About
The Medicine You Carry began with a question:
We are living through a period of profound upheaval. Tune into the news on any day and you are met with another devastating earthquake, another town fleeing from fire, another political decision that will cause real harm to millions of people. It’s not easy being alive right now, and the circumstances of our time can feel absolutely overwhelming.
Yet many of us intuitively sense that we were born for this time, here to help midwife the change. We are living through a collective rite of passage, and how we meet this passage will determine what the future of life will look like.
This rite of passage also reaches deeply into our personal lives. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls this the meaning crisis: a widespread breakdown in the kinds of connection that give us a sense of belonging, place and purpose. More and more people feel disconnected from themselves, from one another, from the living world and from a future they can genuinely believe in. We are drowning in information, yet struggling to discern what is worthy of our devotion and whether anything we do can make a meaningful difference.
This is where a collective rite of passage meets a deeply personal crisis of contribution.
What is mine to do? How can my life be of service? What medicine do I carry?
I developed The Medicine You Carry
to help you recognize your contribution.
It looks for the patterns already running through your life: what you notice, what you care about, what people seek you out for, what you feel responsible for and how you instinctively respond when something needs to change.
It also widens the frame around what leadership means in today’s world. Some people protect what is under threat. Some disrupt the patterns perpetuating harm or build new systems in their place. Others repair relationships, make complexity understandable, carry wisdom forward, create beauty, hold space through profound change or perceive the beginnings of a future that other people can’t yet see.
I began writing descriptions of these archetypes several years ago. I was simply inspired to put words to the patterns I was seeing in the people around me, and to give language to the new forms of leadership these times require.
The fifteen archetypes are my own synthesis, developed through my Master of Science in Creativity and Change Leadership, more than two decades of working with leaders and changemakers, and years spent exploring creativity, psychology, systems thinking, transformation and the many ways people respond when the world invites, perhaps even demands, them to change.
After I had written them, I began to see how each one could fit within one of the three mutually reinforcing dimensions of the Great Turning: Holding Actions, Building Life-Sustaining Systems and Shifting Consciousness. Each archetype has a primary contribution within one of these dimensions, although many naturally reach across more than one.
Active Hope
Joanna Macy’s work with Chris Johnstone also gave us the language of Active Hope. Active Hope does not require us to feel certain that everything will work out. It asks us to face what is happening, clarify what we hope for and choose how we will participate in moving toward it. We may never know whether our contribution will be enough, but we step forward and offer it because this is the world we love and the future we are willing to take a stand for.
I have spent hundreds of hours over the better part of the past year turning these archetypes into an assessment.
I wrote the archetypes and the meaning held within each result. My mother usually edits my writing, and to spare her the additional work, I used AI to help edit and polish the many pages behind each archetype so they were ready to read.
More importantly, AI was the mathematical engine that translated the archetypes into a functioning assessment. It modeled the relationships between them and tested the scoring in ways I could never have done by hand, and without it this assessment could not exist in its current form. (With one primary archetype and two supporting archetypes drawn from fifteen, there are 2,730 possible outcomes.)
I also used AI to build this entire website, which has been a dream come true. Despite the controversial nature of artificial intelligence, I’m deeply grateful for the creativity these tools have enabled.
Behind all of those hours is a deep devotion to the Great Turning and a heartfelt wish to support people who feel called to contribute but aren’t always sure where to begin.
My hope is that this assessment gives language to something you already sense. May it help you see yourself more clearly, trust the medicine you carry and feel more confident in the contribution that is yours to make.
About Laura Dawn
Laura Dawn is a teacher, speaker and facilitator whose work explores creativity, change leadership, expanded states of consciousness, human flourishing and ecological stewardship.
She has spent more than two decades supporting leaders, entrepreneurs and changemakers through periods of personal and collective transformation.