How to Take Your Medicine
Harvesting the Fruits of Your Suffering
I did not need to go to the promised land. No, I only needed to live in my parent’s basement.
This might not be news to you, but it’s time that I came clean: I’m the kind of person who gets off on dramatizing my healing. I know. It’s very Wizard of Oz of me. But for me to really feel like I’ve gotten the bang for my healing buck, I want to know that I’ve gone as far as I can go on my spiritual journey. I want to feel hungover, wrung out, re-calibrated, blown open, melted, donezo. Tickled mercilessly by a million spirit fingers until I scream STOP.
Talk pantheon and moondrake to me. Say my name in a dead language.
Yes, I am that person whose home is decorated with a mélange of forest debris, IKEA, and actual Egyptian antiquities. It brings me obscene pleasure to spend a chunk of Uncle Sam’s change on an airplane ticket to a tiny mountain valley inhabited mostly by alpacas where I can partake in some dank toad medicine and battle my own duality.
My greatest joy is to hunt for the existential koans and subterranean treasures of lost maps and teachings scattered by the fetid winds of time. I get off on picking every lock I can find.
And, believe it or not, an average existence is just not going to do it for me. No matter how hard I try to do things like “have a career” and “find a nice dude to settle down with” I seem to prefer rolling in the deep. No, let me not shy away. I would actually not have it any other way. After all, I desire to expand like a tree throbbing with living history. Simmer me in the rich broth of a ritual unfolding gently. You will find me by the river listening for the language of her waters, wondering what message wishes to visit my net next.
I’m going to leave home again and again, each time returning a different person. You can call me by a name I received from ancient goat gods on a hilltop. I find great peace in wandering strange cities. I chase stories for goddamn centuries. Bored with obvious answers, I go hunting for more questions. When I feel stuck, I draw a trapdoor in the floor of my room, lift it up, and enter a portal that exits on the other side of nowhere.
I do partake in basic muggle things like Starbucks and leftovers and wiping my butt (I don’t have a bidet like Elon Musk) but let me be excruciatingly real: without some rowdy spiritual improv games to stay engaged, I’m just going to create some.
That, my friends, is a guarantee I can make good on.
•
I said that I did not need to go to the promised land, but I promise you I did. The trip was a lavish gift and I accepted it, to my pragmatic lawyer brother’s stern chagrin. He wanted to advise me and I know he meant well. It was March 2020, and Covid had just entered stage right. A bit worrisome as we were about to leave the country but the virus was still building steam, not yet officially stamped pandemic.
Of course it was risky. At the time, that was a valued aspect of my identity. But more honestly: when confronted with a set of possible extremes and choice points, I was much less willing to deal with the idea that I might not get to celebrate my birthday in the burial chamber of the great pyramid. And so we went to Egypt, my ex and I, because that is what you do when you have decided that life lived at the end of your sword makes you feel like a fucking warrior.
But let it be known: even before the plague arrived, I had caught whiff of some impending doom. I didn’t know what shape or form it held for me, only sensed the reverberation of a future shattering, like the echo before a scream or a wind-chime before a storm. My animal instincts tensed in anticipation of a climactic energy waiting in the wings, unknown and unseen until it stampeded over absolutely everything.
In the meantime — a pilgrimage will fix this weird feeling. I decided to outrun it.
Are the end times not terrifying? Maybe I believed that I could go and retrieve something from a magical place — such as a rare potion for eliminating unruly demons — that would save me from the promise of imminent pain.
•
Looking back, I think the thread really started to unravel before that, in fact right after the beginning of that year: the cusp of 2020. My ex and I had moved in together before the holidays, and I was having my doubts. Red flags abounded. I was experiencing regular nervous breakdowns. But I was determined to maintain my dream of making it big and so I shoved all my feelings into a bag and dropped it off a bridge in the dark of night. I wished to drown my persistent anxiety. I wanted to ride my maverick wave, even as it threatened to swallow me. I had shuttered my whole life in Los Angeles and followed the call to Northern California, hunting my urgency — but once I arrived nothing went right.
So when he surprised me with a vacation to the remote island of Dominica to attend a transformational retreat, I thought: Maybe this is the moment everything turns around. After all — didn’t I want to be treated like a queen? Did I not deserve to be shuttled to an exotic destination by a man who swore his undying love for me? To deny this opportunity would be to deny everything I stood for, what I had banked my future on: Exciting adventure! Transformational wizardry! A good story! Based on this checklist, my decision made itself clear.
Dominica was stunning: white sand and palm trees and chickens tottering down the beach. Our group had the run of a brand new resort situated on a remote part of the island. The transformational retreat we attended turned out to be mostly white men who were paid handsome amounts of money to sell fancy knives. Most of the women were wives. A former boys club turned all-inclusive leadership journey where we took turns announcing our wins into a microphone. In the mornings, we beat our lower dantian in tandem while the Chief Spiritual Officer of the organization explained how this practice would circulate our qi, our sacred life force.
Spirituality — but make it locker room.
The theme of the week hinged on blasting past your limiting beliefs. It was the dawn of 2020, and this year was all about seeing clearly. My secret competitive streak was determined not to be the loser left behind when everyone else claimed their vision and made it happen. Is this the year we make a million dollars? My ex asked me one day as we luxuriated at the swim-up bar. I did my best to not laugh in his face. I had precisely 500 bucks in my bank account. I had drained all my savings and couldn’t afford to get myself out of there on my own. The pressure to succeed infused everything. That ethos was the unspoken godhead. I really wanted to love the Kool-Aid because a million dollars at that time sounded nice, but it all felt a bit polluted by woke bro culture. The kind of mentality that encouraged endless scaling, constant expansion.
Although me and the men did agree on that value — the ceaseless drive to gobble up life — we had different paths to our ultimate destination. This crew paid 20k each for their week of transformation. Mine, on the other hand, was hard-earned in the dirt. My hardcore authenticity granted me a righteous throne where no one could touch me, where I remained pure and otherworldly. Or so I thought.
Until the end of the week, when one of the 20-something salesmen made it his quest to take me down a notch. That, or “wake me up.” He hadn’t registered on my radar up until then, although I vaguely recalled him receiving mad props on our spit-blasted microphone for sharing some stoic wisdom in another brother’s time of need. Whereas I…well I had made myself known amidst this tight knit group of dudes and their plus ones. At one of our last closing circles, I was the first woman to step into the center and speak. I wore a blue silk beach gown and a cheap tiara gifted to me in the women’s circle.
This was my thing, after all: to bring big energy.
Later on that evening, at a local barbecue, this man with the face of a Cub Scout insisted that I needed to speak with him. He seemed intent on having a deep conversation, yet avoided or dismissed all my questions. It was not clear what he wanted from our exchange but I sensed something amiss in the way a woman can with that kind of man: a sick feeling of tension, a desire to leave his presence. I looked for my ex, hoping to catch his eye and signal my intention to head back to the hotel. Now. But this man cornered me in order to deliver a final teaching from the gutters of Eden.
You are nothing. I am everything.
He said a few other horrible things, but this was the essence of his testament. He made sure I knew his ruling.
Later on that night, he found me again, when I was sitting alone on the silent dock still angry, flicking ash at the moon. He was with four other drunken men and they surrounded me, laughing, acting as though they were going to sit down with me and have a nice chat. The moon had warned me. I heard her speak as their loud steps thudded down the long swaying dock: The shadow of man passes over the face of the moon. I was terrified. It was icky. (They didn’t touch me. It didn’t matter.) I got out of there.
I kept running.
•
Back in Myspace times, I had the following Walt Whitman quote in my profile:
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
This sentence provided my future self with the promise of more salvation than any religious canon. The permission to be something — anything at all — even if one’s most iconic and revered ideologies must be sacrificed struck me as one of the most liberating commandments I could imagine. According to my early 20-something self, these were hallowed words and I wanted the right to live by them, even if I risked becoming a blasphemous hypocrite in other people’s myths.
I prefer to live and die by my own creed.
I do, however, abhor the idea of enslavement. My purity obsession isn’t rooted in the body but rather the mind, for I am all too familiar with how certain beliefs can corrupt. How they can disguise themselves as love. Perhaps that is the path of anyone who desires to be free: the decisions and deeds that test our commitment to the truth.
This seems to be mine, at least.
But for someone who was so determined to exist outside of a binding rulebook for how to be, I was also falling prey to an insidious game, one so widely endorsed yet simultaneously denied in our culture: I was not taking responsibility. I was running from one exciting adventure to the next and had been for months. Under the surface of my own thoughts, I was caught up in the idea that I could attend an experience and be done with it, tie my healing up with a bow, make it pretty, then move onto my blinding success. These kinds of retreats, however lovely, still provided me with an ideal excuse: entertaining distraction that made it easy for me to pretend that real work was being done behind the scenes. Although the reality I couldn’t face was still dragging behind me like a limp leg.
Which brings me back to my personal missionary on the beach.
He-whose-name-won’t-be-spoken. He who assigned himself as my cruel guru, lest I miss out on the ultimate opportunity to get my life, but in a way I never expected. I won’t joke about the truth — this man was threatening in a way I couldn’t directly name, and I left feeling unsettled and shook to the bone. But beyond the rancid taste it left in my mouth, past the immediate and pervasive sense of danger I felt from a total stranger, there was a disturbing question that I couldn’t answer. It lingered at the back of my head like a hot burp for two years.
Why me?
•
When you live in a drive-thru culture of immediate gratification, it becomes harder to appreciate what happens slowly over great spans of time. As someone who spent 32 months in the cosmic washing machine, I asked that question constantly. I was desperate for an answer. All the big, fun, shiny adventures tumbled out of my world, and what I was left with (based on my old self-perception) was frankly depressing.
Dominica was just the beginning of a crushing spiral that didn’t stop.
Two months later, when we went to Egypt, I still felt like a ship run adrift. I was floating in my relationship, untethered in my life, unable to root anywhere that felt real for long. Only now I felt like I had more to lose if I lost even these things — my lover, my cool home in California, this vision I had worked so hard to cultivate and tend that had become my living gospel.
In the double decade stretch between my first romance with Walt Whitman (short, stormy, iconic) and my two-week pilgrimage to Egypt, life continued to deliver a spicy teaching that never failed to humble me when I got too big for my britches.
For you see: regardless of what I stand for, one day I will stand on the other side.
Does this make me exciting or — as my ex would say — untrustable? I can’t tell and by now, I don’t think I care. Regardless of how others perceive my being, I find that embracing opposites has taught me far more than running to the extreme of either end of the spectrum. And if you don’t know by now: I fucking love my extremes.
I have learned in this time to anticipate the shadow side of every desire. Eventually, each desire will show me another face. I know sooner or later I will encounter the dark contrast to my joy and pleasure. If I am at the top of my wave one morning I might be at the bottom by the end of the day.
Contrast is an essential paradox.
•
I will spare you the boring details of all that has befallen me. Now I know not to get wrapped up in the story, for then I risk losing the real thread.
And the real truth is this: I ran for as long as I could. Then one day, near the end of this summer, the wave crashed over me, dragging me down to the bottom. My life had been undergoing a grand stripping, but then suddenly, in a matter of what felt like seconds, so many of the things that had propped up the last shriveled ideas of myself — my cracking husk — were removed.
But it is not the things that matter. It is our relationship to them.
This teaching keeps finding me. And what that tells me is that I got lost in the human game. I forgot myself for a minute there. Three years, to be exact. Or maybe the opposite perspective can do Past Kat one better: It took me that long to get to the root of a belief that was limiting my way of being.
Healing is a spiral like that. And if I turn away from the opportunity to learn my own underbelly and love it good, then y’all, the joke is on me. I notice now how so much of my suffering was rooted in my own rigidity to shifting. I went everywhere trying to prove otherwise. I went to Dominica to try on some superiority and spiritual vastness. I went to Egypt a thirsty beggar, wanting some ancient god to relieve me of my suffering.
I was still looking outside of myself for answers.
•
I carry a particular medicine that I will tell you about now. In my lineage, it is referred to as cosmic justice — lightning medicine. When this particular message came out in the first divination I ever had with my teacher Mark, he laughed out loud. He said that there were a few things I should know, if I didn’t already.
And proceeded to tell me many things I knew about myself but didn’t like to admit out loud. That I carried a lot of anger, that I probably struggled with righteousness. That I felt misunderstood by others much of the time. That I operated from a moral compass that was more wild feral nature than rational human logic. That I had a lot of integrity — and this piece, in particular, was the key.
I nodded yes to all these things.
You’re being put on notice, he said. From here forth, if you act out of integrity, you will get corrected. It won’t be pretty, he added. It is not an easy medicine to carry.
It was the fall of 2019. I was at the very beginning of this journey, curious as to what this medicine might do for me.
•
I look back at the debris now and have the eyes to see how I prolonged my own suffering. Grief is a normal emotion for the stripping I endured, for what was cleaved from my world. Or as David Foster Wallace once said: Everything I’ve ever let go of in my life has claw marks on it.
Maybe now, facing forward, I can spare myself that pain.
But here is the great joke of it all: sparing the pain is not the point. If the center touches all sides of the circle, then the truth is that too: inclusive of everything, especially the opposite, regardless of where I think I stand or what I think I want or worse, what I believe I deserve. It’s funny how it works, and at the bottom of every example is a truth that defies human logic. These are my favorite kinds of teachings.
Because life has been instructing me to touch all of it, to love it equally. Therein the real gift lives.
I am not a master in this practice. Far from it. But how beautiful — what an unexpected salvation — to look back at this moment in time and see the glimmering pearl inside the judgment hurled forth from this man on the beach: the reflection of my shadow belief mirrored back. The ball and chain I’d been dragging around. For all my clever resistance and self-righteousness around how I wanted the solution to look, he certainly threw open a door that I had prayed for. My revelation arrived in the mouth of a dark jester. I give it up to the universe, who used this man as a tool for influence beyond his comprehension. His words and actions were not loving. I don’t know what he intended. Nonetheless, his sword was never so dangerous as the insidious, invisible bindings of my limiting beliefs, my self-made prison. Bless him for exposing it so ruthlessly. This devilish, divine lightning strike shone on the slimy bedrock of my primal blindness. What a good lil Judas. What a good lil Buddha.
You are nothing.
How hilarious that the same teaching can take us in opposite directions.
•
How far have I run from my fear? To the ends of the earth and back, only to wind up in my parent’s basement. To finally sit with the truth of what I created in order to integrate the most sublime lesson.
And I’m glad for all of it. I’m glad I visited the sacred tombs of the kings who walked before me, who were just as afraid to go away that they constructed a temple around their own graves. Maybe I will do the same.
But perhaps I will choose a different path. Because now that I am no longer calibrated in opposition to my hidden fear, I have lost my desire to outrun its shadow. I am no longer fueled by the need to maintain an elaborate palace around my most precious, festering wound. The gods have not forsaken me, as I thought, not in the least. Rather they delivered on their prophecy. They removed everything that was in the way so that I could finally encounter this place in me — this place I sought so desperately to escape. And now that I have touched the source of this pain, I no longer fear its presence, its heavy weight.
And me?
Well if I am to teach, then I must be ready to take my own medicine. That is what the lightning path has shown. Let it be known: awakening is a treacherous passage.
But finally, FINALLY, I let that almighty mouth chew through the sludge of my stories, my hot messes, my most sacred defenses. I allowed the brutal truth to slice me open. The most loving sword is precise, clean. Why me? I invoked this chain of events. I — the one who prayed to see myself. I claim my temper tantrum. I confess it all now, in the sanctuary I made to witness me while I walked myself home. Part of me has died here and it is good. I lay that fear to rest now and I laugh at my old self, who thought being born again was a creepy Jesus thing.
Now we all know it was me.
It was me that called forth a headfuck of epic proportions because I love proving to myself that I can live at the edge. Meeting myself here has made me bigger, more immense. There is nothing wrong with loving that. And — I am enough to begin with.
As I am, always more, yes please times infinity.
The truth is, there is no awakening, no end to the pain, until you face yourself. And when you do, it will be a glorious death, a cosmic godsend.
That, my friends, is a fucking guarantee.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
