Life as medicine
There's a line from the Zen master Yunmen:
'Medicine and sickness subdue each other. The whole earth is medicine.'
I came to it through Michael Stone's teacher, Pat Enkyo O'Hara, who built a whole talk around it. It changed how I approach both life and readings.
Everything that happens to us can be read as an invitation to grow. Each experience holds the specific medicine we need for that moment — not a generic lesson, but the one we're actually here to learn. The medicine and the training are the same thing. The thing that breaks you open is the thing that makes space.
It’s something I’ve been taught directly from spirit so I have inherent trust in it, but whether it’s actually ‘true’ or not is less important than the practical fact that this is the mindset that makes a life truly ours and a reading effective.
The confusing text message from your ex, the feeling like you need to leave your job but you don’t know what to do about it, the health niggles that keep you tossing and turning in the night — all an offering of love and an invitation to acknowledge, to feel, to grow and evolve. You don't need a reading to do this. You just need to stay with the feeling long enough to hear what it's saying, instead of reaching for the phone or the distraction.
Behind each of these situations is an energetic force of some kind. Dion Fortune, in The Mystical Qabalah, recalls an adept telling her: 'If you want to know what God is, I can tell you in one word: God is pressure.' The way life works — the scenarios that present themselves, the responses they elicit — is a pressure system. Much like weather.
The power of a reading is it gives us access to understanding what these energies are, and what they’re trying to do. It gives you the wider context around what's going on so you can see how you're being asked to learn, heal, or shift. Sometimes it's stern or direct if you're off track. But it always feels loving. It all works like a training ground. The difference in a reading is that you get to talk to the course designers. Which means you can master the lesson faster, with less pain and less drama.
