The Medicine Buddha Blog
May we all grow wise and helpful with Menla. If you have connected with Menla, and would like to share your story, please send it on.
Thank you.
Jim Sacamano
May we all grow wise and helpful with Menla. If you have connected with Menla, and would like to share your story, please send it on.
Thank you.
Jim Sacamano
The material on this site may seem complex, but it is really quite simple. The basic idea is that how we hold ourself is how we will live and be. Ordinarily we are caught in a kind of struggle with life. We want things to stay when they will eventually go. We want things to go but they stay. There are good times, but those are always impermanent. Because we hold on to this struggle, we feel pain, loss and morbid sadness. But if we align with a sense of health, things work as they should. We may get over our problem, or we may find a better...
read moreIn order to really address difficult issues in life, it can help to actually bring them into our practice. Therefore it can be helpful to do Medicine Buddha practice not only for people you like, but also for people you find difficult. And it can help to do this for difficult relationships, and parts of ourselves as well. We need to engage the real world.
read moreThere are three issues I would like to discuss here. First is that just doing Medicine Buddha practice puts us in touch with this wisdom. The second is that when we touch into this wisdom, doors open for healing to follow. An third is the idea that when we know space as space in being rather than being spaced out, our practice and our life can become joyful and nothing can stop our progress. To begin, when we practice Medicine Buddha, we hold a HUM in our heart. You can see a HUM syllable on our site...
read moreThrangu Rinpoche taught that compassion is the effort to reduce others’ sufferings, and love is the effort to support others’ happiness. While we suffer from getting what we do not want and losing what we do want, ultimately all of samsara is the arena of suffering. That is because even the most pleasant experiences are temporary. So there are two aspects of the relief of suffering. First is relieving the short term suffering of illness and problematic experiences, and econd is the relief from the overall experience of the...
read moreOur challenges, however we encounter then, as long as they do not entirely overwhelm us, encourage us to nudge closer to the Dharma. For that we can be grateful. Medicine Buddha helps us both understand life and how to work with it better, and gives us the actual tools to do so. We can see our challenges as stepping stones to waking up. We can be grateful.
read moreOnce you have a good feeling for the practice of Medicine Buddha, as long as you honor the source and tradition of this practice and keep to the pure intent of being of service to others, you can modify how you use and do the practice to maximize the benefit to others. I do little snippets of the practice throughout the day when I hear of or encounter a situation of need. A friend of mine who is a bodyworker uses the Menla practice in his healing work. Here is the URL of his website: https://bodyworksvictoria.ca/medicine-buddha/. Look at the...
read moreMedicine Buddha: A Transdual Self-model Meditation to Support Healthcare Practitioners J. Sacamano & D. Paproski Journal of Religion and Health volume 59, pages1597–1609(2020)Cite this article 153 Accesses Metrics details Abstract There is increasing awareness of the deleterious effect of the current work demands on a wide range of health professionals and of the benefits of contemplative understandings and practices in modern, secular settings, and healthcare environments. Here, we examine the theory and practice of a traditional...
read moreHuman life is ultimately very brief and precious. We have no way of knowing how long it will last. While our current pandemic is causing so much suffering, it is also a reminder that whatever time we are in, that is the best time to practice. And with Medicine Buddha, not only do we connect with the ultimate need to be on a path to full awakening, but by way of what is known as co-dependent origination, or the interconnection of all things, we also support whatever ordinary health we need. Please practice as best you can.
read moreI had a powerful practice session last night that I would like to share. I was in a hospital room with an old friend who was dying. I got word this morning that he had died over night. I understand that in the past, meditators would spend time with dying people as a regular practice. I remember how Mingyur Rinpoche mentioned being with death as memento mori in his book, In Love with Life. Being with death opens one’s mind in a powerful way. Menla was there with me and I think helped me at least, and maybe my friend. It is great to read the...
read moreThe universe of health is within us all and at the same time beyond all boundaries. This big sense of health is Buddha Nature, which is our basic nature, the nature of just being awake. When we know Menla, we know this ultimate health in both a personal and a cosmic way. Just as this big health is natural to us, the tools we use to realize Menla—inspiration, mantra and visualization—are part of our normal life-experience shaping activities. We generally ignore these tools in daily life. Beyond that, we miss how, without proper training we...
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