THE MEDICINE NOT TAKEN
Sometimes the most potent remedies are the hardest to swallow.
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There is a small forest of bottles on my counter, vintage amber and clear glass holding the promise of repair, relief, renewal. They sit like a tiny army of quiet companions, waiting for me to say yes. It’s never as easy as it seems, this handful of rescue that reminds my body of this necessary cure.
In these past months I have become intimately acquainted with the language of healing — the tinctures and teas, the protocols and pulses.
I have listened to the whispers of integrative doctors and the earnest urgings of practitioners who join me on this journey to thrive. Every day, three times a day, I ingest twenty-four pills, each capsule carrying a story of hope, a promise of restoration, a small act of faith that my body will respond.
These are my literal "hard pills to swallow," reminders of my ongoing willingness to meet this healing journey head-on.
The revelation wedged within the deeper story is that the most difficult pill to ingest isn’t the one in my hand. There is a different kind of prescription that calls to me. The quiet, unseen medicine that demands something harder than digesting of the belly but a surrendering of the will.
It asks for my radical honesty. It asks for my whole self to step into the light.
We carry these unopened bottles inside us. The invitations from God —
to forgive the person we vowed never to speak to again,
to change the “me” that we have grown used to even though our inaction stifles who we are, who we’re meant to become,
to walk out into the dawn and listen for the unnameable voice in the stillness,
to speak the thing that trembles on the edge of our tongue.
We know these prescriptions by heart. We feel them pulse in the center of our chest, or catch in our throat like an unspoken prayer.
And yet, we often set them aside because they require too much…Too much courage. Too much change. Too much becoming.
We reach instead for the mundane, the predictable, the easy swallow of a routine life. We choose to keep living half-ill rather than risk the wild medicine of transformation.
But there is a hidden kind of beauty that lives inside the hard moment — a luminous, uncut diamond that can only be revealed when we are willing to break open.
The beauty is not in avoiding the ache, but in leaning into it with our whole selves: body, mind, and spirit.
We have learned to nourish the body — we track steps, choose clean foods, count our supplements like rosary beads. We engage the mind — read the books, learn the frameworks, strategize our futures. But the spirit?
The spirit is so often left wandering in the far corners of our lives, uninvited to the table. It waits patiently to be called home, to be given its rightful place as guide and confidante.
The life we long for — the one shimmering beyond our fear, beyond our excuses — demands that we become fully integrated. The life of quiet, radiant beauty asks that we invite the Spirit back into the circle, that we listen for the gentle breath of God and allow our inner sanctuary to shape our outer world.
When we live from the fullness of Spirit, we hear the quiet divine prescriptions more clearly. They become not vague suggestions, but soul-deep directives: Change this. Speak that. Go there. Rest now. Build here.
These inner promptings are not just wise for the moment; they ripple forward, shaping our future selves, our families, our communities, and the generational stories we will leave behind.
This is the ultimate medicine not taken — the choice to live from fierce clarity rather than the shallow pools of convenience. The choice to swallow the hard pill — the truth we’ve been avoiding — rather than settle for easy numbness. The choice to become fully alive, even when it terrifies us.
What is the “medicine” you know you are meant to take but have been resisting?
What would it look like to stop postponing your own wholeness?
What inner promptings have you been ignoring because they seem too hard, too disruptive, too sacred?
Oh, what beauty might unfold if you chose to embrace the hard moment rather than avoid.
May you become the healed and healing sanctuary you were always meant to be.
NOTES:
Twenty-four pills, three times a day. In this snapshot of my reality, this is the hardest thing I am doing to heal. I am blessed that the pain is minimal, despite the digestion concerns with so many foreign substances on board.
They are meant to heal. But the healing comes with discomfort. Isn’t that the way it always is? Still, what is endured is made lighter by the full confidence that every thing taken in has a reason, a mission, a cure contained within.
The unsavory thing we confront in the now has the potential to change the course of everything.
I hold this as my mantra and do my best to put a glorious future in front of me as I look squarely at the medicine that is mine for the taking, held in the palm of my hand.