Medicine Buddha Practice and Sankofa: Going Back to Heal

A weekly Medicine Buddha practice, held while its founding teacher was away, became a place for one facilitator to ask an old question out loud: what happens to the pieces of yourself you leave behind when you are young and under pressure? In a session recorded October 12, 2026, and posted to Lama Rod Owens's channel two days later, Eli Ryn Brown opened the practice not with instruction but with a seven-year reflection that moved from a Harriet Tubman-inspired turn toward Medicine Buddha, through the Akan-derived idea of sankofa, into a childhood of being outed, a period of institutional religious leadership, and then a stretch of heartbreak, illness, and disability. What follows is a close reading of that opening and of the practice that grew out of it, drawn from the transcribed passages of the session.

What does a community-led Medicine Buddha session actually look like?

The format is simple on paper. The channel description calls it a weekly offering where practitioners gather to "nourish healing, deepen spiritual friendship, and abolish social forces that perpetuate harm for self and others." In the October 12 session, that collective nature was visible from the first seconds. Brown began by thanking the person who had introduced the space, then interrupted that introduction to lift up Tempe, who had held the practice the week before. The gesture was small, but it set the tone: the sangha is not a stage with one performer, but a set of people folding in their effort, whether facilitating, co-hosting, or simply showing up.

Brown described the practice as something that "can be so many things," a line they attributed to Lama Rod Owens, who had reiterated it many times. That open-endedness shapes the whole session. There is no lecture to master and no authority that must be borrowed. The practice gets its shape from the people in the room and from the medicine each person is willing to receive.

What is sankofa, and why does going back matter?

The reflection turns on a concept Brown named early in the opening: sankofa. They placed it among the Adinkra symbols, the visual system of the Akan people of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, and noted that the idea appears across West African religion, architecture, philosophy, and storytelling. Brown's gloss was direct: go back and get it. The concept means returning for what you need, honoring ancestors, and retrieving the wisdom that your past holds, so you can understand who you are and where you come from.

Brown was clear that they were applying the idea at a personal scale. As Brown put it, the world moves through "inflammatory" traumas and headlines and violences enacted against all kinds of people, and in that context they had done "one cycle of go back and get it" for their inner child. The phrase works as a method. Sankofa is not nostalgia. It is a deliberate return to the moment where something was lost, so that it can be witnessed and tended instead of carried unconsciously into the present.

That method is what makes Brown's reflection more than an autobiographical sketch. Sankofa gives the wounds a direction. You go back not to relive pain but to find the part of yourself that was left there.

How does a childhood of being outed shape what comes next?

Brown traced the origin of the wounding to a run of significant traumas between ages eight and eleven. "I just left pieces of me there," they said, and then named one of those pieces precisely: being outed young as a gay girl in a small town. The account is not framed as a tragedy alone. Brown describes a child who led walkouts in fifth grade, who chose visibility as a route ("I was like, all right, I'm the villain, then I'm the villain"), and who was "real gay from the start out loud dangerously and at a large cost."

"There was this bubble of just like, oh my gosh, I'm free. Like this is what it's like to just like kiss somebody and to just like be yourself all the way."

Eli Ryn Brown, Medicine Buddha session, October 12, 2026

Brown's use of music to anchor these periods is worth noticing. They tied the early years to Olivia Rodrigo's "Stupid" as a song about being in love, and described the stretch of stolen car rides and secret nights as flight. The freedom was real, even though it came with risk. Brown is careful to hold both truths at once: the bubble of joy and the cost that followed.

Why did the bubble of freedom fade, and what came after?

The freedom did not last in the same form. Brown describes getting "safer than I could get loud," becoming smaller, and letting a lot of themselves dim through later high school and college, even as they grew in other ways. In the mid-twenties, Brown moved across the country and entered what they called the Aaron Allen Kaine period, named for another song, "Have Mercy." This was the stretch when Brown was leading a Buddhist temple, deeply steeped in institutional religion and academia, going to grad school, and writing a book.

Brown described it as spiritually nourishing and still incomplete. They felt fed, but knew "there was like someone I left behind." Over those years, Brown says their gender expanded, they came out as genderqueer, and their relationship to sexuality and gender shifted fundamentally. Abolitionist commitments became part of how they experienced their own body. The growth was real, and so was the nagging sense of a missing piece.

That sense found language in a lyric Brown associated with the song: a line asking whether, if they call, the divine will remember them. Brown heard in it a question about their own neglected interior. "There's some piece of me that maybe I'm not looking at, or I'm too afraid," they reflected, "or it's just I haven't been ready yet."

What does "pouring as you receive" mean in practice?

For years, Brown said, Medicine Buddha practice had been a process of receiving medicine and then offering it out to everyone. Brown began to extend that same offering to themselves. They attributed the key image to Lama Rod Owens, who often says pouring as you receive, as you pour. Brown's own version was almost bodily: "I'm a teapot being poured into as I pour out."

The image is useful beyond this session. Many contemplative communities teach generosity as an outward movement, and Brown's point is that the movement has to include the practitioner. If you only pour, the vessel empties. The discipline is holding both at once. Brown named what that required: "getting comfortable with heartbreak." They described many years of deep heartbreak and deep madness, autoimmune disorders, disability changes, and the hard question of "what do I need for real?"

This is where sankofa returned to the foreground. Brown said that when they let themselves remember who they had been, both "the little me" and "all of the big me's," the work became one of retrieval rather than self-judgment.

How does the practice itself carry that work?

The transcribed passages show the structure of the session. Brown guided participants through breathing instructions: take a deep breath in, let the breath find a normal pace, bring it down into the belly, and settle into the center. The session then moved through chanting rounds, with pauses and bells, before shifting into prayers spoken for specific needs. Brown spoke of a relationship with Ma Durga during a period of disability, and prayers were offered for healing, for stability, and for people navigating healing with children and family, asking that the fog give way "to a true home within."

The dedication at the end is where the arc of the reflection resolves into community. Prayers reached for "the generosity of a loving universe," asked that the pain of every living creature be eased, and affirmed that the practitioner is not alone. Near the close, Brown said, "You are never alone in your search." Whether one hears that as an invocation or a reminder, it returns the individual journey to the collective field the session began with.

Where to go from here

If Brown's reflection resonates, the most direct next step is the practice itself. The weekly Medicine Buddha offering is open for registration at lamarod.com/deity#medicinebuddha, and more information about upcoming sessions and the teacher's work is collected at bit.ly/MB-links. Lama Rod's channel also hosts the full recording of this session for anyone who wants to hear the opening reflection in Brown's own voice, including the parts that a transcript can only approximate.

For readers new to sankofa, begin with the simplest version of Brown's instruction: pick one moment from your own past where something was left behind, and ask what it needs now. You do not have to revisit it all at once. Brown's own cycle of going back and getting it took years, moved through several seasons of life, and still left room for the bigger work ahead.