What is a medicator, and when do we use them?
Sometimes we have a hard time figuring out what we use to numb/medicate our feelings and why we numb. This is why spiritual guidance is so important. We have blind spots that only someone on the outside can see. When we are in our woundedness, we can be blind to our situation. There are so many medicators that we use to not feel our feelings. Some of the medicators people wouldn’t think as ways to numb. Like religion! Never would you think that this could be one, right?
A medicator is something we use to make us not feel what we label as bad feelings. A short list of medicators can be:
- Alcohol
- Dugs
- Exercise
- Gambling
- Shopping
- Relationships
- Eating
- Spiritual practice
Are you getting the picture? Anything we use to try to make us not feel our feelings is a medicator. As a society we are always trying to only feel good. Our goal to feel good all the time.
The problem with this is it’s not reality!
Life is full of ups and downs; good things happen to us and bad things happen to us. We get a great job opportunity, we meet a special person, buy a beautiful house, and on the opposite side of this we lose our job, get divorced, and lose our home to foreclosure. This is life. It is always full of highs and lows. How we react when we are in our lows is what we should be looking at. Do we run away from our feelings of sadness into the arms of another because we lost our relationship or do we sit with the feelings of loneliness and sadness until it passes?
This can be tough because we have no idea how long these low feelings will last. Our tolerance for sitting with our pain might be very little. The more we learn to sit with it, the higher our tolerance grows. With every situation that comes to us it is an opportunity to see where we are in our spiritual development.
We need spiritual guidance because we can be blind to our shadow side at times.
Sometimes we don’t want to see our shadow side and see how we might be medicating because if we see it, we have to stop medicating. Most people don’t want to give up the vices they use to numb the pain they are feeling. Who would voluntarily want to feel crappy? Someone interested in their spiritual progress and evolution, that’s who! The best time to grow is when we stay present with our feelings and decide to move through them instead of shove them under the rug or numb them so they disappear.
Make a list of all your medicators and what makes you run to them. Then make a conscious choice not to use them when you are feeling low. Make yourself sit down and explore those feelings and track where they came from. No matter how horrible they feel, be with them, cry your eyes out, and self-nurture.
Don’t go outside yourself to feel better.
