into their depths.
I know this dance because I spent years perfecting it.
But here's what nobody tells you about the medicine you're meant to carry: it's forged in the exact place you're afraid to look.
In the wounds you're desperately trying to regulate away.
In the darkness that terrifies you.
The Dam
Our uninitiated culture doesn't understand soul emergence. We mistake the journey into depths for psychological crisis.
And yes - it is a crisis.
But not one you can medicate or regulate away.
When our soul starts rattling its cage, we're told to repress it, not listen.
Pop a pill. Get back to work. Stay productive.
But these aren't symptoms to suppress - they're calls to wake the fuck up.
It's like locking a 300-pound gorilla in a cage and refusing to feed it. It gets louder. It rattles harder.
It beats its chest demanding to be seen.
Everyone's walking around with this gorilla in their body, pretending it doesn't exist, feeling a terrifying inner chaos that they have no idea what to do about.
And so we build our walls higher. Dam our rivers deeper. Try anything to keep the pressure contained.
The Pressure
The cure for the pain is in the pain.
- Rumi
Life took me through the fucking ringer these past couple years.
I hit rock bottom - the kind where you wake up to $27 in your bank account two thousand miles from home, with no idea what comes next.
Immigration hell had me trapped in the US for three years, unable to even travel back to Canada while family members and close friends died. One after another. No goodbyes. No closure.
Then someone tried to destroy my reputation, spreading lies about me to hundreds of thousands of people. Relationships I'd built over years crumbled overnight. Some still haven't recovered.
Every time I thought "this can't get worse" - it did.
When the pressure builds, we do what we're taught.
I did what most people do when life gets too real. I numbed the fuck out.
Edibles. Video games. Scotch. Porn. Doom scrolling.
I turned to anything that could dull the constant dread, sorrow, and grief running through my veins. It felt like too much to hold. Too much to be with.
From the outside, no one would know.
I was still building a multi-six figure business with my partners (though running big retreats and splitting profits four ways doesn't leave much take-home).
Still working out. Still traveling. Still showing up like everything was fine.
But inside? I was dying, and in complete denial about the depths of my grief.
The pressure always finds a way to build. No matter how well we think we've contained it.
The Breaking
"If it keeps on raining, levee's going to break" - Memphis Minnie
After a few years of this insanity, watching my hair go grey week by week, I finally cracked.
I found myself collapsed on the floor for days, just fucking howling.
There were such deep waves of grief moving through my body it felt like my guts were being rung out.
Purging.
Absolutely losing my shit.
The kind of breakdown that would have "normal" people calling mental health professionals.
But here's what nobody tells you about breaking open:
This wasn't just releasing the past few years of stored angst, grief, and rage.
This was decades of pain and sorrow I'd expertly packed away.
Years of calcifying myself into numbness, finally breaking open.
Most people hit this point - when the old strategies of hiding and numbing stop working.
And most do what our broken culture has taught them— they find new ways to cope.
They'll go to their drug-dealing doctor and get a diagnosis to affirm their brokenness. This diagnosis conveniently pairs with a brand-new pharmaceutical (complete with a laundry-list of soul-numbing side effects).
Or they'll blow up their life in some dramatic way to temporarily relieve the pressure, like quitting their job or leaving their marriage, only to realize changing your surroundings never profoundly shifts your inner landscape.
But there's another way.
Rivers are not meant to be dammed.
Nor are we. The twists and turns of our lives are not meant to be straightened out.
The Flow
Last week I was on a call with a client who was feeling an immense amount of tension in his solar plexus region.
I took him through a short practice of getting into his body, then we spent about 10-15 minutes exploring the feeling in this region of his body.
We didn't do anything special. There was no trying to make it go away. There was no special breath practice or energy clearing thing.
I just had him get in touch with this sensation, then tune into the first time he ever felt this feeling.
He regressed all the way back to when he was about two years old and felt the first real experience of not feeling loved.
As he stayed with this sensation in his body and tracked it, it began to bring a flood of emotion and energy throughout his being.
By the end of our session, his entire body had been cracked open. Numerous profound realizations about how he had spent his whole life vying for love.
He tapped into his partner's experience of feeling unloved and had an overwhelming sense of compassion for her. He realized how he could show up better for her as a man.
In a world of curated crying posts and performative breakdowns, real transformation looks nothing like what you see online.
You'll know you're actually touching the depths when everything you once preached about healing starts to sound like complete bullshit.
When all your fancy spiritual concepts and self-help frameworks crumble like paper in the rain.
The process won't fit into a cute Instagram post.
You won't be documenting your journey because you'll be too busy living it - sometimes face down on the floor, making sounds you didn't know could come from a human body.
Your "conscious" friends might stop inviting you places. Your unfiltered truth makes them uncomfortable. You've stopped trying to package your pain into ‘mindset reframes.
Stopped pretending every breakdown leads to an immediate breakthrough.
Instead of becoming more "elevated," you're letting yourself completely unravel. And for the first time, it doesn't feel like something to fix.
The Medicine
This is where the real medicine begins to emerge. Not in the carefully curated "healing journey," but in the mess and chaos of genuine transformation.
Here’s what I’ve been noticing in the murky depths of my own descent:
You start noticing the subtle ways your body speaks. That knot in your gut isn't something to breathe away - it's a doorway. That rage isn't something to regulate - it's showing you where you've abandoned yourself.
Most people want to overcomplicate how to feel.
They think they need thousand-dollar retreats or buckets of ayahuasca to access their depths.
But 99% of the time, the medicine is in simply staying with what's arising. No fancy techniques. No spiritual bypass.
It's letting yourself feel the grief fully when it comes. Letting the tears fall without trying to understand them. Letting the rage move without trying to justify it.
This isn't about indulging in your emotions, but rather staying present while everything moves through you.
Like sitting on the riverbank, watching the water flow, without trying to direct its course.
The medicine reveals herself in layers: First in your body - your breath deepens, your jaw unclenches, that constant scanning for threat begins to quiet.
Then in your presence - you can sit in silence without needing to fill it.
You can hold space for others' pain because you've held your own.
Finally in your way of being - you start speaking truths you've never dared to voice.
Creating your life from a place that feels ancient and new at the same time.
Your medicine isn't found in escaping the depths. It's forged in your willingness to feel everything you've spent a lifetime avoiding.
In a world obsessed with spiritual ascent and evolution, true medicine is rare.
It isn’t cosmic. There are no angels or bright lights.
It’s a dark and terrifying abyss. It’s cold and damp like the soil, rocks, and minerals that make up everything we are.
Few will venture here, but those who do become the medicine carriers the world desperately needs.
The invitation is simple.
Stop running. Stop numbing. Stop pretending.
Your medicine - your unique gift to this dying world - is waiting on the other side of your willingness to go to the depths of the very thing you believe with every fiber of your being is going to destroy you completely.
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PPS: I just opened the doors to the Deep Life Lab— a place where soulful visionaries can learn how to take their writing and make a living making a positive impact in the world. Invites are made privately to people on my email list:
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