10/22/2025
✨What is sacred in medicine?✨
In my early 20s, I spent 9 months studying religion and culture in India, China, Thailand, and Turkey. In a multitude of settings, I witnessed how humans draw lines between that which is sacred and that which is ordinary. When we make something sacred, we make it extraordinary, grant it more respect, make it more meaningful and give it more power.
I see these lines being drawn in medicine too. In natural and holistic spaces, we place many healing practices to be within the realm of the sacred: the intentional ingestion of a flower essence for deep emotional healing, the mindful ritual of preparing passionflower and skullcap tea before bed to help unwind our nervous system, the sanctuary of time and space we create for our morning meditation practice.
What if we extended that same reverence to all forms of medicine? To the sacred act of ingesting the statin that protects our blood vessels, the SSRI that brings us out of crisis, or the supplement that corrects a deficiency. What would happen if we made the act of taking these medicines sacred? To acknowledge just how powerful and life changing they are. What if we made the weekly chemotherapy hospital visit sacred? Offering a moment of reverence and awe for the powerful, life-saving IV bag as it is hung; a sacred medicine - the product of countless hours of research - that generations before us could not have imagined.
How beautiful it is that we live in a time when we can draw from medicines used for hundreds or even thousands of years, while also benefiting from innovations of modern science. The art is in knowing when to use which medicine — and remembering that the use of any medicine, when used appropriately, can be sacred.
