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Jul 6, 2026
Meditation Sickness and the Dangers of Buddhist Practice with Pierce Salguero
Summary
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).
Related Topics
Your Host
Matthew O'Connell
Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect Buddha podcast. You can find The Imperfect Buddha on Facebook and Twitter (@imperfectbuddha).
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