We in the modern West most often think of medicine as either something given to us or done to us by a medical professional. In a nutshell, pills or procedures. But in many traditions across space and time, there has been a deep and intimate knowledge of the primary and essential place that the fulfillment of your soul’s expression has on your physical health and well-being.

On the whole, we are soul-starved and instinct-injured,* leaving us disconnected from our gifts and our reasons for being here. We squander our days recklessly, filling them with busyness, stress, worry and addiction. So long as we remain a stranger to our unique contributions to life, our bodies will always suffer in one way or another as we effort in vain to fill the void of an unexpressed life with food, shopping, screen time, alcohol, anxiety, and on and on it goes.

What would it look like “to live as if life depended on the gifts we try to hide?”** To come to the knowing that all of life is depending on you bringing forward what you came here to do. Can you imagine the power and the healing that would course through your life if it was charged with meaning and purpose? Would not the expression of your gifts negate the need for distraction and medication in all of its forms? Like a well healed scab, all of the ways you hide would begin to fall away. No effort involved. The new growth pushing off the old.

So, what is it that you love to do? What lights you up? What secret yearnings do you have buried deep within? These sensations point you in the direction of your purpose. What is one, simple, easy step you could take in that direction? Today. Pay no attention to the machinations of the mind when it starts in on the futility of doing this or of the need for it to be polished, perfect or a paycheck. What is it that you do (or want to do) that makes you feel most at home, most right, most in the flow? For you see, when we bring that level of expression into our life, our physical health will reflect that level of aliveness. Let that be your guide and let the power of this ancient medicine heal you and all of life.

* From Clarissa Pinkola-Estes The Women Who Run With Wolves

**From Climbing Poetry

We are a culture of the quick fix; we love a pill, we’re up for the procedure, and we want someone else to take responsibility for our health and make it better for us. And while in specific instances, pills and procedures can be helpful, even life-saving, these approaches have their downside; troublesome side effects, financial costs, and ineffectiveness at  addressing the root cause of the problem.

I would like to add another drawback; they are external to us and do not require us to look at how we are getting to where we are in terms of our imbalances. When I think of my own personal medicine, before I go to anything outside of me, I try and check in with the inside first. What I mean be the “inside” is an approach that includes taking into account bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions and the state of my spirit. There are traditions that hold that when something shows up in the body, it is the final outcome of imbalances that began in other areas of our lives. And on some level, we all know this to be true. Often when we look  back, we can see how the path we have been traveling on has gotten us to where we find ourselves today.

So, how do we begin? Do we possess any built-in medicines that would enliven the body and help us to slow down enough to notice the path we are on? We do, and it is called the breath. Oxygen is our single most important nutrient, without it we die in a matter of minutes. And while many of us survive based on how we are currently breathing, we are often far from thriving. The breath carries the life force for both body and spirit. Without a body breathing well we struggle to utilize glucose, the body’s energy source. We miss out on the purifying nature of oxygen which destroys viruses, parasites and fungi (Think pools that use oxygen to sanitize instead of chlorine). And our ability to know a clear mind and a deep connection to Spirit becomes muddled in our neglected and restricted breathing patterns.

Try this. Once a day, pause wherever you are and take five, slow, deep breaths. As you breathe in think; “Long, slow, deep, breath in” and as you breathe out, “Long, slow, deep, breath out.” Notice what you are feeling, thinking and experiencing in the body. Notice and shift something. Anything, even if it’s as seemingly insignificant as the hair tie that is too tight.

I have had the great and good fortune of working with a homeopath since my children were babies. One of the greatest suggestions she ever made to me was to keep a health journal on the kids. In this journal I would note things like how often and when they got sick, what kind of sick and what helped. Over time, patterns began to emerge. Armed with these observations, I was able to predict how things would go, which treatments were most effective and eventually the approaches that would help strengthen the systems that habitually seemed out of balance.

After a time, I began keeping a journal on myself. This journaling has formed the basis of my own Personal Medicine. “Personal”, as in pertaining to a particular person, me. And “Medicine” as in the art and science of preserving and restoring my own health. It is made up of observations, wonderings, connections, approaches, and it is unique to me. I find this to be a meaningful and effective way to approach health in a time when conventional medicine seems top heavy with bureaucrats, overburdened with red tape and chains of command and ineffective in its ability to get to the root cause of illness and suffering.

What resides at the heart of this approach is personal responsibility. Being accountable to the parts of your health that are within your power to control. No matter where we are on the path, each one of us already knows where we have abdicated personal responsibility in matters of health. Where’s yours?