Imagine your body filled with healing blue light. The light penetrates every layer of your body so that every fiber and cell of your body are filled with this healing energy. It penetrates every layer of your mind and every layer of your heart. This healing blue light is the unconditional love from the Universe to you.
The paragraph above could be part of almost any Tibetan healing meditation. This passage has a focus on the body, using energy from light and feeling of love to heal. Thus it works on three levels of body, subtle energy and mind.
This element of three levels or three parts is a recurring theme in healing meditations. Body, energy and mind is sometimes described as body, breath and mind. In the west it might be familiar as body, mind and spirit. I like to describe it as body, mind and heart. Speech in the Tibetan tradition includes the constant voice in our head as well as the words that come out of our mouth, thus mind or really brain and speech are synonymous. Mind in the Tibetan tradition refers more to a deeper level than the voice in our head and is associated with the heart.
The element of three can be further explored and I will elaborate on that further by describing the 3 efforts and 3 principle aspects of the path.
The Three Doors of Healing
The three aspects of body, energy (breath) and mind-heart are sometimes referred to as three doors of Tibetan Medicine.
The body of Tibetan medicine includes treatments like herbs, yoga, massage and diet. The energy (breath) includes pranayama or breathing exercises, mantra, prayer and chanting. Finally, the mind-heart door is mainly meditation.
Any treatment in Tibetan medicine, whether herbs, massage or mantra always includes a component of body, energy and mind. However, one of the three is always emphasized in a treatment. For example, mantra always includes an element of body and mind but subtle energy is always the main focus.
The practices and treatments for the mind-heart are considered the most profound, deepest, and the most effective. But these meditation treatments also require the most skill.
Meditation on Root Causes of Disease
The healing meditations of the mind-heart door address the root cause of disease. According to the Four Medical Tantras of Tibetan Medicine, the primary root causes of all disease originate in the mind as desire (and all its forms of greed, wanting, lust), anger (and its forms of hatred, aversion, resistance) and ignorance. Because the meditations work directly on the primary root causes of disease they are considered the most profound.
A typical healing meditation includes 3 stages: 1. The preliminary stage generates compassion which acts as an antidote to anger; 2. the generation stage uses desire transmuted into enlightened bliss energy; and 3. the completion stage transmutes ignorance into wisdom. In this way the three roots of disease are cured.
How Healing Meditations Actually Work
“If you go toward the suffering and allow yourself to go through it, you discover suffering is joy. It's a little itch on the edge of bliss.” - Robert Thurman
This quote by Robert Thurman directly describes how Tibetan healing meditations work at the deepest level. I like to describe the process in three parts or three efforts: 1. Move toward illness or pain; 2. Embrace the illness or pain; and 3. Merge with the illness or pain. These three parts follow what is known as the three principle aspects of the path: 1. Renunciation; 2. Compassion; and 3. Emptiness. With respect to illness and pain one first renounces our normal approach to pain which is to get rid of pain. If we can’t get rid of pain, then we tend to distract ourselves so we don’t feel it. This distraction can take many forms like TV, alcohol, food or other. The distractions amount to resistance of what is occurring. Instead the teachings tell us to move toward the pain, renouncing our resistance.
Secondly, we open our hearts to the pain, feel compassion for the pain and embrace it. If we are skillful with the first and second step, we can merge with the pain or illness, go through it and we dissolve along with the pain into space. We find open, spacious joy which is the union of bliss and emptiness.
By turning pain into bliss, we heal ourselves at the deepest level. At this point our physical bodies may heal or not. But because our highest mind is revealed and all experience is bliss and space, it doesn’t matter if the physical body is healed or not. The mind is healed or its natural state of already being “healed” is revealed to us.
These healing meditations also work at the subtle energetic level. The Tibetan Buddhist tradition describes the subtle body consisting of chakras and channels. Visualization of light in the chakras and channels during meditations help manipulate and heal the subtle body. Often mantras are part of the meditation and this also helps manipulate the subtle energy body. Healing of the physical body can result from healing of the subtle body.
Types of Healing Meditation
There are many healing meditations in the Tibetan tradition. One of the simplest is tonglen meditation, where one visualizes taking in the pain or illness into the heart chakra as dark light or smoke. Then white healing light is released from the heart to the area of pain or illness. This taking and sending is coordinated with the breath; breathe in pain as dark light and breathe out healing as white light.
Tsa Lung uses tsa – energetic channels and lung – subtle energy to open major chakras and bring the subtle energy into the central channel from the side channels. The Tsa Lung practice involves body movement, energy visualization and mind – meditation. Phakyab Rinpoche made the Tsa Lung practice more widely known as a healing practice when he healed himself of a gangrenous leg and several other major health problems. His story is described in his book Meditation Saved My Life.
In the book Ultimate Healing, Lama Zopa Rinpoche describes a simple white light healing in which the light comes from an object, sky or the universe. However, most of the healing meditation involves visualizing a yidam which send you healing rays of light. Healing yidams are quite varied, taking on many different forms.
Vajrasattva is a white colored enlightened yidam Buddha that is used to purify negative karma and can be used to wash away illness. Green Tara is a female Buddha used to eliminate obstacles. Parnashavri is a Buddha used to heal disease and Avalokiteshvara Simhanada removes disease caused by provocations. Hayagriva is a wrathful yidam sometimes used in healing.
Medicine Buddha is Supreme
Of all the healing yidams, Medicine Buddha or Healing Buddha is the most often employed and is considered appropriate for all diseases, illness and pain. The Healing Buddha is visualized as made of blue light, sitting crossed legged on a lotus and moon seat and wearing the robes of a monk. In his right hand he holds the medicinal arura plant and in his left hand he holds a bowl of healing nectar.
Medicine Buddha’s healing power is described in the Medicine Buddha Sutra (teaching) where he made 12 great vows of healing.
Although the basic form of the Medicine Buddha is usually the same, there can be many variations on how the meditations (sadhana) are done. For example, the Medicine Buddha can appear in front of you, above you, in your heart center or you can be instantly transformed into the Medicine Buddha. The Medicine Buddha can appear with two Bodhisattvas, one red symbolizing solar energy and one white symbolizing lunar energy. He can be depicted with seven other Buddhas of Medicine, each with their own vow of healing or with four Dakinis (female Buddhas). The white Dakini in front has pacifying energy, the yellow Dakini on the right enriches, the red Dakini behind magnetizes and the green Dakini on the left destroys. These multiple energies of the Dakinis makes available whatever particular energy is needed for an illness.
Medicine Buddha in one or more variations is found in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism and in one Nyingma tradition he has merged with Padmasambhava. The merged Buddha is depicted as a king rather than a monk and is known as Urgyen Menla.
Medicine Buddha can be a lower tantra practice (Kriya) up to highest yoga tantra practice (Anuttarayoga). In one interesting sadhana written by Khentrul Rinpoche, Medicine Buddha can be practiced at any level depending your own level of practice.
Some variations on the Medicine Buddha meditation are associated with particular lineages but many are designed to address particular sicknesses. For example, each of the seven associated Medicine Buddhas have their own vows to address particular problems.
Healing Yourself with Light
Most of the yidam meditations involve a stage where one becomes the yidam, the enlightened Buddha with a body of light. As Dr. Nida says “when you become the Healing Buddha, you are no longer sick, you no longer have pain”. Becoming the Healing Buddha allows you to dis-identify with your pain, illness or disability. You are no longer your pain. Imagining you are a body made of light loosens our grasping of the illness and pain making it less solid.
“The pain has no opportunity to take hold or go deep, because light is translucent
insubstantial, and open.” – Tulku Thondup
Essentially, one can move towards the pain and go through it to understand its’ emptiness or one can dissolve the self and see the emptiness of self. Either way dissolves the problem of illness or pain.
Meditation in Everyday Life
Post meditation practice is as important as the actual meditation. In tantric practices one is taught to take a “pure view” when going through one’s daily life. In pure view one sees all things as made of crystal light, all sounds are mantras and all beings are Buddhas.
Lama Tenzin teaches that when Medicine Buddha is your yidam, all substances are medicine, made of crystal light and radiating or reflecting healing light. All sounds are healing mantras and all actions by beings are acts of healing. Lama also teaches to bless your food to make it medicine, to imagine your morning shower to be a shower of healing nectar from the Medicine Buddha or when walking in sunlight imagine you are receiving healing rays of light. In this way you can make anything and everything a healing activity.
To Learn More
If you are interested in learning Medicine Buddha healing meditation or other healing meditation, it is best to receive an empowerment and teaching from a qualified Lama. However, you can experience a guided Medicine Buddha meditation here or you can study a more in depth Medicine Buddha course here.
Nice post
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