In Native American understanding there is a concept called ‘getting ahead of the medicine’. This is an extremely useful idea. To understand the meaning of this term it helps to understand what a native person means by Medicine. Medicine is a term used by indigenous peoples around the world to refer to a person’s unique talents and abilities. It is a term that is also used to describe plants or elements of nature that have a healing effect on humans. These could be plants with a visionary aspect to them like peyote, hallucinatory mushrooms, iboga, ayahuasca, huachuma etc. In shamanism it is a term used to describe the healing aspect of almost anything you can imagine; music, dancing, singing, the sun, the moon, a forest, a meadow, a stream, a cloud, a hot spring, and so on. For example, a shaman may prescribe for someone to sit in the sun for awhile and absorb its medicinal radiation, light, and warmth or for someone to bathe in hot springs with healing mineral properties, or to eat the fruit of a certain tree etc. So, medicine can be anything that heals you and it can be the thing that you offer to the world to be of service and when you practice this you heal yourself and may help to heal someone else.
What, then, does it mean to ‘get ahead of the medicine’? One meaning refers to being impatient. For example, let’s say a young woman or man is interested in playing the drums so they persuade their parents to buy them an expensive drum set before they even take a lesson. That is an example of getting ahead of the medicine. They may not like it after a month or so and move on to another interest. They may need many lessons and much practice before they are able to play. They may discover they have no talent for this whatsoever and be driven to toward another interest that they show more promise in. So, to work with the medicine instead of getting ahead of it in this example, you don’t go out and buy a drum set without finding out a little more about whether this is a good direction for you. Maybe you rent a set or borrow an old set of drums from a friend who is no longer using them having moved on to a more advanced set. You take your time and learn gradually and slowly move your way up to owning a set of your own. Even then, you start with a simple set before you move on to a very expensive professional set of drums.
Another example might be someone who wants their parents to buy them a high-powered muscle car when they have just passed their driver’s test. Impatience will likely get them killed.
These are just a couple of examples of so many ways of getting ahead of the medicine. Another motive for committing these types of errors goes beyond impatience into the territory of arrogance. A person takes a weekend workshop in a certain yoga practice and the next week they call themselves a yoga master and hang their shingle out to teach others. Someone reads a book about shamanism and suddenly starts calling themselves a shaman and dressing like some indigenous shaman they have seen pictures of. A person goes to a Native American sweat lodge and now they think they are fully qualified to run their own sweats to the community. Someone hops on a friend’s motorcycle for the first time one afternoon and suddenly they believe they are fully qualified to buy a 1000 cc bike and hurtle down the highway.
Greed, arrogance, and ignorance are often combined in getting ahead of the medicine. Years ago, when Lena and I climbed twenty-three thousand-foot Mt. Aconcagua In Chile and Argentina we trained and prepared for months under supervision of our very experienced guide to make the climb. At twenty-two thousand feet we came across a group of people with no guide whose one liter of water was frozen because it was in a canteen on their belt, without proper gear and warm clothing, as if they were on an ordinary day hike in the lowlands, and in terrible physical shape. Some were clearly in need of medical attention. To this day I hope they made it out alive. On other trips rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon I have run into people who had run short on food and drinks and were improperly prepared for the big rapids, long hot days, and icy waters despite having been cleared by rangers for the trip. Getting ahead of the medicine can kill you in more ways than one. That is just not an effective way to approach life. Risk taking endeavors require training, qualifying, getting some experience and careful planning – especially before involving others. To do otherwise can endanger other people’s lives and we know of cases where people have died because an inexperienced arrogant, impatient, greedy, and ignorant person offered sweat lodges or incredibly powerful hallucinogens to others without adequate training. In some cases, they guided others through treacherous terrain without having the training and knowhow to do so. That is getting ahead of the medicine. In some of the worse-case scenarios it is a result of greed, seeing an opportunity to make some money without being qualified. Unfortunately, there are many, many examples these days of people who are completely unqualified or underqualified offering hallucinogens like MDMA, Ketamine, mushrooms, and Ayahuasca to groups of people without knowing the science, the dangers of mixing these ingredients with other medications, or the songs and prayers that indigenous peoples accompany the plant-derived medicines so that the experience is a healing one and not a risk to their lives. These are all examples of getting ahead of the medicine.
Since there are so many ignorant and under qualified people offering all kinds of services out there these days, the onus is now on the consumer not to be stupid and trust anyone offering to take you on a ride. Do your due diligence. Check references, find out qualifications, make sure you are in trustworthy, reliable hands. Your life may be on the line.
As you can see, getting ahead of the medicine is an ego-driven affair. It often occurs when a person is not at all attuned to proper timing, and baldly goes ahead when conditions are just not right or when it is beyond the scope of what is possible under the conditions or circumstances at hand. Notoriously, these events take place when one is driven by sheer ambition and the intuition that would normally tell one to stop is completely ignored or discounted. The shamanic understanding is that when you make a bid for power, take on an initiation, a challenge or quest you must be absolutely prepared physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. The price for not being prepared in any of these areas is great, humiliating defeat, injury, or even death. Just wanting something because it looks like a cool thing to do, be, or have is just not enough in most cases. It should be done only if it is the right thing to do, at the right time, for the right reasons. What are the right reasons? Certainly not to look or be seen as cool or badass. Examples of the right reasons might be that it is in alignment with your essence self. That it is your calling to learn something important or to gain experience in something so that you can be of great service, or it simply may be because the experience at hand is one of extraordinary beauty and magnificence and it brings out the best in you like a perfect ski run down the high mountain or a musician giving the performance of a lifetime before a huge audience, an actor giving an extraordinary performance or an Olympic athlete going deep for a perfect ten.
Let the medicine show you the way. Let it have the time to teach you, heal you, prepare you like a fine meal, not fast junk food. Give it the years it needs. Listen deeply and know when the time to step forward has come, like when the lion dashes out into the herd of wildebeest for a successful hunt. Meanwhile, while preparing, be relaxed but in readiness, stay aware and present. Do not think overly much. Be in your knowing that there is a right moment when you are ready and everything welcomes you to proceed. It will feel right. At that time when you catch the wave there is no doubt, there are no considerations, and your narrative vanishes. You are empty, in the moment and your heart is open. You are everything you need to be.
