Why Today?

Medicine Buddha is both an ancient, time-tested way to work with both immediate and long-term aspects of healing, and an increasingly needed and vital healing force in our society today. We are at a unique juncture in the history of human life on this planet. We face a looming environmental crisis. And now more than ever, we have access to an increasing variety of ancient spiritual traditions, many of which have some approach to health and healing. And this very proliferation tends to co-arise with a thinning of some of the social elements that supported those traditions.

We face unprecedented challenges in living in health on Earth today.

Many of the modern health approaches, including the current focus on testable, western, scientific methodologies, can tend to divide our feelings and biological functions into smaller, more manageable views and pathways. Other approaches take opposing points of view, while perfectly reasonable, might further divide our view wholeness in our world. Putting all these factors together, we might feel a sense of fragmentation and alienation from whatever basic health and wholeness we have inherited as human beings and as human societies. Still, these healing traditions can all have great value and can all support our human journey, each in their own way.

In addition, we see the very health of ourselves as individuals, as a society and a species being eroded by the forces of social and environmental exploitation. We are finding that short-term measures indeed only produce short-term results.

We are hearing calls to increasingly extreme  and divisive political ideologies. While most of us consume enough calories, economic disparities are causing ever mounting social distress. Our technologies can help us in many ways, but at the same time, tend to distance us from the basic earth that supports our bodies with food and water, and our minds with a fundamental sense of groundedness.

Now more than ever, we need a unifying principle, vision and practice that is at the core of all healing traditions, including the scientific approach of the West, the energy approaches of the East, the current focus on meditative approaches of mindfulness etc.

Rather than being more esoteric, more sophisticated, more beyond ordinary experience, we need an approach that touches into the basic core of what it means to be human, to have a healing attitude independent of theory, to operate in the most basic, wholesome human ways.

This approach can start with recognizing that our problems are not a result of some fundamental human flaw, but rather a result of lack of familiarity with the basic health underlying all human experience. This is where true healing starts: getting to know our basic health and realigning with it however we can. When we appreciate that inner health, we can really honor and support all healing methods as shining like light rays, out from the sun of that health, and we can recognize that anything we do, if based in that health, can be medicine.

If you look beyond what might initially seem exotic, you can get a sense of how Medicine Buddha can bring out healing in a basic human way.

And as a universal, human approach to healing, Medicine Buddha is accessible to everyone regardless of religious belief or the lack there of. We can probably recall the freshness of the open, blue sky, or remember some even tiny glint of brightness in our being and in our world, and hopefully remember another person having been kind to us. Somewhere within we have some sense of what it means to be awake. Any approach to healing, whether focused on physical or emotional health, or the health of our societies and our species, has at its core these basic visions that Menla can help bring into focus and support. Regardless of who and what we are trying to help and how we are trying to do it, Menla can help bring out the best in what we are doing and help it be more effective, especially today, when we need a sense of confidence in basic human health the most. Today more than ever, even our problems, when held in the great wisdom of inherent, human health, can be great stimuli to help us bring the enormous variety of health and healing traditions in our human heritage out into full, colorful, vibrant bloom.