Medicine Buddha Practice: Feeling Healing Energy Within

In a weekly Medicine Buddha session recorded in the days before the 2026 US midterms, Lama Rod Owens does something most guided practices rarely spell out: he tells the room to stop trying so hard. Instead of building an elaborate picture of the healing deity, he asks people to notice what Medicine Buddha feels like, as energy or frequency, and to let the body and breath do the work of opening. The session also shows how a contemplative group can hold real-world fear inside practice rather than outside it, and how a single evening can move from logistics and news to prayer and aspiration. What follows draws on the opening portion of that session, where the teaching is most fully spoken, along with the chanting and recitation that come after it.

What does a live Medicine Buddha session sound like before practice begins?

The session opens the way a gathering does when people have been coming back to the same room for a while. Owens thanks the practice leaders who stepped in for him, jokes about being in and out of the calendar this fall, and mentions an upcoming trip to Australia, where he plans to spend time in retreat with a community of elders on First Nations land. He also refers to an ancestor day held in person the previous Saturday and a passing of the spirit ceremony held the day before, which he describes as something that will be taught regularly as a way to tend to the spirits of the lands people dwell on.

Then he names the mood in the room directly. "This is the eve of midterms and there's a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry," he says, and he does not pretend the moment is calm. Owens frames the situation plainly: "we do what we can, we choose our actions, right? We choose, you know, our work and we just do it." That plainness sets up everything that follows. The practice is not a retreat from the news. It is a place to bring it.

He also says something about the gathering itself that is worth holding onto. Medicine Buddha, he notes, "is kind of a thing now," with many people coming in and out, and the space "feels like a beautiful refuge for so many folks." A weekly sit with no fixed membership requirement is a refuge only if people can arrive partway through a crisis and still find their footing.

Why start by asking what Medicine Buddha feels like?

This is the core of the session, and it is where Owens departs from a common picture of deity practice. At around the eleven-minute mark he says it is worth beginning to explore "how you experience the energy or consciousness of medicine Buddha." He is specific that this matters most for people who have practiced for a while, with him or with other teachers. The reason, in his account, is that "at some point we we have some sense of what the deities feel like," and that sense is "an experience of energy, you know, or frequency."

The instruction is simple enough to state and harder to actually do: ask yourself, "what does medicine Buddha feel like?" For many students the default move is to construct an image, a color, a posture, a set of attributes, and then hold it in the mind. Owens treats that as one approach, but his emphasis is on something prior to the picture. Attunement begins with feeling, and only later does the thinking mind arrange what has been felt into a form. In paraphrase from the session at around the 29-minute mark, the experience arrives first as energy, and the analytical layer comes after.

This is a useful distinction for anyone who has sat with a deity practice and felt like they were failing at visualization. Owens is suggesting that the felt sense is the practice, not a warm-up for it. The question is not whether you can make the image sharp enough. The question is whether you can notice a quality of presence that is larger than your self-image.

How do you relax into a deity instead of forcing a visualization?

The most striking moment in the early session is Owens undercutting his own instructions. He has just told the group to turn their minds toward the deity, and then he stops. "Actually, everything I just said is actually way too much effort as well. Like it's not it's not that labor intensive turning our minds." What he offers in its place is smaller: "it means not necessarily turning but just relaxing, opening."

"Don't try too hard. Don't overthink it." (Owens, guiding the room at around 12:45 into the practice)

He then points toward the body as the first place to begin. He asks students to feel "this kind of rigid structure and boundary of our bodies that we often kind of align with our skin," and to soften that edge rather than defend it. The aim is a kind of gentle, subtle energy work that he describes as "really all we ever do." This is not a dramatic act of transformation. It is a repeated loosening of the sense that the self ends neatly at the skin.

Later, when he describes the wider field of practice, he returns to the same theme. The session includes language about not trying to identify with the experience too quickly, about a process of softening and about "rising to hold you," and then about blending into a larger space. Students who expect a deity practice to feel like a performance may find this unsettling. Owens's point is that a deity is not something to be produced inside a head. It is something you come into contact with when you stop managing the contact.

He reinforces this near the end of the excerpted teaching with a short instruction: "Don't think about it. Don't force." For people who grew up with a strong sense of doing a practice correctly, that sentence is probably the most useful one in the session.

Why does anxiety belong inside a healing practice?

Medicine Buddha is a practice of healing, and the session takes that word seriously without turning it into a promise. Owens tells the group that the energy in the room is "potent" and that the season carries a great deal of spirit energy, with Day of the Dead and All Souls' Day behind them and a sense of anticipation around the coming election. He says he expects that the nervousness will come up in practice and that the group should "bring all of this into practice."

This is where the description the channel published for the series becomes concrete. The stated aims are to nourish healing, deepen spiritual friendship, and abolish social forces that perpetuate harm, for oneself and for others. Within this session those aims are not abstractions. When Owens says the group keeps "pushing through these moments," and that people "keep settling, we keep opening, keep asking for help," he is describing a practical discipline. Setbacks are expected. The instruction is to keep returning, not to achieve a state in which fear has disappeared.

He also acknowledges that people are reading and posting comments during the session, and that some of what they name is hard, including anger. Rather than ignoring it, he tells them that staying grounded in practice matters, and that people should feel free to be as vulnerable as they like in the postings. That openness is a form of spiritual friendship in action: the room is shared, and what one person brings to it becomes part of the field everyone is working with.

What happens when the practice turns to prayer and aspiration?

After the teaching, the session moves into what the transcript captures mostly in fragments: singing, then the reading of prayer requests into the shared space. The excerpted transcript shows people's requests being called in, including prayers for healing, for a safe transition into winter, for the protection of people facing danger, and for those who have died or disappeared. Individual names are part of the practice record, so they are not reproduced here. What matters for a reader is the structure. The practice does not end with personal feeling. It opens outward into specific human suffering, and then into aspiration.

The aspiration that appears in the transcript is one of the clearest statements of the practice's ethic: "may I be the nurse for all sick beings." It is a line that turns a personal healing practice into a commitment to care for others, the work of a nurse who does not stop at her own recovery. Paired with the earlier instruction to soften the boundary of the body, it reads as a single movement: the sense of self loosens, and what it makes room for is other people.

Where to go from here

The session is best understood as a practice you can enter, not a lecture to take notes on. If you want to explore the approach Owens describes, start small. Sit with the question "what does Medicine Buddha feel like?" for a few breaths, and notice whether the answer comes as an image, a sensation, a quality of warmth or space, or nothing at all. Then, when you notice effort, soften it. Keep the body as a point of reference, let the boundary at the skin become less rigid, and let the sense of being a separate self loosen a little.

For the full schedule and registration for the weekly practice, the links in the session description point to a deity page on Owens's site and to his other programs. The same page carries a donation link for those who want to support his work. Those who want to understand the wider context should also read the description's stated aims carefully, since the session treats healing, friendship, and the undoing of harmful social forces as one project rather than three.

The practice that Owens teaches in this session will not resolve the midterms, or the wars and climates and institutions that generate so much of the anxiety in the room. What it offers, as he frames it, is a place to notice that fear is energy too, to bring it into a shared body of practitioners, and to keep choosing the next action. In his words from the session, we do what we can.