Video Summary:

Many of the Aboriginal and Native American cultures have some concept of a spiritual gift that you offer your people. It might be called your medicine in Native American cultures or your dreaming in the Aboriginal people of Australia. Your medicine is your spiritual gift that makes the people stronger.

What is sometimes missed in the various pursuits of finding your medicine or purpose is that the context for this in aboriginal cultures has always revolved around the people and the community that you are a part of. So the value of your medicine has always been the value that it brings to your people.

Our culture has become more individualized than the communities where these ideas were practiced for thousands of years. So it can be easy to forget that the context of community was so important in unfolding your spiritual gifts.

Your medicine sometimes comes to you in visions, dreams, or ceremony, or it was a gift that you always seemed to have. These spiritual experiences were a gift from Spirit that would get awakened inside of you. The community was always the crucible and proving ground where your medicine would unfold.

So we would receive this vision or have this gift and then we'd begin to offer it to the people. And that's how the integration of our medicine happened.

The vision is a pure idea, energy, and possibility that awakens in us, and then we work with it in the context of community. We use trial and error. We try this and that's not quite it so let's try this. And then it touches people, and we learn about it.

We used to live in community all the time. There was a place for receiving and developing our medicine in these Aboriginal and Native American communities. It was built into the fabric of the community.

It's different now in that community has become more fragmented. It's a little here and a little there. You may have communities at work, in your neighborhood, at the gym, and in your yoga class. So considering how you experience community now, how can you develop your medicine and offer it to your people?

Another thing to consider is often this medicine is often in the form of energy. We tend to be very focused on doing interventions, but sometimes our medicine is very subtle. In the first book I wrote on Your Natural Gift, I defined our gift as the natural effect you have on people when your heart is open.

So when your heart's open, you have a powerful energetic effect on the people around you. Whenever your heart is open, it's touching people, and that is an expression of your medicine. When you smile at someone and ask them how their day is, it touches and uplifts them in some way.

We can use reverse engineering to understand our medicine by looking at the effect that we're having on people. You can notice the effect that it's having and what people are coming to you for. An example of this would be when someone says, “You know, I always feel really safe around you.”

This statement is a real clue as to what your medicine might be. They may feel this way because you've done heroic acts to keep them safe, but more often, it may be due to you showing up with your strength, and courage, and being grounded and true to yourself.

This is really important to understand because then you can begin noticing what your medicine is, crafting it, and taking it deeper. You notice the timing of offering it, what to say, and how to introduce it to people.

While in some sense your medicine is already happening, when you bring your awareness to it, you can start working with it at deeper levels. You become more conscious of the effect that you're having which makes your medicine more powerful.