Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness tool, the Buddhist tradition has long recognized its inherent psychological and physical risks. We explore multi-tradition historical texts, the anatomy of practice crises, and the ethical responsibility of teachers and app developers to provide something along the lines of informed consent.

Key Discussion Points & Timeline

• Contrasting modern wellness marketing with historical accounts of meditative danger; the book provides a sourcebook for Dharma teachers, clinicians, and serious practitioners.

• Multi-Tradition Mapping throughout covers Pali, medieval Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan sources, many of which we touch on.
• Traditional sources diagnose destabilization and even offer a range of physical, energetic, and lifestyle remedies to mediate crisis: whether they would be a good fit for today’s practitioner is another matter.

• Challenging the modern claim that adverse effects only happen to the unprepared or mentally fragile.
• Classical lineages show that severe physical ailments and mental destabilization can happen randomly, even to advanced practitioners.

• The hidden risks of unmonitored, commercialized meditation apps.
• Why creators have an ethical duty to move past treating meditation as a risk-free panacea and offer clear safety guardrails.

• How different cultures draw the line between a spiritual breakthrough and clinical pathology.
• The ongoing project of integrating traditional remedies with modern psychology and neuroscience.

Links & Resources Mentioned

• The Book: Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice.
• Guest Website: here (Includes the book's introduction).

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.