Meditation Sickness

“Winds in the Heart: Tibetan Geksel Practices for Healing Insecurity and Anxiety.” In Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. Edited by C. Pierce Salguero. University of Hawai’i Press. 2026

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By the eleventh century, Tibetans began to design, describe, and apply contemplative practices to intentionally dispel obstructions (gegs sel) that emerge during meditative experience. Such kinds of emergent experiences include mental and bodily pains and disorders as well as external adversarial forces and circumstances. These remedial contemplative interventions for dispelling all kinds of obstructions were recorded by Tibetan practitioners as experiential guidance (myong khrid), compiled in anthologies, and circulated amongst communities of meditation practitioners. While some of these remedial treatments are prescribed antidotally to specific emergent remakable meditative experiences (nyams), typically those that arise from tantric practices, others are generically applied to symptoms such as headaches, depression, gout, and so forth. These written procedural instructions became integral to a contemplative life and were included in meditation guidance manuals (khrid yig) and instructions on how to conduct a mountain retreatant (ri chos). This chapter presents select practices of dispelling obstructions in translation drawn from two important Tibetan language anthologies, The Great Anthology of Practices for Dispelling Obstructions (Gegs sel chen mo) by Jikten Gönpo Rinchen Pel (1143-1217) and A Garland of Gems: Direct Instructions for Dispelling Obstructions (Gegs sel gyi man ngag nor bu’i phreng ba) by Minyak Drakap Dorjé (d. 1491).