Loading summary
Transcript76 lines
- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:08]
Lan Le
This is Black Barrel producer Lan Le, here to let you know that not all BBP episodes are syndicated on the New Books Network feed. To catch all of our episodes, you can subscribe directly wherever you get your podcasts. That's black, the color B E R Y L. Now onto the show.
- [01:30]
Susannah Dean
Foreign.
- [01:38]
Pierce Salguero
Welcome to the Black Barrel, a podcast with intelligent conversations about Buddhism, Asian medicine and embodied spirituality. I'm your host, Dr. Pierce Salguero, a professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State's Abington College outside of Philadelphia. Today, I sit down with Susannah Dean, a scholar of Tibetan medicine, Buddhism and psychiatry. Together, we delve into her work on Tibetan concepts of wind disorders and Tantric practice gone wrong. Along the way, we talk about losing control of spirits, becoming a deity, and how Tibetans choose between religious and medical specialists when spiritual practice goes off the rails. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Barrel wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check out our members only benefits on substack.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show. So, Susanna, great to see you. Thanks for making the time to pop in and do a recording.
- [02:53]
Susannah Dean
Thanks for having me.
- [02:54]
Pierce Salguero
Well, let's jump into all of your Work. Before we do that, why don't you just introduce yourself briefly and your academic credentials and so forth so our audience knows who they're listening to.
- [03:04]
Susannah Dean
So my name is Susannah Dean. I originally did an undergraduate degree in psychology and then coming out of that, I didn't really know what to do and I was interested in, I guess, different healing systems. So I trained as a massage therapist and I worked on and off doing that for quite a long time. In fact, all the way through until pretty much when I finished the PhD. I also spent quite a bit of time traveling around Asia, mostly India, Nepal and then eventually Tibet. And then during one of those periods, about nine years after finishing the undergraduate degree, while I was staying in, in East Tibet for six months, I decided to kind of go back to university, do something related to Tibet or Buddhism, and I did a master's in Buddhist study. And then following that I spent a year in Latha doing the foreign students Tibetan language program and then from there applied for the PhD. I did my PhD at Cardiff University with Jeffrey Samuel, who a lot of people will know his really interesting research across Tibetan religions, really, and then more going into medicine as well, and then decided eventually, really came back bit to psychology, thinking about Tibetan approaches to mental health and illness and looking a little bit about cross cultural approaches to psychiatry, kind of within that. That doctoral research as well.
- [04:22]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, I didn't actually know this detail about your previous experience as a massage therapist. That was my background too. I did that in between graduating from, from college and heading back to graduate school too.
- [04:35]
Susannah Dean
Yeah. Interesting.
- [04:36]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So in terms of your work, you've recently developed also a focus on, how do we say it, when. When spirituality goes wrong or when engaging in tantric practices and meditation and so forth, bleeds over into mental health problems in Tibetan culture known as wind disorders, lung or nyam, which is sort of like side effects or something like that, Right?
- [05:01]
Susannah Dean
Yeah. So I guess when I did the PhD research, I was looking quite broadly at Tibetan approaches to mental illness and really perspectives amongst Tibetans who were living specifically in Darjeeling. So people that had often had their schooling in English, so they'd had their kind of biology sort of education in English, but they also have a lot of Tibetan concepts of mind and body and health and illness. And a big part of that is wind as one of the three sort of energies or faults in the body of wind. VIOLIN PHLEGM Wind is the one that is most related to mental health because it is. Has this very close relationship to the consciousness and the mind. And so this is something that people talk about a lot. And one of the things that came up quite often was this idea that quite a common cause of madness, as people would talk about it, is Tantric practice gone wrong. So this is one of several explanations of kind of the causation of madness. But it's something that people talked about a lot. And that's why I decided with the postdoc research to kind of look specifically a madness, really, and these different ways in which it can be caused and therefore perhaps also treated. I don't know if you want me to talk about the. The causes in general, because there's also things about spirit afflictions or to really focus on wind Tantra. What's the most interesting.
- [06:19]
Pierce Salguero
I think we should get into all of it, but why don't we start sort of following the breadcrumbs just from your dissertation work to what we're talking about now? So your dissertation. And then the. And then the book that came out of that was. The book was published in 2018 called Tibetan Medicine, Buddhism and Psychiatry, Mental Health and Healing in a Tibetan Exile Community. And that's from Carolina Academic Press. And that's the book you were just talking about doing the interviews in Darjeeling. Why don't you set the table for us of the kinds of things that you are thinking about in that book in terms of kind of the relationship between Tibetan medicine and psychiatry more generally. This. These concepts of wind and how they. How they work and so forth, just so that we then have a kind of a baseline for understanding why it is that Tantric practice gone wrong might lead to madness. Right. You mentioned winds as being one of the three core sort of energies, or. Yeah, I don't know what the right word is for the Tibetan context.
- [07:20]
Susannah Dean
So, yeah, I think because they have come out of the Ayurvedic notion of the dosha, which is usually translated into English as humors. I think people often, traditionally in English have also translated them to humors. But it gives a bit of. It's a bit of a misnomer because I think it gives us an idea of the kind of the Greek humors. And it's not really like that. So I would say it's better to think about, like, energies. And actually they're not even necessarily substances, but more properties. Right. So wind is about motility and movement and space in the mind, body. And phlegm is about coldness and stickiness. So, you know, bile is about heat fluidity. So the reason that the wind and the mind are said to Be kind of tied together like a rider and his horse. So one needs the other for movement, and the other needs the first one for direction. So they go together. And so what we find is that when people talk about conditions and symptoms that we would, in kind of biomedical classification or Western psychology would think about as mental illnesses, like things like anxiety or low mood depression, they are often related to disruptions in the wind. So people would talk about things like if you're worrying a lot or if you're ruminating on something, you know, then you will get a disruption in the wind. You're disturbing the wind because of those sort of mental activities, I guess. And so people would talk about things in Darjeeling like, you know, I really worry about my son who lives in Delhi. And so, you know, I have, like, a wind problem because I'm always worrying about him. And it's kind of circular. So equally, if you get a wind problem, you also will get some essentially kind of psychological symptoms. And so, like the wind, bile and phlegm, any of them can become disrupted through all kinds of things, whether that's your own behavior, whether that is your diet, whether that is the climate, the season. Any of these kind of things can lead to, like, an increase, a decrease or a disturbance in any of those three kind of energies. And so when people talk about stresses and things like that, particularly. They will talk particularly about wind, about lung. And so, for example, when I was in Darjeeling, there was. There was an earthquake one day. And it was really quite significant. It was something like 6.9 on the Richter scale. It went on for about 45 seconds. It was very stressful. My only experience of a real earthquake. And actually, it was very lucky. There was nobody in Darjeeling was hurt or killed, but people were obviously very unsettled by it. And so when I talked to some Tibetan friends the next day, they were saying things like, I have really high wind, you know, because of my stress, my worry, my fear over this event. And we might see, like, wind illnesses are understood to get worse in certain climates. So when it's cold and also when it's rainy. So all these kind of things can feed into a disturbance with the wind.
- [10:09]
Pierce Salguero
What do you think? This metaphor of wind, I mean, so in English, we might just refer to all of the above as stress or anxiety or something like that. But there's, you know, in using this term lung, there's an invocation of a whole kind of metaphorical complex, right? That's different in Tibet than it would be, say, in an East Asian context, where all of this might be chalked up to chi, which would introduce a whole. A whole other kind of constellation of metaphorical kind of associations and so forth. So specifically, in the Tibetan context, evoking this metaphor of wind, does it allow a certain approach to managing these kinds of symptoms, or does it evoke certain kinds of, I don't know, parallels in nature or parallels that wouldn't necessarily be evoked by the English term stress or the Chinese kind of concept of qi or something?
- [11:02]
Susannah Dean
I guess one of the underlying things here is that the Tibetan concept of lung has conflated two separate Indian concepts. So we have. In Ayurveda, we have the notion of. Of wind, as in vata. So for out of the three dosha. And in Indian Tantra, we have the notion of prana, which we understand as it's often translated like life force, breath, that kind of thing. Right. And in the Tibetan tradition, these two things have kind of come back together. There's one concept and one term. But what it means is that you have this term being used in these two kind of parallel traditions of Tibetan medicine and Tibetan tantra that are very similar. And often they overlap, but sometimes they are, like, a little bit in conflict. And that is some. One of the reasons that we see these kind of issues with Tantric practice leading to wind problems and therefore, kind of mental health issues. So that's kind of a key aspect of it, I think, why it's kind of different, I guess, particularly from qi, that it conflates these two separate things and they don't always fit back easily together, if you like.
- [12:09]
Pierce Salguero
That reminds me a little bit about what we do in English when we translate all of these terms, prana, lung, qi, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, into energy. Right. We're kind of like conflating these very different medical and religious systems and worlds of thought. And we're. In English, we translate all of those. I mean, scholars tend to be more precise, but just ordinary sort of people, spiritual practitioners, massage therapists, will talk about energy and creating maybe a fluid conflation between, you know, are we talking about electricity? Are we talking about flows of sensation in the body? Are we talking about mental processes? Are we talking about physical processes? And it's like the term energy brings all of that together into one melting pot and allows you to make conflations. That might be. A lot of times scholars criticize that or critique that when it's Westerners doing it with the word energy. But you're pointing to sort of the Creative potential of conflations when one single translation term in the Tibetan case can bridge these two different fields that are sometimes compatible and sometimes not.
- [13:17]
Susannah Dean
Yeah, I mean, I think it's also. This is something, you know, these are topics that are really discussed in the Tibetan text as well. Right. And, you know, in. In some of the historical texts, we have Tibetan Buddhist scholars arguing about whether the central channel mentioned in the medical text is the same as the central channel mentioned in the Tantric text of their tradition. And there are debates and discussions about that. But then equally, in the kind of contemporary texts, amongst contemporary Tibet scholars, where they're medical or Buddhist scholars, often they're also sort of struggling to. To translate, you know, do we translate these channels in the body as nerves? Do we translate them as arteries? Do we translate them? Because they don't match perfectly with any of these kind of biomedical structures. And so it is a kind of an ongoing discussion, I guess, amongst a lot of people as to how, you know, how do you understand these. These descriptions of the body? And I think, particularly when we start to talk about Tantra, when, you know, we have this kind of map of the body that you use as your Tantric practice, where you're directing the flow of energy through channels in the body, they're not literally telling you that's what the body looks like if you cut it open, but they're giving you a way of working with energy within the body that is, perhaps it's going to be a little bit different from one tradition to the next, but there are shared ways of working with energy, I guess, across those different traditions.
- [14:41]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, I want to underline that a couple times. And I think that is a very common misunderstanding of subtle energy systems around Asia, where, particularly in sort of New Age circles or Western esoteric circles, they're understood to be sort of descriptions of reality, whereas in. In Asian systems of practice, these are normally. They're like templates, right, that you're. You're using this model in order to cultivate a certain kind of body, right. You're cultivating a certain sensitivity and a certain approach and sort certain changes and transformations in your body using these templates, right?
- [15:17]
Susannah Dean
Yeah, we have this idea of the, you know, the wind traveling through, sort of flowing through channels in the body. But when you start to do the Tantric practices aimed at manipulating them, you're also manipulating the bodhichitta, the mind of enlightenment. So you have these kind of things that are a substance, but also a certain state that can't be easily categorized as, you know, well, can I. Can I find that if I cut the body open, it's just a lot more kind of complicated than that.
- [15:43]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So you have this long history in Tibet of dialogue or conflict, tension between people who are coming at it from a more medical, concrete, physiological, even anatomical kind of perspective. And then on the other hand, people that are more spiritually oriented working with this in their tantric practice. And so I think this term wind is, like you've said, is doing all of this kind of work, sort of like both bridging between those two fields, but then also providing an area of contestation and kind of negotiation also.
- [16:13]
Susannah Dean
And I think one of the things as well that's particularly interesting is that wind, that lung has become politicized as well, particularly in exile in India and Dharamsala, but also in Lhasa a little bit as well, where the sort of, the notion of wind in relation to stress and anxiety and depression is related to in exile, the difficulties of living in exile and within Tibet, living in the current political situation in Tibet. And so you see quite a bit of research that's looked at Tibetans living in those different regions, the discussion about wind to really give space to the discussion about the difficulties of the current political situation. So that's a really interesting way in which that concept has taken on different meanings in quite recent years as well, I guess.
- [16:57]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. Cool.
- [17:02]
Susannah Dean
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [17:25]
WhatsApp Advertiser
Learn more@WhatsApp.com finally, in your wellness era, then you know gut health is gut wealth. And with 20 years of science behind it, Activia can help keep those good gut vibes going. Deliciously smooth and creamy Activia probiotic yogurts and dailies have billions of live and active probiotics and help support gut health while you go about your day. Your gut is where it all begins. So start with Activia. Enjoying Activia twice a day for two weeks as part of a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle can help reduce the frequency of minor digestive discomfort.
- [17:59]
Home Depot Advertiser
The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees. So you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor, like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot.
- [18:30]
Pierce Salguero
So I don't know how many mileposts we want to hit along the way with your publications. And you please let me know if you want to stop somewhere else. But I was going to shift forward to. So that book that we were just talking about came out in 2018. And then you and I and Kin Chung, we co edited together a volume that came out with University of Hawaii Press in 2024 called Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World. It was an edited volume with I don't know how many, 12 maybe different authors that were writing about various aspects of Buddhism and medicine from the modern and contemporary period. And your chapter in that book focused on the Amdo region. So that's. You were in Qinghai most in. In western China, right?
- [19:23]
Susannah Dean
Yes. So for my postdoctoral research, I was then in. Yeah. What is now Qinghai Province. So I was predominantly in Shining, which is the city, and then also traveling sort of mostly around the Repcong Valley, which is a couple of hours drive out of there, and some of the smaller Tibetan towns and villages around there.
- [19:41]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. And so you were looking at sort of this wind and navigation between medical and religious contexts and bodies of knowledge and so forth. But now in PRC in China.
- [19:54]
Susannah Dean
Yeah. So the project as a whole was focused on Tibetan notions of madness across medical and religious ideas about mind and body and health and illness. So in doing that doctoral research, it became clear that this was something that's really interesting, that there's not that much research on, and that there are a lot of religious explanations or spiritual explanations about the causes and the treatments for madness. And so I was doing this fieldwork in Amdo, and what was really interesting was to see, particularly, say, living in Shining, where there's some quite big Tibetan medicine institutions as well as some big biomedical institutes institutions, how people are navigating for these kinds of conditions, how people are navigating those different health systems, where there's all these different factors at play. So, for example, their own knowledge of the different medical systems, people's language, and the kind of practitioners they feel comfortable to go and see. Obviously, costs are always an issue as well, and how people are looking for diagnosis and treatment in this kind of context, particularly around Shining and Repcom, which is really interesting.
- [20:59]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. I think that approach fits really well with this book, which is kind of looking at both factors of globalization, also factors of, like, localization of Buddhist ideas and how, you know, there's tensions or navigations between tradition as well as both scientific but also political contexts, and how Buddhism plays a role in all of those dynamics when it comes to different approaches to health and healing. Most of the chapters focus on Buddhism and its role in healing and well being. But two of the chapters focus on the potential for negative, negative side effects of practicing Buddhism. And so there's a chapter by Ira Helderman that looks at how adverse meditation affects, which is a topic we've talked about in previous episodes on this podcast, how those are framed in popular media in the U.S. and then there's a chapter on modern Japan by Melissa Emory Curley about anxiety and labor and Buddhist ideas about adverse meditation effects. Your chapter touches a little bit on the subject of madness as a side effect or a result of Tantric practice. But this chapter was sort of produced at a time where you already were deep into an investigation into that particular question. Is there more of a backstory that you want to tell about the shift from focusing on psychiatry and madness to specifically this as a result of Tantric practice? Like, how did you come to that particular shift? What drew your attention?
- [22:29]
Susannah Dean
Because really, it was something that people, people just talked about all the time. People chat to you all the time and they ask, you know, oh, what are you doing here? And you say, I'm doing research on madness. And pretty much everyone I spoke to talked about one of the main causes of madness being, oh, you know, I know of this monk in my village who did his practice wrong and he was mad for years. So this is a really common explanation amongst within Tibetan communities. And it was something that I'd seen a little bit in the PhD research, which is why I was interest to look at it. And I mean, you can say in, in Tibetan understanding, there are, you know, a couple of key causes of madness, and one is spirit affliction. And that can be spirit possession, or it could be a spirit afflicting you from a distance. They don't have to kind of possess you. Or it is related to wind, predominantly. When we look at the. Those three energies, it's predominantly wind because, again, we're talking about things related to the mind and consciousness and, and the relationship of the mind to wind. And so people would talk about, I guess, everyday causes of wind imb. Like we were saying before of somebody becoming, you know, particularly worried about something, it's disturbing the wind, or if they're spending a lot of time on Their own. In their own head with their own thoughts that is disturbing the wind. And if somebody experiences some kind of life trauma or life stressors, like, you know, repeated bereavements, people would talk about this kind of thing that will impact the wind in the body. But also, if we're then looking at Tantric practice, you know, these practices are based around what are known as the Tsalung practices, the Channel wind practices, where you are manipulating the wind in the body in order to manipulate your consciousness towards enlightenment. So we can see then the link there that, you know, essentially, if you do your practices right, hopefully you become enlightened. The Tibetan tradition is very clear. But if you do them wrong, you are messing around with your own consciousness. So we can imagine that that's then in the same way, these other kind of disturbances to the mind, these kinds of manipulations of the mind, body manipulations of the wind and its sort of flow throughout the body is also going to lead to all kinds of symptoms that we would talk about in relation to madness. So people having hallucinations or visions or not feeling themselves behaving in very strange ways because they are starting to impact their own senses through these practices they're doing if they're not doing them right. And, yeah, the reason, I guess it's interesting is because people talk about it very openly. It's something that's very clear in a lot of the Buddhist texts, texts, but it's not something like, you know, that well known in amongst kind of Westerners who are interested in Buddhism. And we see now this growing research with Britain and Lindahl on this. But it's all quite recent, whereas it's very clear in the. In the Tibetan Buddhist text certainly that these are the kind of things that might happen when you're doing your Tantra practice.
- [25:13]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So we just had Jarrod Lindahl and Will be Britton on in a previous episode that hasn't. Hasn't dropped at the moment that we're talking. It hasn't come out yet, but say.
- [25:23]
Susannah Dean
I haven't seen that yet.
- [25:24]
Pierce Salguero
Okay, yeah, yeah, it's soon to come. But, yeah, I mean, this is one of the stark and fascinating differences. I think when I first encountered their research, it was as if Western meditation researchers anyway had just discovered this connection or this possibility that there's negative side effects to meditation. And my first reaction was like, everybody knows that. Right. Because I was coming out of a Chinese context where this has been written about for, you know, well over a thousand years. There's plenty of textual material, historical material, that I had been studying. And even in Chinese kung fu movies, there's. There's kind of like a trope of people going mad from being, from practicing too much martial arts or qigong or whatever. And it's a very well known, commonly talked about phenomena within monastic communities as well.
- [26:13]
Susannah Dean
When I was doing the PhD field work in Darjeeling, I had a Tibetan friend who had come into exile as a teenager and lived a long time in Dharamsala before moving to Darjeeling. And he was always laughing and saying to me, you know, if you really are interested in mental illness and madness, like, you should just go to Dharamsala because it's like full of inchenyumba, like kind of foreign crazies, you know, you said, you know, there's loads of them there. Why don't you just go there? You can get loads of interviewees. So there was this understanding from Tibetans as well that there are a lot of Westerners who are coming without that proper preparation, which again is very clear in the Buddhist text. You need all these kind of foundational practices, these initiations before you go into high level practices. And there are people going into these practices that are not ready for them. Perhaps it's not suitable for them and having a lot of different kind of mental health issues as a result of that. So, yeah, I think it's something that's not. It's not just that it's in the Buddhist text, but it's also something that's understood by pretty much every person I interviewed, whether they were a Buddhist monk or a Geshe or a lay Tibetan who just knew that this has happened to somebody, sometimes in their own family, people told me about, but otherwise in the local monastery and things like that. This is, is very well understood, I guess you would say.
- [27:22]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. What you were just saying about Dharamsala reminds me a little bit of Jerusalem syndrome, which is something that. I had never heard of this. But apparently the hospitals in Jerusalem routinely admit tourists who have come to Jerusalem on some kind of, you know, spiritual pilgrimage of some sort and have like a psychotic break. And it's a, it's a known phenomenon. I forget if it's dozens or hundreds of people per year that the hospitals, you know, diagnosed with this. But one of the things that strikes me is that the conversations taking place in the west, in English, between researchers like Jared Lindahl and Will be Britton, and the pushback that they're getting from Buddhist communities around this is usually like they're misunderstanding Buddhism or this can't possibly be true or there's some kind of methodological flaw with their research or something. I think introducing Asian perspectives on this topic, just that translation of these perspectives alone is helpful for kind of moving the dial on where people are with their understanding of this topic. Just to know that there's centuries of literature and also this is something that's very well known and very common and people have not only familiarity with, but insight and potentially even knowledge about prevention and treatment. You know, as you've now published this book earlier this year called Illness and Enlightenment, exploring Tibetan perspectives on madness in text and everyday life life. And that's from bergen Books in 2025. I think just that alone is a huge contribution.
- [28:57]
Susannah Dean
Thank you. Yes, it came out in February and so I guess like a lot of academic projects a little later than I was hoping, but it's really great to have it done and I. Yeah. And really enjoyed it as a project.
- [29:08]
Pierce Salguero
So meditators aren't going to read your book and come away with like an easy guide to navigating these kinds of situations, but getting some broader cultural perspective might be helpful. Meanwhile, those of us that are interested in Asian medicine and Buddhism and the kind of the connections between the two are going to be fascinated by your work, I think. I think your work is really sort of extremely important in that particular area.
- [29:33]
Susannah Dean
Yeah, I mean, I guess it whilst is mostly sort of talking to anthropologists, Tibetan studies, Buddhist studies, it is also part of a bigger conversation about cross cultural approaches to psychology and psychiatry. And I think, you know, when I did my psychology degree in the 90s, my undergraduate degree, you know, there was no kind of mention of different cultural approaches to mind and mental health or anything like that. Right. It was. Well, we used to believe in Freud, but don't worry, we found behaviorism, everything. Now we don't worry, we've got the answer now we have the biomedical model. And so I think, you know, it's not just about things that are happening over there, Right. Or those people over there understand things in a different way, but they've kind of got it wrong. We need to really be looking, I think at having more understanding of the different ways people understand their own experience in relation to their own ideas about mind and body, about health and illness, about healing. So part of that bigger picture as well, I think.
- [30:26]
Pierce Salguero
I think it also opens up possibilities, right, like particularly for people who are involved in meditation, involved in serious kinds of spiritual practice within a Asian tradition, particularly perhaps for people that are practicing Buddhism. I think, I think really should to Put it strongly. I think they really should pick up your book and take a look at and listen to Tibetan perspectives on how and why these kinds of problems arise and what might be done about it. All right, so why don't we get into it a little bit with how it is that somebody can run into trouble.
- [30:58]
Susannah Dean
So yeah, so there's a number of ways that I guess you could say that things would go wrong. And I think really key is the Tibetan idea that, you know, Tantric practice is like high risk, high reward. Right. The idea is that it's, from the Tibetan perspective, it's the only Buddhist tradition that is going to can get you enlightened within one lifetime. And so the practices are very complex. They are understood to be difficult. And that's why within the tradition, you know, in a sense that the practices and the teachings are quite tightly controlled. You would be taught traditionally on a one to one basis from teacher to student. And your teacher should be able to kind of assess like how you are doing and when you're ready for the next stage of practices. And so there are, are very lengthy, often like months long initiatory practices and preliminary practices that might involve, for example, like 10,000 prostrations, so physical activities as well as mental activities as well. And so one of the ways that people, and particularly in Ando, talked about people going wrong with their practice was that they had kind of skipped some of this. So sometimes people talked to interviewees, talked about someone who wasn't a monk, wasn't a Tantric practitioner, but they had found a book of Tibetan Buddhism and they were interested and so they picked it up and they started trying to do some of the practices. Other times people talked about, you know, perhaps a monastic practitioner going ahead of their, what their teacher is telling them to do, whether that is through enthusiasm or through arrogance for thinking, you know, I'm ready for this next stage, I don't need to wait for these kind of long instructions. Right. And so one of the key things is, I guess, a lack of foundational understanding in Buddhism. So when people talk about these being high level practices, you need to have really, really good understandings of Buddhist concepts like emptiness. And if you start to go into high level practices where you are trying to destroy attachment to your own body, you're imagining yourself as a deity, you're trying to transform yourself into a deity in the middle of its pure Buddha land. If you don't have those really foundational understandings of basic Buddhist concepts, you are going to start having having issues where you might get confused by what you're experiencing during the practice and things like that. And so people would talk often about concept of nun talk, which I mean, in the Buddhist texts it sort of would be translated, I guess as kind of preconceptions. So the preconceptions of an unenlightened mind. So you're not truly seeing things as they really are, unlike when you're enlightened, when you would. But in colloquial Tibetan, it's used to mean kind of doubt or suspicion. So for example, if you don't have a good foundation or understanding of emptiness, you can start doing these high level Tantric practices is you start to have visions and things like that that you would expect to have if you're doing your practices right. But if you haven't got this good foundational teaching, this good foundational understanding, people start to have non talk. So they would start to doubt the practice, they would start to doubt themselves and their own ability. And then they might spiral into a bit of a panic. And then of course you're starting to get wind problems and things like that because you're starting to get anxious, you're starting to get stressed. So that's one of the ways people talk about it, this idea of numb talk equally when people are dealing with spirits. So if you're doing what's known as chud practice is a practice that was founded by Maciek Labdrun in the 11th century. And it's where the practitioner goes usually on their own to a cremation ground and they go through a long ritualized sort of visualization of cutting up their own body, tossing their intestines into their skull and things like that, and then inviting the spirits to come and feed on their body as, as offerings. Now if you don't have a really clear understanding of the nature of spirits, people talk about, well, you know, this person, they did this practice and then they started to panic because they lost control of those spirits. And so people again have this idea of Namtok. They haven't got a good understanding of the nature of reality and they start to go into a panic because they're dealing with spirits they don't fully understand from a Buddhist perspective. And that's another way people start to have doubts and fears that then can lead to all kinds of problems.
- [35:08]
Pierce Salguero
That's fascinating. Can you summarize the proper way of thinking about spirits in that context?
- [35:14]
Susannah Dean
That's a really complicated question. It's really interesting. What I found doing the field work is that some people, some of my Tibetan interviewees would talk about spirits in very tangible terms, like they are beings that can come in and afflict you. They can possess you, they can make you sick in all kinds of different ways equally. People talk about spirits as being the problems within your own mind, right? The kind of the fundamental psychological forces of sort of hatred and aversion and those kind of pride, arrogance, those kind of things. And I guess from a Buddhist perspective, they can be both of those things, right? And what you find is people talk about them in different ways in different contexts sometimes. And ultimately, I guess you could say that spirits are as real as you or I are real, which is ultimately not that real. Would that be the conclusion? Maybe, yeah.
- [36:00]
Pierce Salguero
I mean, this view of spirits is being able to see the. See it both ways is universal in Buddhist cultures, as far as I'm aware. I mean, emptiness is form, form is emptiness. Some cultures are more kind of lean on one side or the other. But it does. It does seem to be a Buddhist perspective on spirits is that, yeah, they're both external entities and also projections of your own mental constructions.
- [36:23]
Susannah Dean
So the other way that you're going to become potentially mad or have all kinds of other. It's not just madness, it's all kinds of symptoms and illnesses I guess you can get from doing your practices wrong is simply in the kind of the misdirection of the winds in the body. Body. So we talk about this idea of manipulating the consciousness through manipulating the wind, like manipulating the consciousness towards enlightenment. And so fundamental to some of those channel wind practices, those Tsalung practices, is sort of manipulating the flow of the energy of the wind from the side channels into the central channel of the body. So we have the central channel of the body sort of running down the middle of the torso. And then each side of that, we have one side channel, the left channel, and the right channel channel. We can talk about karmic winds which reside in the side channels, and the wisdom wind, the wind of an enlightened mind which resides in the central channel. You are trying to transform the karmic winds into wisdom wind in the central channel. So one of the reasons this is a little bit complicated is that we go back to these kind of twin traditions that this Tibetan notion of wind has come from. So in the medical tradition, we have the central channel called the soktza, right? It's the kind of the life channel in the center of the body. Body. In the Tibetan Tantric traditions, we have the tsawuma, which is also a central channel. And so we find in the. Some of the Buddhist texts, long discussions about whether these medical and tantric traditions are describing the same central channel or if they are two separate channels. And so some of the texts will talk about if you misdirect your winds into the kind of medical central channel rather than the tawuma, that's when the wind is going to become stuck there and it's going to cause all kinds of problems with the circular of wind through the body that's particularly related to mental health, functioning, mental health and illness and the different kind of symptoms related to that.
- [38:15]
Pierce Salguero
So just to pause there and think about where this tantric system is coming from. It's coming from India. The medical system is mostly coming from India, but also has a lot of inputs from China and also, also from Islamic medicine and, you know, local traditions and so forth. The tantric system is largely coming from India. Tantric Buddhism is similar to, but different than Tantric Hinduism that some of our listeners might be familiar with. So we're talking here about a Tibetan adaptation of a Buddhist model of the subtle body that is somewhat similar to the kind of central channel, Shishumna and Ita Bingala, with the chakras and the kundalini and so forth, from what many people know of as sort of the Hindu tantric world. Can you give us sort of like, paint a picture of this template real quick? You know, just quickly describe, like, the Tibetan Buddhist tantric subtle body system. What are the components of it?
- [39:07]
Susannah Dean
So in both the medical and the tantric Tibetan systems, we have this idea of a kind of a depiction of the body with thousands of channels running throughout it through which the wind flows. And then we have chakras or energy centers that are often depicted as situated down the central channel. And so they are points through which those side channels intersect with the central channel kind of down the center of the body. Body. But what's interesting is that there are really some differences in the different tantric and medical texts descriptions of this. So some systems will talk about three chakras, some will talk about seven chakras, some will talk about hundreds of chakras. So again, we get back to this idea that this isn't necessarily descriptive, but it is instructive. Right? It's a way of conceptualizing the body and how it works and how you can use it towards enlightenment, particularly in the tantric system. And certainly. So you can see different depictions, I guess. Of course, we see the ones with the seven chakras, which is what's been popularized in Western interpretations of, I guess, Indian traditions, particularly and we see those kind of pictures a lot in New Age spirituality of kind of seven chakras, but that is just one. That's just one of the many depictions, one of the many systems. And so there's quite a bit of variety between them.
- [40:26]
Lan Le
Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy. Energy perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid Ivy's new energy multiplier, sugar free. Unlike other energy drinks, you know, the ones that make you feel like you're glitching, it's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes, so you get the boost without the burnout. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier, sugar free hydrating energy. Tap the banner to learn more.
- [40:55]
Pierce Salguero
So I was just thinking that there's. There's some really beautiful depictions of the medical subtle body system in the Blue Barrel Tonkas. This set of paintings that was done in the, I guess the turn of the 17th to 18th century that tried to make a catalog of all of the medical knowledge of the time. And the subtle body system with the chakras and channels and so forth, is one of the Tonkas, actually, I think more than one of the Tonkas.
- [41:22]
Susannah Dean
Yeah, we do see the sort of depictions, and I guess it's that kind of thing that encourages people to think about them as descriptive. Right. But yeah, these are, I guess, sort of this one representation of the body that you would see in one Tantric tradition, and you would see a slightly different representation on a similar theme in a different Tantric teaching tradition. And so we do see quite a bit of diversity between them.
- [41:43]
Pierce Salguero
So we like to give little bonus gifts for our members in our members only area of substack. And maybe I'll put a scan of the subtle body system from the Blue Barrel Tonkas in there along with some other goodies. I'm sure you have something, something maybe a chapter from the book or something else that we can give to people too, there.
- [42:04]
Susannah Dean
Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. Think what would be good to include. That would be nice.
- [42:08]
Pierce Salguero
Okay, so these are the causes. And now I think you've given us a fair depiction of the kinds of symptoms or problems that can arise. I don't know if there's any kind of categories of problems that we've missed so far, but you've talked about the psychological, the psychophysical. Oh, maybe just like physical illnesses is a category that we haven't really gotten into yet.
- [42:30]
Susannah Dean
So, yeah, I'm gonna say I don't know too much other. It's more people talk about physical symptoms in the kind of minor ways. I don't know so much about the kind of actual physical illnesses. I.
- [42:41]
Pierce Salguero
Okay, maybe that's a cultural difference because in the Chinese material there's definitely like whole lists of physical symptoms. So did you get into it with people about prevention and treatment?
- [42:53]
Susannah Dean
Yes, I guess the prevention is, is what we've been talking about, which is that, you know, you should be following your teacher's guidance. Your teacher should be able to gauge where you're at with your abilities, with your kind of growing skills and things like that. And the treatments are going to be mixed depending on what seems to be going on. So for example, if we're talking, which we are in most of these cases, we're talking about disruptions in the wind in the body, then it makes sense that you could take Tibetan medicines for wind illnesses, right? Because maybe your wind is too high, so you would take Tibetan medicine for that. Equally you might have particular dietary sort of specifications from a Tibetan doctor. They'll tell you. So for wind illness you would have things like having meat, bone, broth, eggs, things like that, like warming foods which would be prescribed for or sort of advised for any kind of wind illness usually. But they are also going to be relevant here because you have got a disturbance in your wind. Equally, you might do some physical things to sort of bring the wind down. So your teacher might get you to do some, some of the more kind of physical practices and to take a break and do something different. Different to sort of get everything to come back to a sort of level again, I guess. But what's quite interesting is that often people won't go to a Tibetan doctor. So we could talk about these things being in the Tibetan medical text, in the Gyuji, particularly in the Four Tantras text, where it talks about, you know, all the different kinds of treatments for wind illness. Like what we were just saying, particular dietary suggestions, particular behavioral things, like being in a warm place, being people kind of taking care of you, looking after you. But in reality, a lot of people are just going to get advice from their Tantric teacher who will know a lot of these things anyway from their own practice, their own training, and will quite often give them a mix of like, sort of things like that to do, which you could say are more on the medical side and also actual practices that are designed to kind of calm down the wind and things like that as well. You know, a bit more what, what I talked about in the chapter for our co edited volume, which is that people tend not to go so much to Doctors for this, where these kinds of. Kinds of conditions and madness in general. Even though there's a lot of stuff in the. In the Tibetan medical text about this, this is often seen by patients and their families. As, you know, this is a spiritual problem, this is a religious problem, therefore we go to a religious practitioner for treatment.
- [45:12]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. And I'll just mention that the name of the chapter in that book is for this kind of thing, the Llama is better. Right. In quotes. Right. So this is like, you analyze how people make the decision between religious versus medical practitioners and why they prefer to go to religious practitioners for this, which, again, I think is super relevant for contemporary Western. I know that's not your specialty, but it's on my mind because we've been talking with Jared and Willoughby. It's on my mind right now. But the notion of where to draw the line between something needing clinical medical intervention versus being able to be dealt with within a spiritual community I think is something that's. It's a relevant question. I'm not making a prescriptive statement about where to draw that line, and I don't know that Westerners would necessarily agree with Tibetans on where to draw that line, but the fact that there is a decision to make, and I think.
- [46:02]
Susannah Dean
Like I talked about in that chapter, there's a lot of factors that kind of play into this. So in traditional Tibetan medicine, they talk about wind illnesses needing. The person suffering needs to be in a calm place, a quiet place, a warm place where people are speaking gently to them, where people are taking care of them and they're. They're having these things to eat. And then when you look at what the modern Tibetan medicine hospital looks like in Chinning, for example, it looks very much like a modern biomedical hospital with, you know, a ward full of people and it's quite noisy. And so people often said to me, well, you know, we wouldn't take somebody who's got madness from wind illness to the Tibetan medicine hospital because the environment is totally wrong for that. Right. It's not quiet, it's not calm, it's not warm. And so there's all these different kind of factors about how Tibetan medicine is. Is practiced today in different places in different Tibetan communities, that also how people make those decisions around health seeking and treatment. And there's often this, as we're saying, this sense that, like, well, it's not a medical problem, it's a, you know, this result of religious practice. So therefore I go to my religious teacher. And so that's often, you know, really what's at the forefront for people. And then perhaps if those things don't work and it seems like more of a crisis situation, then they might take the person to Tibetan Medicine Hospital or perhaps to a biomedical psychiatric hospital as well. But that's sometimes seen as the kind of the last resort after they've tried those other things.
- [47:24]
Pierce Salguero
Why don't you tell us a little bit about the process of doing ethnography around these particular questions? Because these are, these are really sensitive questions. Right. And here you are, you know, a British anthropologist. You stand out a little bit, I think, in Shanghai or in Darjeeling. No doubt you've developed long term relationships with people over time. But just what does that process look like?
- [47:47]
Susannah Dean
I mean, the main thing is that, you know, I wasn't setting out in either place to interview you people who have experienced, you know, mental health crises. Of course, what happens is that, you know, you start to meet people and you explain the research you're doing and then it turns out that, you know, one of their close relatives perhaps has experienced something like this. I guess the key things with the kind of the ethical processes for that is that I'm not seeking patients in Darjeeling. I had a psychiatrist that I interviewed say, oh, you know, I could just put you in touch with one of my patients. Like, why don't you just go and knock on his door? Okay? I don't feel I can do that. I don't think my university would like me to do that. Right. That doesn't feel. Would probably be fairly unremarkable to the person themselves because that's not an unusual way to, to get to know people, for example, in Darjeeling. But I wouldn't feel good about doing that. So I don't do that. But it is true that as you chat to people about your research, they say, oh, you know, I should tell you about my father because he had this period of madness a few years ago where he really went completely mad. And let me explain to you what happened. I leave it open, really. I'm just asking people for their perspectives, like, what do you think about this thing? You know, they talk about madness. Madness. It leaves space for people to really, you know, take as much or as little as they want. And what I found was that people were very open actually about talking about this topic. I did hear about people's relatives. I heard about people they knew in their own community. And yeah, people were quite open about this. They were just interested to discuss it and to ask, oh, well, you know, how would this be understood in England. People often want to say, or, you know, well, what do they do about that in England? So you can have some really interesting discussions. And coming from my own perspective of fairly critical of biomedical psychiatry and the biomedical model and even some of the more recent biopsychosocial models of psychiatry and mental health, this is really interesting as well, that you can have really interesting, kind of quite complex conversations about those things. So I guess the, you know, the ethical approach is that you just go into it quite open. I'm not asking anyone about their personal experience of their own mental health, but people often are very open to kind of chat about this topic quite openly, in my experience.
- [49:51]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So you mentioned that you're, you know, critical of the biomedical system. And I'm, I'm wondering what findings, what perspectives, what ideas arise out of your ethnographic research that, that you think are relevant to a critique of biomedicine?
- [50:07]
Susannah Dean
I think, I mean, this was more my original PhD research and a lot of my PhD thesis, quite a bit of which I took out of my. Then the book that I turned it into, because it is, it doesn't go.
- [50:18]
Pierce Salguero
Back and I got to read your thesis.
- [50:21]
Susannah Dean
Yeah. What's relevant to this particularly is the different ways that biomedicine is practiced in different places. Right. When we look at how psychiatry, for example, is practiced in Darjeeling, it's quite different to how psychiatry is practiced here in Bath, for example. So we see already the different kinds of pressures that are on doctors working ostensibly from the same system, but in different circumstances, in different locations, and what that means in terms of practice. And so I think that's kind of really interesting because. Because, you know, there are a lot of questions about, I guess, the cross cultural validity of biomedical psychiatry and Western psychology. You know, how well do they fit in other cultural contexts. But also the fact that the psychiatry being practiced in Darjeeling is not the same as the psychiatry being practiced in London. The psychiatry being practiced in Shining is different, again due to all these different kinds of factors. Not to mention the fact, I guess, that it is. Yeah, it is a questionable, you know, these are questionable models. There is a lot of discussion, discussion, you know, within Western psychiatry and psychology about the validity of diagnoses, about the changing nature of diagnoses, about the kind of the diagnoses that come and go and how they come about. What does that mean then for people with completely different ideas about mind and body and health and illness in different cultural contexts? And what does that mean for how they get treated? So I guess there's a lot of ethical questions that I find really interesting.
- [51:44]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah, fascinating. So, Susanna, what is your relationship with Tantric practice or with Buddhist practice?
- [51:53]
Susannah Dean
So, I mean, I guess the short answer is that I'm a little bit lazy and impatient and I do find it hard to sustain a, you know, to really keep at a practice. But the slightly longer answer is that now that I've done this kind of research where really, I mean, not in my own research, but looking at say Britain and Linda's and other people's research from Western psychology, we see people having mental health issues from often, you know, mindfulness. We're not just talking about high level Tantra practices, right? These, these are quite low level practices sometimes people are doing. And having had mental health problems myself as a teenager and feeling like the, I guess the level mental health that I've had now for quite a long time, but it feels quite hard won and I would now be much more wary than I would have been when I was younger. And now that I've done this research, I'll be a lot more wary about going into kind of more regular practice, I guess just to just be a little bit cautious maybe about my own mental health.
- [52:47]
Pierce Salguero
Mental health, I think that's really important. I think that kind of self reflection and, and sort of self awareness and knowledge and caution, I think is very much warranted given what we know about the dangers of these kinds of practices, even at small doses, even at introductory level mindfulness courses. So what's next for you then? I mean, is this area of research going to continue to attract your attention? Are you shifting gear years?
- [53:16]
Susannah Dean
No, I think so. I think obviously I contributed a chapter to your forthcoming volume on meditation sickness and I'm working on another one and I do think, yeah, it, it is really interesting. I do feel a little bit of responsibility, which I think you were saying at the beginning as well, to give these, you know, Asian perspectives. Right, to give these Tibetan perspectives. To not have the narrative be kind of from the sort of the Western psychology side to sort of really be talking about what does this look like from Tibetan perspective? What does this, what does it say in Tibetan Buddhist text? How do you know Tibetans and contemporary communities understand this stuff? Because this is something that's well, you know, well understood by people. Like I saying, it's not just, you know, the geshes that will explain this to you. Pretty much everyone I interviewed told me a story about somebody they knew of, you know, within their community, if not within their own family, that this had happened to. And so I think it's something where there's a lot more scope to really look at it a bit more and to, yeah, investigate a little bit more what's in the text as well as how these things are kind of understood in contemporary communities as well.
- [54:17]
Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So how can people follow along with you if they're interested in your work and want to keep updated?
- [54:23]
Susannah Dean
So I have tried to keep everything on academia Edu, but that's a good reminder that I will, I will make sure that's updated and I'm on LinkedIn if people want to find me there. And so I'm not great at the online stuff and I'm trying to be a bit better with those, those aspects of it.
- [54:41]
Pierce Salguero
Fabulous. We'll, we'll put a bunch of links to your work in the show notes here, both monographs of yours that we've been talking about, but also the edited volume and, you know, a couple other article and other things. And then as usual, we'll put some PDFs of articles that are otherwise maybe inaccessible. We'll put them in the members only area of our substack, which is linked in the show Notes as well.
- [55:02]
Susannah Dean
I mean, I guess this is these are Tibetan medicine itself is quite a small, you know, research area. So it's really nice for. Yeah. To get the research out there for people to be interested. These topics, it's growing. But again, they're quite small research circles. Right. I think things so it's, it's nice to meet people who are interested in any kind of fashion in this kind of research and these kind of topics and to connect with them for sure.
- [55:25]
Pierce Salguero
Well, fabulous having you here. Thank you so much. Really great conversation and thanks for sharing your research and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.
- [55:32]
Susannah Dean
Thank you.
- [55:41]
Lan Le
That's it for today from us at the Black Barrel Podcast. If you're listening to us on one of our partner podcasts, you can subscribe directly to us for ad free episodes or look us up on substack to check out members only benefits. This episode is hosted by Pierce Algaro and produced and edited by Me Lan Le. Our music is by Jonathan Pettit. Until next time, be happy, be safe and be well.
- [56:09]
Susannah Dean
Sam.