Everyone knows that meditation is good for your health and well-being. However, a percentage of people practicing meditation experience psychotic breaks and related adverse mental and physical side effects. Are these symptoms of improper practice or an unavoidable part of spiritual cultivation? While contemporary scientific literature is just beginning to document such phenomena, Buddhist communities have for centuries warned practitioners about “meditation sickness,” “wind illness,” “demonic attack,” and other potential dangers. Due to language barriers, their important writings have remained virtually unknown in Western medical, scientific, and practitioner communities. Here, for the first time, historical and contemporary teachings on the topic from around the Buddhist world have been brought together. The works not only identify these ailments as possible side effects of meditation practice, but also explain why they arise and how they can be effectively prevented and treated. Meditation Sickness will transform the way we think about meditation in the West.

• C. Pierce Salguero, Editor

  C. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and cross-cultural exchange. He teaches at Penn State University’s Abington College and has been editor in chief of Asian Medicine: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine since 2016.

Contributors

• C. Pierce Salguero
• Bryan De Notariis
• Bhikkhu Anālayo
• Charles DiSimone
• Eric M. Greene
• James A. Benn
• Paul L. Swanson
• David Carpenter
• Michael Sheehy
• Juhn Ahn
• Leslie E. De Vries
• Leo Lok
• Daniel M. Stuart
• Swe Swe Mon
• Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
• Dixuan Chen
• Francisco Figueroa Medina
• Trang T. D. Nguyen
• Céline Coderey
• Daphne Weber
• Nathan Jishin Michon
• Kin Cheung
• Susannah Deane
• Ben Philip Joffe
• Ira Helderman
• Willoughby Britton
• David J. Cooper
• Nathan E. Fisher
• Jared Lindahl

• Meditation Sickness provides a much-needed corrective to an idealized view of meditation by documenting the long history of Asian Buddhist discourse around the etiology, symptoms, and treatments for meditation-related difficulties. The context and perspectives presented across its chapters lay to rest the myth that the ‘dangers’ of meditation are due to incorrect practice or a flawed practitioner, while also offering guidance that could help meditators-in-distress today. The book authoritatively sets the record straight: meditation has never been without risks or harms, and difficulties can arise even under optimal circumstances.
  —Nicholas Canby, Brown University; Senior Clinician, Cheetah House
• I wish Meditation Sickness had been out twelve years ago when I started researching the effects of meditation. It should be mandatory reading for all mindfulness researchers, clinicians, and teachers. Reports and discussion of meditation's adverse effects have a long history that takes us back to early Buddhism. The older accounts translated here are impressively similar to many contemporary ones and offer us a wonderful opportunity to better understand human consciousness.
  —Miguel Farias, University of Oxford, author of The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?
• This volume is of not only great importance as it will help support a necessary conversation about the adverse effects of meditation but also great value because it compiles in one place a truly arresting array of texts, interviews, and ethnographic material on the subject. The result is a refreshing and original approach in Buddhist studies.
  —Amy Langenberg, Eckerd College
• Meditation Sickness will serve as an unprecedented resource for researching and teaching courses on the relationship between Buddhism and medicine, Buddhist meditation more broadly, and historical and cultural approaches to disease.
  —William A. McGrath, New York University