I have received a major grant from the Robert Ho Family Foundation to launch an initiative called the Contemplative Challenges Collaborative (CCC). This is a team of specialists who are knowledgeable about the traditional Buddhist approaches to the medical and psychiatric challenges that can arise in the course of meditation. Members of the CCC are convening between September 2026 and July 2028, and all major outputs will be posted here. You can also sign up for email updates to keep abreast of the project’s progress.

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. 

More information is coming soon! Stay up to date.