Episode 32: Finding Your Medicine

The Heart of the Conversation: Redefining Medicine

The core of this episode is a shift in perspective regarding what "medicine" actually is. Rather than viewing it strictly as pharmaceutical pills or clinical practices, the conversation centers on medicine as a holistic, spiritual, and metaphysical practice. It is defined as anything that restores balance and harmony within a person’s energetic field and reconnects the mind, body, and spirit.

The Transmission: The Mechanics of Healing

Elisha shares several key insights on how we can identify and utilize these non-material medicines:

• The Safety Barometer: True medicine is identified by how it makes you feel internally; it should bring your nervous system into a state of safety and coherence.
• Neuroplasticity and "Pathways": Healing involves carving out new neural pathways—much like treading a new path in a forest—through intentional practice and repetition.
• Somatic Release: The body (the soma) carries wisdom and can "clear" trapped trauma or emotions through specific physical movements and breathwork.
• The Frequency of Being: Once you find your own internal peace, you naturally hold a specific frequency that can act as medicine for others just by being present.

The Invitation: Becoming an Experiencer

Elisha concludes with a call to action for the listeners:

• Try the "Weird" Thing: She encourages listeners to be "experimenters" and say yes to new workshops or experiences, even if they feel a bit "on the fence".
• Consult Your Inner Child: Look back at what you loved to do for play as a child to rediscover what sparks your vitality and makes you feel alive.
• Audit Your Senses: Use your five senses to find the "decadence" in life and identify which sounds, sights, or touches bring you a sense of relief and joy.

Time Stamps:

00:00 Introduction

00:01 Broad Medicine Definition

00:02 Spiritual & Holistic Medicine

00:03 Non-Traditional Medicine Examples

00:05 Host's Experience & Experimentation

00:08 How to Identify Your Medicine

00:09 Medicine Changes Over Time

00:11 Healing Emotions & Brain Pathways

00:13 Inner Child & Play as Medicine

00:14 Sensory Exploration for Healing

00:16 Being Medicine for Others

00:19 Transforming Challenges into Wisdom

Link to Transcript of Show:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vJMCGuleckCyejb1Im9JHgFgeAddLWge/view?usp=sharing

Apply to be on the Show:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdo3jzeiCYLsDQMnfZbar8GlhJOjWGAFLtMlsZI2L8XwZ_IMw/viewform?usp=sharing

Find Elisha Elsewhere on the web:

https://linktr.ee/elishalightangel

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So I'm talking about medicine on a much broader term, medicine that can feed your soul, heal your heart, help you mend emotions, help you transform who you are into who you are becoming. Hello and welcome to That's Just Human, a podcast that explores all aspects of being human, living in a human body, and dealing with life's obstacles. I am your host, Elisha Light Angel. By day I'm a massage therapist. Right now, I'm a podcaster, and like you, I live in a human body and have a plethora of human experiences, and this is the place where we get to talk about my experiences, other people's experiences, and life in general. So today I am doing a solo episode and I picked a topic that is fun for me and something I've really learned a lot about on my life journey. And the concept has really taken some time to be integrated, to sink in, because making a mind shift around the way we think about a concept can take time. So what am I talking about today? Medicine. What is the first thing that is conjured in your brain when I say the word medicine? I know for me, and you know, doing a little bit of my note-taking and thinking about this podcast, I thought the first thing might be your standardized medicine. Like you go to the pharmacy and you pick up some pills, and that's your medicine. But then I decided to consult Google and it let me know that medicine is actually considered like the whole practice of what doctors do off from everything from diagnosis to giving different kinds of medications or even suggesting lifestyle changes, is all encompassed under that term medicine. So it isn't specifically like pills or one thing only, it's quite a broad spectrum. So even with the terminology that's given to us. Um I'm talking about medicine on a much broader term, medicine that can feed your soul, heal your heart, help you mend emotions, help you transform who you are into who you are becoming. So this is what I would kind of consider more like spiritual medicine. In metaphysical terms, we can understand medicine as a practice that is aiming to restore balance and harmony harmony within a person's energetic field. It can be viewed as a connection between the physical body, the mind, the spirit, and it can go beyond treating just the physical symptoms and address like deeper imbalances that might contribute to some of those physical symptoms deeper on a spiritual level. Basically, it's about facilitating a healing on an entirely holistic and non-material plane. So that's the kind of medicine that I'm wanting to dive into today. So, what then can medicine be if it's not what we know as the standard go-to-the-pharmacy, even over-the-counter meds or supplements, beyond just this physical ingestion of something? So, medicine can be all sorts of different things. Medicine is gonna be what feeds you, it's going to be what brings your nervous system into feeling a sense of safety. Even if it's only during the time that you're experiencing whatever the medicine is for you, that's gonna be a gauge on how do I feel about this. So I'm thinking about things, um, dance could be medicine, singing or chanting, using your voice somehow, uh, anything physical. So you could be running, working out, hiking, bike riding, um, any kind of workout that one enjoys can be medicine. It's it is also a physical medicine, but it's a medicine that can go deeper because it allows you to be able to process emotions out of the body, out of the nervous system, to come into a place in coherence and harmony with yourself because of what you're doing physically. Medicine could be art. It could be delving into the art, it could be surrounding yourself with art. Medicine could be going out into the forest. And, you know, they have this term forest bathing. Basically, you're just sitting in the forest and soaking up the foresty vibes from the trees and the birds and whatever other animals and elements are present in that moment, but getting back to nature, sticking your feet on the ground for grounding purposes, barefoot, that can be medicine. So, this is by all means not an extensive list of what medicine can be. These are just some examples. So, in my experience, I was on the spiritual journey, and I just said yes to this, yes to that, yes, that kind of sounds cool. Oh, that's weird. Let's go do that thing. Um, that's kind of my personality. I'm an experiencer, experimenter. I enjoy anything that I have never tried before, even if I don't know what I'm walking into. As a result, I received medicine and healing in spaces that I never would have thought prior to going to do, say, a workshop that I got invited to, um weekend camp out that was transformational. There's just these little things, and sometimes they're moments and sometimes they're a little bit more drawn out, but every single one offered me a medicine, something different that allowed me to learn more about myself, to learn more about the world around me, to integrate something new and healing, to rewire some of the pathways in my brain to working on becoming a new version of me. That's how I can give you a relatable experience within my own life. For me, I experience qigong as medicine, I experience dance and breath work, uh, those are some really big medicines for me. Currently, I'm in a phase of yoga as a medicine for not just my spirit but my body, and it's very encompassing, and um it's just different things. So I would encourage you to go out and experience something, or if you hear about a workshop and maybe you're a little on the fence, try it anyway. This is where you're gonna get into gauging. If you don't go and experience anything, then you're not gonna know if it works for you or not, or if you like it, or if you don't, because you literally just don't know because you have nothing to compare it to. Um do you already have something that you can get lost in? Do you already have that thing that you feel completely safe when you're in that space? When all of your guards are down, when time disappears, this could be an indication that this is a good medicine for you. Everything goes back to becoming more and more in touch with how you feel internally, how you are experiencing the world. And when you learn how to tap in and recognize the wisdom of your body, because our body does carry so much wisdom, it's talking to us all the time, it's helping us on this intuitive level to be able to navigate life, and by tapping into that, you are able to better live your life, and you're able to overcome more obstacles. It's really amazing. You want to find something that just like makes all of your cells vibrate with a sigh, just like a sigh of relief, a sigh of this is it. Here's the thing though, your medicine can change. So you're not eating one food all the time, right? And this is the only food that you ever eat for your whole life ever. Like you wouldn't get enough nutrition. Well, I think with medicine and different things that we experience in life, it's the same thing. You can have a lot of one thing, and it can be your go-to, but there's still a variety. And at different points in your life, you will experience different ups and downs, and depending on the space that you're in, the season that you're in, is going to depend on the type of medicine that you're going to need, the type of medicine that's going to go in there and restore your being into the best coherence and resonant harmony that can possibly be. So finding that is always going to be a matter of tweaking what you know, trying something maybe a little new or different, and seeing what happens. But always going back to your own barometer of if it makes you feel good and safe. I think some medicines, I won't say they're necessarily make you feel good. When we're healing from trauma and pain from the past, it does come up. It hurts. Like it was there, it was already hurting you, and you were acting from a place of patterning and safety to constantly keep yourself from having to experience that pain again. So, why would you want to willingly walk into a situation that's gonna make you have to relive that pain and that trauma? There's lots of modalities that allow you to move through that so that you can clear it. You can clear it out of your body with different types of somatic movement, soma being in the body, so movement specifically, and when you have an attention and a focus going in, it will help move things more. And there are very specific movements that people have figured out that help to move emotions out of the body easier than other movements, and there are breath work and different different things that help. There's a lot out there that you can experience to move this. There's things that are stuck in your brain, so you can rewire your neural pathways because we are neuroplastic, meaning that everything's constantly always changing. Like even our thought patterns can shift how we're thinking. So in our brain, the thought is going to take the easiest path. Think of it if you want to give it a physical term, like in a path in a forest or something, if there's one that a lot of people have taken, it's clear there's not a lot of brush, there's not a lot of rocks, it's very easy for you to walk. But if there's, say, a more other way that you can get to the same place, but people haven't really treaded that, it's it's got sticks everywhere, you might have to move some logs that have fallen from trees, there's a lot more obstacles. So think of your brain as if it was a forest full of little paths, and some of them are already carved out, easy to go, and uh that's how everything's flowing. But you have the ability to carve out new pathways, and then you have to practice utilizing those pathways until it's eventually become a clear path. That's my best analogy that I can currently think of to give you on how the neuroplasticity works within the brain. Something else you can do to figure out what might be a good medicine or what might put you in that safe space is think about your inner child. Think about the little version of you as far back as you can remember. You know, what did you do as a kid? What was it that you did for play that you would just get lost in, where your parents would have to pull you out of it or be like, hey, come back. Um, you know, was it playing with some of your toys? Was it playing in the mud, going outside? Maybe it was kicking a ball around, spending time in a little kitty swimming pool. Reimagine the ways that you can bring that back in. The last solo episode I did was all about play. That's all about like bringing your inner child into adulthood. So even that can be something in finding your medicine that's gonna work for you. It's gonna restore your vitality, restore your passion, help you remember what it is that makes you spark so you feel alive, right? Because we want to spark, we want to feel alive, we want to feel like life is enjoyable. Because what's the point if everything's just bogging us down a hundred percent of the time? Man, I mean, I've definitely had a lot of those moments in life, and it is not fun. Um so anything that I can do to pull myself out of that space, especially when I have control over where my brain is. I have control over how I'm responding to something, even if I don't have control of a bunch of external factors. What goes on in my own internal world, how I find my own internal peace, is a hundred percent completely up to me. So you can do things to bring in your five senses. So you have your taste, smell, touch, sight, and sound. With those five senses, you can try and figure out if there's anything that you gravitate to more. Obviously, there is, you know which one it is, and find the decadence in that. Um experience things, maybe it's sound. There's a lot of different sounds, so you can um play sound frequencies, you can go to concerts, you could go to sound baths, you could have somebody just around you playing instruments. You could play an instrument, you could be singing, sound, voice, all of that is just one of the senses that can be utilized to find the medicine. Visually, what do you see? What do you find beautiful? What is it that invokes a smile, a hint of joy, something that transforms you or speaks to you on this deep, deep level. These are all different things when you have had the opportunity to get to experience medicine in different forms or finding your own medicine, then you become a wisdom holder. And sometimes you become the medicine for somebody else. So we are looking for medicine, but sometimes we're other people's medicine, not intentionally, but sometimes say a teacher could be somebody that is delivering medicine to people, a teacher of a workshop, a yoga, a breath instruction, um, something transformational, all of those could be more of an intentional medicine that's being given. But think about times where you've been in a conversation with somebody and it's just flowing, both of you are going going, and you say something, and they say, Oh my gosh, that's the exact thing I needed to hear at this time. When those moments happen, you're becoming the medicine for somebody else. When you find your peace and you can walk into a room in a peaceful or a joyful state, you become the medicine for the people around you because you're able to hold a frequency of peace, to hold a frequency of joy, and you can help attune other people and bring them into that space with you. So simply being, once you've learned how to achieve a certain frequency, allows you to become the medicine for people and the space around you. It's really kind of cool when you start to wrap your mind about how many situations in life we come across that we get to be the medicine. Or the fact that maybe you went through a bunch of shit in your life, right? Like life is throwing some stuff at us, and we gotta be dodging or you know, having a tennis racket, flipping it back, or we're getting hit with it, right? So there's a lot of stuff that we have to navigate, and once you have learned a lot more, you can help others. So we can always take our crappy situations and utilize them for something good, for something better in the future, and maybe the crappy situation that you went through is the exact thing that you're going to be helping other people through because you learned how to navigate it, and now you're their medicine. Like, how cool is that? It wasn't cool going through the situation, it was crap, but you got through it, and now you're on the other side, right? And that's what we're trying to do. We're just trying to get to the other side, so we're always looking for our medicine that's gonna get us to the other side of wherever it is we are right now. So that is my little spiel on medicine and tape. Uh, if you have any comments on it, please feel free to leave them in the YouTube comments, and I'm happy to respond to it. What is your medicine? What is something that you really cling to or have found in your life that works really well for you? Um, have you found yourself in situations where you're being the medicine for somebody else? Let me know. You can also leave me five stars on Spotify, you can leave me five stars on Apple iTunes with a nice little review, and that helps get me out to more listeners. So if people enjoy what I'm talking about, they get to hear it too. And as you embrace your humanness, be kind, be you, and remember everything is part of the journey.