In this episode, Le Trente founder and host Anne V. Mühlethaler welcomes Oana Budica, a Chinese medicine physician, acupuncturist, and herbal medicine practitioner based in Geneva, Switzerland. Originally from Romania, Oana has spent over a decade moving between clinical medicine and serious contemplative training, and the conversation moves freely between both worlds. She spent training across multiple Asian contemplative traditions, including completing two full vassa retreats in Theravāda monasteries in Thailand and Myanmar under the guidance of Pa-Auk Sayadaw, one of the most respected teachers of systematic concentration practice alive today. They begin, as Anne likes to, with childhood. Oana's story starts in the Romanian forests, picking mushrooms with her grandfather, a leather-hat-wearing adventurer Anne imagines as the Indiana Jones of the Carpathians. It is an image that carries through the whole conversation, because Oana's path has been anything but cautious. A comment from a friend at 19 (that she had a big ego) sent her on a journey of self-discovery that took her to India, where she found her teacher. Later, Oana decided to study Shiatsu, acupuncture, and eventually earning a diploma in classical Chinese herbal medicine under Dr A. Lewis, whose lineage-based approach to pulse diagnosis remains one of the things that still surprises Oana in her own practice. Patients ask her: how did you know that? She finds herself asking the same question. Anne and Oana also spend time on the less mappable parts of her formation, meeting her teacher, discovering meditation, yoga philosophy and silent retreats. It was in that silence, specifically in a cave in the Himalayas at 3,500 metres, cooking on open fires, bathing in hot springs between sessions, that Oana discovered something she carries as a north star: the kind of joy and happiness that does not depend on material circumstances. Her “alive” question — the one threading through both the clinic and her own life — is this: how do we stay aligned with what truly matters in order to create the life we are dreaming of? Anne and Oana trace it through Oana's patients, many of whom arrive with burnout, anxiety, and a kind of unnamed emptiness. They also push into what meditation is and is not — not suppression, not spiritual bypassing, not indifference to a difficult world. Oana describes it as effort that eventually becomes effortlessness, and as a way to work with anger, not away from it. In Chinese medicine, she reminds us, anger is fire. It can calcify in the body, or it can be transformed into creativity, into action, into something that moves through rather than settles in. Oana closes the conversation with a short guided breath practice, live on air. And somewhere along the way, Anne discovers that Oana sang in front of 16,000 people at the age of nine, and is also a free diver. This is that kind of conversation. Connect with Oana: LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/oana-budica-60032827a/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oanabelove/ At Biomed MTC in Geneva: https://biomed-mtc.ch/en/our-therapeuts-biomed-mtc/oana-budica-therapeute-biomed-mtc/ The Mettā Interview: Website: https://LeTrente.com/the-metta-interview Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5204m0Z8im7uQOfFG5mk6L Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-metta-interview/id1832511055 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMettaInterview The Mettā View newsletter: https://themettaview.com Selected linksLe Trente: https://LeTrente.com
