The Contemplative Challenges Collaborative (CCC) is a team of meditation teachers and academic specialists who are knowledgeable about the traditional Buddhist approaches to the medical and psychiatric challenges that can arise in the course of meditation — conditions known variously as “meditation sickness,” “Zen sickness,” “spiritual crises,” “wind illnesses,” or other terms. Funded by the Robert Ho Family Foundation, we are involved in a multidisciplinary dialogue between September 2026 and July 2028. Major outputs from our collaboration will be posted here and on the “Meditation Sickness” website. You can also sign up for email updates to keep abreast of the project’s progress.

Project Structure & Timeline

Stage 1 of the project involves a year-long series of monthly Zoom meetings between teachers of different types of Buddhism who will highlight traditional approaches to diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of these conditions. Over the course of the year, participants will compare notes on how different traditions understand these issues, exploring synergies, connections, and differences between them. The goal is by the end of the year to come up with a shared vision, a common language, and a toolkit of practices for sufferers of meditation sickness that is derived from global Buddhist traditions. 

In Stage 2, the synthesis developed in Stage 1 will be workshopped by psychologists, psychiatrists, and other academic specialists in modern Western approaches at an in-person workshop. The goal here is to crossculturally translate the Buddhist interventions for contemporary Western contexts. The idea is to develop approaches that can be studied through scientific methods, while simultaneously staying true to the Buddhist backgrounds of these approaches and also making them accessible for modern English-speaking therapists, clinicians, educators, and Dharma teachers. 

Stage 3 will then be a commenting period where all participants in both previous phases can provide feedback and critical suggestions on the outputs of Stage 2, before the results of the collaborative are made publicly available here on this website.

A final stage, not yet funded, will involve collaborating with four or five major meditation organizations to distribute the protocol developed by the CCC to end-users (students, patients, clients, etc.) along with a feedback mechanism so we can empirically measure the protocol’s efficacy and make improvements to it. 

Phase I: Schedule & Recordings

Phase I is currently underway, and the recordings of our conversations will be posted here. You can also subscribe directly to the YouTube channel.

  • Sep 21, 2026 – Pierce Salguero (Introduction)
  • Oct 19 – Beth Upton (Theravada)
  • Nov 16 – Meido Moore (Zen)
  • Dec 21 – Damcho Finnegan (Tibetan Buddhism)
  • Jan 18, 2027 –  Tashi Rabten (Tibetan medicine)
  • Feb 15 – Rebecca Li (Chan)
  • Mar 15 – Stephen Mugen Snyder (Theravada & Zen)
  • Apr 19 – Leo Lok (Chinese Mahayana)
  • May 17 – JyHyang Padma (Korean)
  • Jun 21 – Justin con Bujdoss (Tibetan Buddhism)
  • Jul 19 – Tawni Tidwell (Tibetan medicine)
  • Aug 16 – Daniel Ingram (Contemporary)