Medicine Buddha Practice: Healing Through Specificity and Presence

In a room packed with practitioners on a new moon night, Eli Ryn Brown—who uses all pronouns—opens a community-led Medicine Buddha practice by naming something rarely spoken aloud in spiritual spaces: that vague prayers, however earnest, often leave us wanting. "If I'm aspirationally asking for something or if I'm just not really clear, so I'm asking real vague, like I'll get what I want, but it I'll still be left being like there's something, you know, deeper or whatever," Eli explains. The insight cuts to the heart of why specificity matters in healing practice. It's not about perfecting the ask—it's about getting intimate with what you actually need.

Why Vague Medicine Leaves Something Missing

The practice of Medicine Buddha—a central Buddhist healing deity—is often approached with a general intention: health, wellness, the abstract concept of mending. But Eli's framing resets that framework. Drawing on recent work with what she calls "dark mothers"—including Harriet Tubman and Black Tara—she names that the biggest instruction from her guides and ancestors has been "my full presence and all of the responsibility that comes with being able to be fully present." That presence requires something anterior: knowing yourself well enough to know what medicine you actually need.

This distinction is not academic. When you ask vaguely for healing, you may receive something. But you remain unclear about what's still unmet. By contrast, getting specific with your wounds—asking not just for relief but for the particular medicine that addresses your particular condition—creates a different channel. "Getting more specific even with my own prayers by getting to know myself more by knowing what medicine I need, you know, helps me receive more specifically for like my own wounds, you know, or my own needs," Eli notes. It's a reframing of prayer not as petition to an external force but as intimate dialogue with what you're capable of receiving.

How Presence Becomes the First Practice

Before the chanting begins, before the formal invocation of Medicine Buddha, Eli calls the room to something deceptively simple: making choices about how to tend to themselves. "Whether you're new, whether you've been here more times than you can count, I welcome you in. This space is for all of us to do exactly what we need to get exactly what we need out of it." She invites practitioners to check in: Are you supported where you're sitting? Do you need water? Do you need to clear anything away? Can any part of you soften?

This opening is radical precisely because it's ordinary. It refuses the bypass that often accompanies spiritual practice—the idea that showing up transcends the body's actual needs. The first step, Eli emphasizes, is "choosing, you know, wholeheartedly and not taking for granted things that feel like little choices." Witnessing a choice being made is itself an act of practice. Presence, in this frame, isn't about transcending form; it's about getting intimate with it.

What Sound Waves Actually Do (Not Just Metaphorically)

Later in the session, Eli pivots to something she says "never ceases to make me happy": the physical reality of sound waves. "I think sometimes we turn everything into a metaphor, even when it's actual, but that's a real physical thing." Like dropping a rock into water and watching the ripples spread, sound is a vibration that moves through the room, through your body, through the water in your blood. "Our sound waves are moving vibrations that are changing the frequency of things around us, melting with the waters in us, moving through our blood."

This matters because it grounds the practice in something concrete. When the group chants together, they are not performing a spiritual gesture; they are changing the physical frequency of the space. It's why Eli's sensei used to say, "Chant with your ears." Hear what's arising rather than trying to produce a perfect note. "It matters so much less than like letting sound be one more vehicle, you know, of easing into this like body and moment and easing out of the like strictness of the bounds of form that I might get caught up into. The rigidness of form gets much more fluid."

Ancestors and Buddhas as Temporary Physical Form

Eli invokes a principle from tantric Buddhism, hoodoo, and West African and African traditional religions: "When we sing or dance or chant with the gods or ancestors we're like giving them a temporary physical form to like play in, right?" This isn't a poetic metaphor. In these traditions, the exchange is literal and reciprocal. The ancestors and deities get to express themselves in the material realm—to play, to teach, to protect. And the practitioners get something equally real: the benefit of ancestral voice coming through, wisdom, protection, what Lama Rod (Eli's teacher, whose practice this session supports) calls "being poured into while you pour out."

It's a framework that rejects the idea of spiritual practice as one-directional extraction. "It's this like non seeparable offering and receiving." You show up, you tend to the space, you make sound, you hold intention—and in doing so, you become a vessel through which something larger can move. The practice changes you and the room simultaneously.

The Playful and Imaginative Dimensions of Practice

Eli also names something often absent from more austere spiritual containers: play. Having recently moved through what she calls "the whole hol weekend portal, the veil real thin," she's been "steeped in these rituals that have felt so fun and playful." She explicitly invites that energy into the Medicine Buddha practice. "I also invite us to, you know, welcome in the playful and the like imaginative aspects of practice into this."

This is not lightness as escape. It's imaginative engagement as a form of rigor. The practice asks you to visualize, to chant, to send prayers out and imagine drawing medicine back in. It asks you to hold the Buddhas and ancestors as real presences capable of entering the room. The imagination is not decoration; it's one of the practice's primary vehicles. By engaging imagination consciously, you're not pretending—you're making something real in a different register.

Medicine Buddha: The Healing Deity as Mirror

The Medicine Buddha itself carries a particular teaching. In Buddhist iconography, this figure represents the capacity to see clearly, to diagnose what's actually wrong, and to offer precisely the remedy needed. By invoking Medicine Buddha, practitioners align themselves with that clarity. They're not asking an external deity to fix them; they're asking to embody the Medicine Buddha's clarity about their own needs, their own wounds, their own capacity to receive.

The prayers that community members contributed during this practice—for loved ones navigating the Bardo, for those processing grief, for healing and protection and continued support—show what this specificity looks like in practice. Each prayer names a particular being, a particular situation, a particular kind of medicine needed. That specificity is the whole point.

Where to go from here

If you're drawn to this work, the first step is getting specific. Not with grand spiritual aspirations, but with your actual wounds, your actual needs, your actual capacity in this moment. The next is showing up with your whole self—resourced as much as you can be, attending to what your body needs, making small choices about how to tend yourself. Then, whether you're chanting in a group or sitting alone, remember that sound is physical, that presence is a practice, and that when you open yourself to receive medicine, you're not bypassing the material world—you're engaging it more fully. The practice happens at the intersection of the imaginal and the real, the ancestral and the present, the personal wound and the collective healing. Medicine Buddha reminds us that all four of those registers matter.