The Medicine Path Is Not Always Pretty
There is something I need to say.
The medicine path is often romanticised.
People see the feathers, the ceremonies, the devotion, the language of light.
They do not always see the cost.
They do not see the nights you unravel.
The relationships strained by your own unhealed edges.
The moments you become the wound while trying to heal it.
The times you hurt others because you had not yet learned how to hold your own pain.
If you’ve arrived here from the post, welcome deeper. What I shared there was only the threshold. Some stories cannot be told in captions, and some lessons ask for more than a passing glance.
This is the deeper truth of mirrors, healing, power, and the long road back to my own voice. If something stirred in you, keep reading. There may be something here for you too.
Because the deepest lessons rarely arrive as comfort.
They arrive as disruption.
As the great cosmic kick in the Arse that rearranges your life in service of your soul.
It has taken me years to understand this was never about them being wrong.
Nor me being wrong, or right.
It was about what life was asking me to reclaim.
There was an essence within me I had not yet fully claimed.
A wisdom not given by any one teacher.
A light not bestowed by any one lineage.
A truth not owned by any one path.
Only remembered.
And perhaps that is why we are here having this human experience at all.
To remember.
To walk through forgetting and find our way back.
To meet ourselves through love, through loss, through beauty, through betrayal, through joy, through longing, through the mirrors life so generously places in front of us.
Not to become perfect.
But to become whole.
Somewhere in the midst of this healing, the Apus spoke to me with a message so simple and so vast that it changed everything:
We are not owned. We are honoured, and we are held in sacred relationship with all of life.
I felt the truth of that in my bones.
What is sacred cannot be possessed.
What is real cannot be monopolised.
What is divine moves through many vessels.
This changed the way I see the medicine path.
Because let’s be honest — the medicine path is not an aesthetic.
It is not incense and curated altars and saying “beloved” in linen pants while secretly spiralling.
It is beautiful, yes.
And it is demanding.
It asks for integrity when no one is watching.
Humility when your ego wants applause.
Discernment when charisma enters the room.
Tenderness when your heart would rather close.
And devotion when the glamour has worn off.
It asks you to walk others home while continuing to walk yourself home.
That is no small thing.
To hold light is one thing.
To embody it consistently, kindly, honestly… is another.
And this understanding now lives at the heart of how I serve.
Anyone who has sat inside my containers has heard me say:
Do not place me on a pedestal.
I do not stand above you.
I walk beside you, always.
Because I am not here to be worshipped.
I am here to witness your remembering.
And in the deepest honesty, I know this too:
I have also been the mirror.
I have felt the sharp edge of what I myself have reflected in others.
I have seen how truth can sting when it arrives before someone is ready to receive it.
I have learned that carrying light is one thing… but knowing how to hold it with tenderness is another.
That is the sacred part.
Not simply what we reveal in one another,
but how we hold each other while it is being revealed.
Last year, I made a prayer, in the mountains.
A real one.
The kind that shakes things loose. A prayer so powerful that even I began to question what I had prayed for as the months unfolded.
I asked for all competition energy to be removed from me, my lineage, my community.
Every trace of comparison.
Every hunger to measure myself against another woman.
Every subtle contraction that says there is not enough room.
And life, being life, answered thoroughly.
It showed me where competition was still hiding in my own body.
In old wounds.
In scarcity.
In places I still believed power was external.
So it cleared it.
Sometimes gently.
Mostly with flamethrower energy.
What remains is simpler now:
There is room for all of us.
Many teachers.
Many paths.
Many expressions of truth.
Many women carrying medicine in different forms.
No one needs to shrink for another to shine.
Today, I hold no bitterness.
Only perspective.
Deep Gratitude, in fact. Unconditional LOVE.
I honour those teachers for the roles they played.
I honour the mirror for what it showed me.
And most of all, I honour the woman who gathered herself piece by piece and came home.
Some people enter our lives to guide us.
Others enter to reflect us so clearly that we can no longer look away.
Some people enter our lives to guide us.
Others enter to reflect us so clearly that we can no longer look away.
Both are sacred.
But only one voice was ever meant to lead you fully.
Your own.
In the end, mirrors are not here to flatter us. They are here to reveal us. They show us the beauty we forget, the wounds we avoid, the power we have misplaced, and the truth waiting beneath every mask.
What we need to see through a mirror is not another person’s reflection, but our own essence staring back with honesty. The mirror’s gift is not comfort — it is indeed clarity. And when we are willing to meet that clarity with courage, it becomes the doorway home to ourselves.
- Angela Maree
Thank you to the ones who know who they are.
The ones who have been my greatest teachers — not always through words, but through presence, challenge, love, and truth.
Thank you to the ones who walk beside me on this path, shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart. The sisters, brothers, friends, and companions who remind me that we were never meant to do this alone.
Thank you to the Lineages that have carried wisdom across time, through prayer, devotion, and remembrance.
Thank you to the Four Directions — to the winds of change, the guardians of East, South, West, and North, each carrying teachings for every season of becoming.
Thank you to the great Apus, guardians of the mountains, whose silence speaks louder than many voices ever could.
Thank you to Taita Inti, Grandfather Sun, for your warmth, illumination, and life-giving fire.
Thank you to Mama Quilla, Mother Moon, for your softness, cycles, mystery, and gentle light in the dark.
Thank you to the Nustas, to the sacred feminine currents that continue to guide, heal, and awaken what was sleeping within me.
Thank you to the Seven Rays of the rainbow, sacred bridge of colour and consciousness, reminding me that light reveals itself in many forms and frequencies.
Thank you to the goddess of IX Cacao, keeper of the heart, ancient sweetness, sacred medicine of remembrance, opening pathways of devotion, tenderness, and truth.
Thank you to the sacred plant medicines — you know who you are — for the initiations, the humbling, the healing, and the doors you opened when I was ready to walk through them.
Thank you to the animal allies who have walked beside me in symbol, spirit, instinct, and medicine.
Thank you to the medicine men and women, seen and unseen, who have helped me heal, unravel, remember, and rise.