Medicine Buddha Practice: Reaching for Healing in Community

A Medicine Buddha session led by a community facilitator rather than its usual teacher turns out to be a close study in what a healing practice is actually for. Recorded on October 19, 2026, while Lama Rod Owens was away, the hour-long gathering was facilitated by René Rivera, who opened with an ancestor altar set up for Día de los Muertos, told a story about reaching for Medicine Buddha in the middle of a painful gallbladder episode, and then guided the room through calling on the directions, a silent offering of prayer requests, and a closing verse. The thread running through all of it is simple and hard to dismiss: the practice is valuable not because it promises relief, but because when the moment of pain arrives, the support is already there to be reached for.

What does a community-led Medicine Buddha practice look like?

The weekly sitting, as the session's own framing describes it, is meant to nourish healing, deepen spiritual friendship, and work toward abolishing the social forces that perpetuate harm, for oneself and for others. That last clause matters. The practice is not framed as a private wellness ritual with a devotional veneer; it is framed as a collective effort that includes the conditions people live in. When Lama Rod Owens is away, other practitioners step into the facilitator's chair, and this week that was Rivera.

Rivera began the way many community sessions begin, with an acknowledgment of the unceded land he was sitting on in Oakland and a brief, unhurried check-in. He also named the recording he had been listening to just before the session, a performance of "Remember Me" from Dido and Aeneas, and described it as feeling like "listening to an ancestor tell me how they want to be remembered." That phrase set the tone for the whole evening. The opening was less a warm-up than an invitation to treat the people who came before as present participants.

Why does an ancestor altar belong in a Medicine Buddha practice?

Rivera had set up an ancestor altar that morning for Día de los Muertos and brought it into the room on camera. He described a mandala-like arrangement of the names of his ancestors, the ones he had found so far, with "offerings of food and flowers, salt and water, many more things," and candles lit. He was explicit that the search is ongoing: "I'm always looking for more."

His framing of the season is worth sitting with. "It's a time to speak to and listen to our ancestors and to make offerings, remember them. Remember them as they want to be remembered perhaps." Rivera was also candid that his own ancestor practice has not yet reached the place where the connection feels fully tangible. "I keep reaching," he said, and then described a seasonal shift: "at this time of year is a time when I can feel those ancestors at my back." For a practice built on reaching, the admission is the point. Connection is treated as something cultivated through repetition, not something guaranteed by a calendar.

What happened when the body needed Medicine Buddha?

The center of the session was Rivera's account of a recent physical crisis. Years earlier he had struggled with his gallbladder, with many stones needing to come out, and he had worked to heal it rather than remove it, which he said he succeeded in doing. This time, he described the episode as the gallbladder "throwing stones," a process he called very intense and painful but time-limited. He had a full set of tools: moxa, herbs, and movement, which he described as getting the body to move a stone through a very small duct.

What changed the story was not a tool but a reflex. Rivera said that in the middle of the pain, without deliberate thought, he reached for Medicine Buddha. "It wasn't even like a thought," he said. "It was really just this arising in my whole being of this reaching for this resource of medicine Buddha and feeling like I'm just being met." He began chanting the practice's chant and reported a sense of flow, as if the chant were meeting the process happening in his body.

Two details deserve emphasis. The first is that this was new. He had spent what he called countless hours chanting Medicine Buddha, but he had not reached for it in a moment of acute need before. The distinction he drew was between an intellectual knowing and a tested one. "If you'd asked me I'd be like of course medicine Buddha is there," he said. "But to really feel it I really felt it in a new way."

The second detail is the comparison he made. Rivera set the experience beside reaching for a friend in grief and getting no response: a text unanswered, a person simply unavailable. The resource in the practice, by contrast, answered. "I think now having reached and been met I know that medicine Buddha is always there," he said, "that this resource of medicine Buddha is one I can really count on." It is a modest claim, grounded in one difficult night, and it is precisely why it lands.

How does calling on the directions work?

Around the middle of the session Rivera moved the room into calling on the directions. Participants turned toward each direction in turn and called on ancestors and other beings associated with it, moving from the north through the other points, up to the sky, and then back into the present moment, "right here in this body in this present." The sequence gives the practice a spatial shape: the room is not just a place where people sit, but the center of a field of support that extends in every direction. Rivera's own account of feeling the land and the ancestors as supports runs through this part, tying the ritual back to the place where the group actually sat.

Why are prayer requests spoken aloud and then held in silence?

The next stretch is the most participatory. Rivera invited anyone who had not yet offered a prayer request to do so, and the room moved into a series of spoken requests, each followed by a shared response. The requests were varied and specific: prayers for beings living with chronic illness, for people who had died, for the community to feel connected, for those who are struggling in ways they have not named aloud. Some prayers were offered for particular people to be "fully resourced and safe," and the session made explicit space for what Rivera called unspoken prayers.

After the requests, the group sat together in silence for about a minute to offer gratitude and practice letting go. Silence is where the practice shifts from naming needs to releasing them, and it gives the spoken requests room to settle rather than simply accumulate.

The session closed with a recitation of a prayer attributed in the transcript to Shantideva, repeated three times, dedicated to all beings and to the world "until everyone is healed." Rivera then offered gratitude to the group and asked whether the space was supporting people, a closing check that kept the evening tied to the experience of the people in it.

What is the lasting lesson of this session?

The most useful thing about this recording is that it shows a practice operating at two timescales at once. On one level, it is a weekly gathering with a clear structure: altar, story, directions, requests, silence, dedication. On another, it is a relationship that a person can test under pressure. Rivera's gallbladder story is not presented as proof that the practice cures anything. It is presented as evidence that, after years of chanting, the support was available when he needed it, and that reaching for it felt like being met. For readers who have practiced in a group and wondered whether it would hold up in a hard moment, that is the question the session leaves open and, in its own way, answers.

Where to go from here

If this session resonated, the practice itself is open to join. Weekly Medicine Buddha practice is available through the registration page at lamarod.com/deity. For more information and upcoming happenings with Lama Rod Owens, see bit.ly/MB-links. Those who want to support the teacher's work can do so at lamarod.com/donate. Whether you come to a sitting for the first time or have chanted for years, the session's central offer is the same one Rivera described: the resource is there, and reaching for it is the practice.