The Energy in the Medicine: Why How We Treat Our People Matters

I’ve always been highly sensitive. Some of it is trauma-related—a CPTSD response, a lifetime of hyper-vigilance. But some of it is just how I’m wired. I feel things deeply. I respond intensely to energy, to medicine, to people’s voices, to environments. It’s not always easy, but I’ve come to see it as part of my gift.

Recently, I took a gummy made with psilocybin. And instead of feeling expansive or grounded, I felt… heavy. Sad. Weepy, even. Not the cathartic kind of weeping—but a grief that didn’t feel like mine. A lingering sense that something was off. It wasn’t the mushrooms themselves—I’ve worked with them before. It was something else entirely.

It hit me: this was about the energy behind the medicine. The way it was made. The people who made it. The space it came from.

Medicine is more than just chemistry. It’s more than milligrams and active ingredients. It’s frequency. Intention. And the energy poured into it by every single person along the way.

When we treat our employees like they’re disposable, overwork them, underpay them, or create toxic work environments—we’re not just failing them. We’re failing the medicine. Especially when that medicine is plant- or fungi-based. These substances are alive. They know when they’re being mishandled. And some of us feel it when they carry that weight.

There are people like me—maybe like you—who can feel when something was made with care, with love, with presence. And when something wasn’t. When medicine carries the imprint of someone else’s burnout, resentment, or pain, it lingers. It works its way into the body, and sometimes into the soul.

I’ve realized that part of my own release is about honoring how I relate to what I consume. I no longer want to ingest anything—food, information, medicine—that doesn’t carry respect for the people who created it.

Because ultimately, it’s all connected. The way we treat people is the medicine. Their joy, their safety, their dignity—that all becomes part of what we put into our bodies. We can’t separate the two.

So if you’re making medicine—of any kind—I invite you to consider this:

Are your people okay?

Do they feel valued, seen, safe?

Are you cultivating the kind of environment where healing begins long before the medicine ever reaches someone’s hand?

Because for those of us who are deeply attuned, we don’t just consume what you make. We carry it.

And I don’t want to be less affected. I want to live in a world that honors how deeply medicine—and people—are connected.