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- [00:01]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Close your eyes.
- [00:02]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Exhale, Feel your body relax and let
- [00:05]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
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- [00:14]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry.
- [00:18]
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- [00:24]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Namaste.
- [00:25]
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- [00:28]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
1-800-contacts.
- [00:30]
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- [00:58]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Experian welcome the New Books Network.
- [01:06]
Lan Lee
This is Black Barrel producer Lan Lee, here to let you know that not all BPP 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.
- [01:35]
Dr. 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 Dr. Tawny Tidwell, a biocultural anthropologist and Tibetan medicine doctor at the center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Together, we How Tibetan Medicine approaches challenges that arise in the course of meditation. Along the way, we talk about reconnecting with indigenous knowledge, establishing a more intimate relationship with the body and the land, and the importance of social context in supporting spiritual practice. 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 to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show. Well, so, yeah, thank you so much for being here.
- [02:49]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, thanks for inviting me.
- [02:50]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
It's really good to meet you in person. I know we've exchanged emails.
- [02:53]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
I know that's secretly actually why I said yes, because I Felt like it was probably time.
- [02:58]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah, I think a good place to start would just be for you to introduce yourself very briefly before we jump in.
- [03:05]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Sure. So my name's Tani Tidwell. I'm a research assistant professor at center for Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I'm a biocultural anthropologist, which means I think a lot about how culture gets under the skin and how beliefs, practices, environment change the biology and our perceptions. I'm also a Tibet medical physician, so I see patients privately three mornings a week and did my training three years at Mensikang in North India and three years in Eastern Tibet and Ando at Sotuklong Qinghai University and my residency and internship there. And I specialize in cancer, various metabolic conditions and kind of the whole gamut.
- [03:43]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah, so that's quite a bit of education, both in medical practice and also in anthropology. I mean, these are, these are serious, serious degrees on both sides of the so called divide there. Maybe I think of it more as a bridge, like on both sides of the bridge. You've got quite a impressive resume. I'm curious, just maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you fell into becoming a specialist in Tibetan culture, Tibetan medicine, medical anthropology. Was that something that you kind of grew up with? Was this something that you studied in college? Or where did your path begin with all of this?
- [04:16]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Where did it come from? I was a science nerd as a kid and I wanted to be an astronaut, so I wanted to go into aerospace medicine. I was very interested in the body in extreme conditions. Uh, growing up for the first part of my life in South Korea, my dad was an army doctor, orthopedic surgeon. So I think I always assumed that Asian medicine had something to tell us about the body and the mind. And yet I did not want to be a doctor because patients are your whole life. And I think that the blood ran thick. So I did end up moving in that direction. But part of my interest was also. So we have Cherokee heritage on my paternal grandfather's side and also Uglal Lakota on my maternal grandfather's side. He grew up on the Cinnaboine Reservation in Wolf Point, Montana. And so I think I grew up also with, you know, the legends of how we could read the land and know how different landscapes are doing health wise, our relationship to it, how to learn to use the herbs, the medicine of the land. Right. And so I think that was a big part of wondering what happened along the way for us to get so disconnected. And I think also, you know, I was a physics major at Stanford and pre med and was very interested in ecology. And so I was talking with a lot of professors there and was surprised that they didn't know much about the local ecology. Right. And so I started to ask a lot of questions and we had a speaker come to the university talking about his childhood growing up with the Lippin Apache Elder, this is Tom Brown Jr. And I think it struck a chord that was very deep within me that to learn skills of knowing that we're land based. And I think these intersected to really form the path of Tibetan medicine because I had met His Holiness the Dalai Lama as a high school student. And when I came to Stanford I was interested in going over to study abroad. And so one of my camp counselors from science camp said, hey, there's a new program where the students are going over to study with his geshes at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, Language and so forth. So I stopped out of Stanford and joined up over in India. And I think I was really interested at that time to learn how do these physicians learn this, this path of medicine where there's, you know, yogis doing all sorts of crazy things with their bodies and minds. On the Tibetan Plateau, high altitude medicine, you can see the aerospace medicine part kind of intersecting in as well. And was quite inspired, I think, to learn that tradition. And so fast forward 10 years. So I had gone back to Stanford, kept going to physics, doing ecology, pre med, all the things, going to Lhasa, kind of building the skills over time and eventually was able to sit for the entrance exam. But I was really interested in cultivating science also as part of my path. And this is, I think, because of being really influenced by Mensikang and the Tibet Medical Institute there, a lot of the mind and life dialogues between Buddhism and neuroscience. I was working as a teaching fellow at the time at Emory University Tibetan Studies Program. And Carol Worthman, a biocultural anthropologist, she runs the Neuroscience science program for the Emory Tibet Science Initiative and she ran the Comparative Human Biology Lab. And she said, why don't you move over to our department? And the faculty had read my application and said I can come on. So it was the start of this path of blending Tibet Medical school and a PhD together.
- [07:47]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Maybe I'll ask you a question that I get actually pretty frequently. So I myself am coming from a Latin American background. Three of my four grandparents are from South America and one of them being half indigenous. I've always been asked, why did I go in the direction of Asia, right? Why not the indigenous traditions of my heritage, which seems like, I mean, I already spoke Spanish. It would have been the obvious choice. So let me ask you this question. Why not Native American traditions when you're interested in, you know, medicine and a relationship with a land, you know, Earth based kind of practices and so forth, what made Asia? What made Tibet in particular be the draw?
- [08:29]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, Trauma and the disassembly of our communities, our indigenous communities in North America, and the loss of knowledge primarily. So just for example, on the Siniboine reservation where my grandfather grew up, sweat lodge, it was done as Alcoholics Anonymous. The high rates of substance abuse and domestic violence being the primary concern in just survival. So restoring those heritage traditions, having wisdom holders present in the community was not really present in those contexts. And I think that that was a big part of it is wondering where that knowledge was lost was kind of what sent me on this journey. I think also being in Asia as a child, I somehow associated myself quite strongly with Asia. So I think that's one part of that. So having a system that's scholastic, that's written down and has a remark integrity and its transmission of knowledge was the other part of that.
- [09:29]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
To what extent do you see part of what you're doing as, you know, maybe bringing back some of these perspectives to American cultures? Is it bringing back some of these perspectives to Native American communities? I mean, how do you see big picture what you're involved in here as an anthropologist, you're a cultural translator and a bridger of cultures. And what is the ultimate purpose of that bridging and translating? Do you think so?
- [09:57]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
I think there was an interest in knowledge transmission and how that gets transmitted over time and how we fundamentally have lost our way of seeing the natural world. That our senses used to be what we survived by, and now we barely use it on a daily basis just to engage. Right. And so that was a big part of that pathway, I think, from the Tibetan side, realizing that the training itself is about cultivating the senses and that we are becoming, you know, what I called embodied diagnostic instruments. We're actually learning to read another body. And I feel like that is the praxis of so many traditions. I do see my work as connecting to a history that many of our traditions have known for a very long time. And that as Tibetan physicians have, you know, globalized, gone all different places, all over the world, talking about how do we use our tongue, right, to test different tastes and properties, to understand how to incorporate new medicine, new medicinal plants, new minerals and so forth. So I do feel like it's bringing us to our roots just by learning how to learn. What's your answer?
- [11:09]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
What's my answer to that question? The why we're doing this question? I think you and I are on the same page. I'm constantly sort of changing how I'm thinking about this and talking about this, but the wording that's making sense to me right now is thinking in terms of the noosphere. And this is a term that people may not have heard before, but it's kind of a way of conceptualizing. You have the geosphere, which is the materiality of the planet, and then you have the biosphere, which is like the living breathing layer of the planet that arises out of the geosphere, that is very much part of the geosphere, but kind of like in a certain way, kind of creates a new level of life and complexity. So the noosphere is the world of culture and intellect and thinking and language that emerges out of the biosphere and the anthroposphere. Yeah, I guess if you want to have the anthroposphere in the middle of that. Yeah, so. So the noosphere is the. A way of thinking about or visualizing this kind of like ocean of thinking and culture and language and relationality and so forth between people. And I think not only has the noosphere become increasingly detached from the biosphere and the geosphere and increasingly self referential. So it's, you know, thoughts about thoughts and thoughts about culture, which are just more thoughts and more, more and more thoughts, kind of like ungrounded in the, either the materiality or the living breathingness of humanity. So not only are we getting more and more detached from that, but then this new sphere itself has become more and more just like a recyc of itself, right? So like, you know, we haven't had music that's extremely innovative and, and exciting and different in the, in the mainstream for like 60 years, right? It's all been just kind of like rehashing of the same material and the same kind of formulaic composition of music. I think film's the same way, I think literature is the same way. Just everything is sort of becoming more and more shallow and, you know, memeified and kind of just repeating the same old tropes. And then that's become, in the last 20 years, like complet screenified. So now it's like we're not even looking at the biosphere, we're not even looking at the geosphere. We're just looking at.
- [13:25]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
We're at each other.
- [13:26]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
We're just looking at our screens and every. We're just like. It's all kind of just recycled. Memified. Screenified.
- [13:32]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Disembodied.
- [13:33]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah, disembodied. And now we've just crossed a new threshold where I can see, I think in very short amount of time that that whole thing is also going to be completely artificially generated by AI. And at that point, like, we have. We've just like departed from our groundedness, our rootedness in anything that's real anymore. Yeah, I'm just feeling like the. The mission for all of us, whether we're artists or novelists or scholars or dancers or athletes or like, whatever our role is in society, even if we're just like a parent or, you know, just out in my garden behind my. With my dogs or whatever, like whatever we're doing, I think there's such an urgency to just actually be embodied. Like, to actually just be here, present, like in our bodies on this earth,
- [14:30]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
like, you know, connecting to the more than human. I mean, connecting much more than just
- [14:35]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
humanity connecting, you know, downwards. I don't know if that's the right metaphor, but like down into the body, into the ground, into the. Replugging, back into the biosphere, the geosphere. Plugging back into, you know, the. The ground.
- [14:47]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Absolutely.
- [14:48]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So anyway, I mean, that's a, I think, a long winded way of saying the same thing. You were just.
- [14:51]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
But you didn't answer, why Asia and not Latin America?
- [14:55]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Why Asia? Yeah. So something struck me as a teenager, in retrospect. I talk about Star wars and Karate Kid, these two, like really kind of, you know, very orientalist movies that were extremely popular among kids my age. I. I moved to the US When I was seven, so I was, you know, I was here when these movies were popular. And the critiques are obvious, but both of them kind of introduced the concept of some kind of connection to an invisible sort of field that transcended the individual. That could be felt, if not seen or pointed to intellectually, but it could be felt. And it could, you know, in the case of Star wars, like, transcend, you know, like solar systems. But in the case of Karate Kid, it could actually be used for healing. Also, you know, there's a. There's a scene, if people haven't seen it. There's a scene where Mr. Miyagi, the prototypical Asian sage, puts his hands together and generates some chi in his hands and uses them to heal the wounded Daniel San, who's been beat up by the bad guys. Right. So. So Anyway, I mean, I was like whatever, 10 at the time.
- [16:05]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
And where were you moving from?
- [16:06]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So I moved from Paraguay, but I came to Massachusetts.
- [16:11]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah. Wow, that's a huge shift.
- [16:13]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah, yeah. So I kind of identified with the bullied kid who was beaten up for being different, but for sure, yeah. No. So anyway, just this kind of like, visceral kind of pull towards that kind of connection. It was coded as Asian when I encountered it for the first time. And if, maybe if I had been exposed more to indigenous, you know, South American traditions at that point, I mean, I. In Paraguay, like, we encountered Guarani people, but I wasn't part of that community. It wasn't really, you know, an integrated kind of society where knowledge was part of what I would have been exposed to as a seven year old. Right. Actually I did take Watani classes in, in elementary school though. But, but, but anyway.
- [16:55]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Interesting. Wow.
- [16:56]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
We didn't. I don't remember having a lot of exposure to, you know, the spiritual traditions of that culture. And so there may, may have been something that I missed there that would have been really wonderful to have received. But anyway, for me, the first thing that kind of like came across, my awareness was coded as Asian through those movies. And so I, I think I'm gonna blame or credit, you know, those two movies with kind of like setting me on that trajectory, you know, Then I started doing martial arts, and then from there I started getting into Asian religions and medicine, and from there I went to Asia and.
- [17:25]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, beautiful.
- [17:26]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
The rest is history.
- [17:27]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, yeah. And you actually were interested in the practice side as well for a while, is that true?
- [17:32]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So I was a little less accomplished than you, but I started as a practitioner in a much less formalized system than what you were in. I did a lot of kind of apprenticeships and casual learning in people's living rooms and that sort of thing. So about four years, four and a half years, and then came back to the US to go to graduate school. I had become more interested in history and scholarly approaches, and I just wanted to explore that. But I still was primarily identifying as a practitioner.
- [18:02]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Interesting.
- [18:03]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
But then over the course of doing a master's degree part time, over five years, by the time I got to the end of that degree, I was like, ooh, actually I see the fork in the road here. And I'm. I'm a scholar, not a. Not a practitioner.
- [18:16]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, Felt the calling.
- [18:17]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
And so at that point, yeah, at that point I kind of dropped the professional practice of medicine or healing practices and went all in on the scholarly thing.
- [18:24]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Beautiful.
- [18:25]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah. But continued to practice, you know, for myself, but not, not as a professional.
- [18:29]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah.
- [18:30]
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- [19:30]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah, so let's just kind of hit some highlights in your career and your publications and what kinds of things you've been interested in exploring. So our listeners have an idea of the path that you've and what sorts of things they might. We'll provide links in the show notes. So what kinds of things they might click on to be able to read more about.
- [19:48]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Sure. I think particularly when I was. So I had started the first two years of my graduate school coursework and you know, quals and everything, and I think I really wanted a topic that could showcase Tibetan medicine in a way that Western medical world could understand. And I think I was really interested in that because Tibetan medicine up to that point had really been seen as a cultural system or had been approached as a cultural system. Very good for mental health conditions, but not really taken seriously as a medical system that is the primary health system for a large part of the world or at least a large region of the world, we'll say. And so cancer was the area that I was really interested in. So I worked with Susan Baowu, who was at Emory at the time, a PhD in nursing and psycho neuroimmunologist. And so she was really interested in looking at hard to treat cases of cancer that had been fully treated by Tibetan medicine. So we, while I was in grad school, were working, working at with Mensicang to look at cases that met those criteria. And so I applied to National Science foundation in Winter grand and said I would like to understand how Tibetan physicians learn how to diagnose cancer through their traditional means. That also meant that I needed to be a medical student. And what I thought going over to Mensicang, I knew it was going to be hard, but I didn't have any sense that we would be memorizing this text for six hours a day, right? And this is an incredibly poetic, metaphoric, gorgeous text, right? And I think what came out of that was this remarkable technology that we as humans have had for many, many generations, and that's that we've transmitted knowledge orally, right? And these texts are meant to be recited and meant to be recited out loud and are literally imprinting our minds, our brains, our, our senses with this knowledge. And I think that became this key into what I realized was the Tibet medical training, right? That actually we are imbibing the text for hours, hours, pages and pages, sitting for our oral exams for two hours of reciting verbatim these stanzas, these poetic metaphoric stanzas. And I realized that something was happening, that actually we were transforming, right? Realizing that this was not a, a way of study that I was familiar with, it blew my mind. It was Gishima Khalsamwamo, who is the German nun up at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics that said, don't worry, your brain is meant for this. Actually, she said, just do 500 recitations a day of a half a page and you got it and go to sleep, maybe do some review and it'll be there. And I just didn'. Believer. But the reality is it works. It works. And I was just like blown away that this is possible. 1, 2. That my mouth would be reciting it sometimes while my mind was wandering somewhere else, right? And that as I was speaking with my Genlas, my teachers, right, they would recite these stanzas like, what is the definition of the body? And that that would come right out of their mouth. Like, this is the standard, this is what that means, right? Or what does a loom pulse feel like? What does a medicine that treats loom taste like, right? And these were the Metaphors that guided us to understand in that embodied knowledge. And I was like, holy cow. This is a gateway to understanding the natural world and understanding our body, how things change. How does loom feel with, say, green tea versus black tea versus coffee, right? How does. How does that feel when we're doing different things in our lives, right? What are the different things that exacerbate that? And so it was this obsession, we can call it that then became my dissertation. So I was interested in then, what does that look like from the cognitive neuroscience? What do we know about the brain in terms of getting this kind of somatosensory imprinting in our body through simulations or all these things, right? What does Buddhist logic say about that? From Dharmakirti and Pramana theory? And then what does bioculture anthropology say about that? Right? And so for me, this was the gateway to understanding. This is a different way of seeing the body. So that was my dissertation looking at then over time, how does that pattern look like for cancer? How do you track that just through the traditional diagnostics, going to Xining, where you have, in Qinghai Province, where, you know, a thousand inpatients, a thousand outpatients a day in this massive, you know, hospital. It means that in the Chinese insurance world that if someone comes in for a cough, they get the full workup, right? Full clinical chemistry, endoscopy, like ekg, everything, right? Which is like, for me, as a data nerd, fabulous, because I can look at all. I can look at the body and what's happening and to see what am I getting out of pulse or urine or tongue, right? And how does that map onto the Western medical diagnoses and what does that look like for different individuals? So that was the early part. And then I was invited to Austria for my postdoc, and that was with Stefan Klus. And this was a European Research Council project that was looking at the size of the Tibetan pharmacological industry. And so it was a five year project. He brought me on for the last year to really look at Qinghai and Gansu, this eastern part of Tibet, he said, you know, please travel all over the plateau and track all the different menjor, the medicine compounding facilities. And so for me, who had just graduated, to go and visit all of my classmates all over the Tibetan Plateau and to see all of their different regional pharmacologists, it was like a dream. And that blew my mind because I realized actually that in India and in the Mensican context, we had this idea that, that Tibetan medicine is kind of like, one lineage. Right. And to then go all over Tibet also, you know, in the TR and see how many different regional lineages there were and how much of my classmates were also maintaining those lineages and maintaining those practices specific to the people of that community, specific to those particular substances. Right. That different botanical lineages were emerging and that our Kumbung lineage of a certain kind of recognition of our plants would be different from those in the southern part of Komnes. It was just kind of mind blowing. And it helped me to understand Tibet medical history a lot more. And then the next part was Madison. So Covid came in. We had the first opportunity to then bring all the Tibetan physicians in North America who were receiving Covid cases and to create an observational study of those who were treated only with Tibetan medicine. And it was the first time Tibetan physicians had been able to collaborate in this way. We could track those cases and show that under Tibetan medicine, the time to symptom recovery was half of what it was in an outpatient, business as usual scenario. So 20 days for those who are just at home resting, recovering, and then 11 days under Tibetan medicine formulation scenario. So I think this was a really exciting time for us to collaborate also with our colleagues in both Tibet and India to say, hey, we have really great results. And I think it reinstilled a confidence in the Tibetan community and their own heritage and their own traditional medicine resources. So that was really exciting. After that, one of my questions came from looking at a lot of our contemplative practices in the center for Healthy Minds, that we were seeing some of these adverse outcomes, but we didn't have a really good way to understand who might have adverse outcomes to the meditation interventions. It's been a really exciting time to look at parsing out some of the adverse outcomes in terms of health conditions, so gastrointestinal issues, blood pressure, various joint and neuroinflammatory issues, to also mental health outcomes. So this has just been something that we've been starting to look at at that a lot of the cognitive affective patterns that we see predominant across, you know, different groups in the population have a clustering also of their outcomes. And we can start maybe using some of these predictors to look at parsing some of that data as well.
- [27:34]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
It's notable to me. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but this is kind of the way I heard it. Maybe it's the way I myself experienced it. So maybe I'm projecting my own experience a little bit. But the way that taking on sort of like a new. A new set of metaphors, a new kind of, like, sensibility towards the world is fundamental to learning this medical system and that you can't just. It's not just about learning new information, but it's rather about sort of reorienting your whole being around a different way of seeing and experiencing your. Your body in the world.
- [28:08]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Absolutely.
- [28:09]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
And then you move from there into. Into very technical studies, very specific and precise kinds of methodologies. But it strikes me that all along I'm hearing a common theme which is not just doing bridging and translation work between Tibetan and biomedical worlds, but actually thinking deeply about how such translation can and should be done.
- [28:35]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Absolutely.
- [28:36]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Your work seems to not just be doing that work, but also, like, deeply reflective on how that work can be done, what are the methodologies by which it can be done, what are the limitations, what are the practices and refining our translation? So I don't know. Am I drawing attention to something that is central in your own thinking, or is it. Yeah.
- [28:56]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Thank you so much. And I think that part of my struggle has been seeing actually the rigor and high technicalities in Tibet medicine itself. And I think a lot of our faculty and clinicians in Tibet, particularly, but also in India, have been intrigued by why serious clinical researchers or pharmacologists haven't been as attracted to Tibet medicine for research, whereas in the humanities, we've had a lot more interest. Right. And I think there's just been an interest in also helping bridge that translation part, to make it accessible, to help both sides see the rigor and technicalities and appreciate the precision, to appreciate the nuance. So I would say that Tibetan medicine, the way that we delineate systems of the body, is just different. So it's helping create that mapping. And so I think that helping that translation process occur helps to facilitate research. And I think that's been a lot of my interests, and I think that's an important part, too, to help create some of that knowledge, to help support a language for what people are experiencing so that they can become familiar with that in their own bodies as well. For example, like wind illnesses.
- [30:09]
Advertisement Voice
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- [30:09]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
I think that lung as a concept is now as familiar among many meditation communities. So they're like, oh, I have a lung condition, but often it's not a lung condition. Right. Because there's not a Tibetan physician actually to diagnose what's happening. Happening.
- [30:22]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Okay, so you mentioned lung or wind illness or lung disorders, let's say. And we had. We had a guest on the Podcast Susanna Dean a couple episodes back, who kind of gave us a deep dive into those concepts in Tibetan culture. She shared with us more of kind of a cultural, anthropological, ethnographic sort of picture of lung disorders and Tibet and how they're, how they're talked about and understood. You know, she talked a lot about those concepts. I'm, I'm saying all this because people who are interested in this topic, I think should, should listen to that episode too, just to get sort of more of the background on the concepts and maybe we don't need to spend as much time kind of introducing the concepts here and we can kind of just jump into a little bit more of the practicalities of what your research is about and so forth.
- [31:15]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Sure.
- [31:16]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So within the Tibetan context, lung disorders are this v vast category of disorders and things that might go wrong for a whole number of different reasons that may or may not relate to meditation or spiritual practice more generally. So, so what we're going to talk about today is kind of like a, a subset of that larger category of lung disorders that particularly relate to what might happen in a meditation practice or a spiritual practice.
- [31:40]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
I would actually say it shouldn't only be lung at all, actually. And I think that's the misunderstanding is that people assume that only lung conditions are meditation gone wrong. And you can get so many different disorders from meditation gone wrong. There are lung tipa begin various forms of the effects of each of those massive categories of conditions, from liver gallbladder disorders to autoimmunity to chronic inflammation that are, have nothing to do almost with lung as well. So I think that's also important to just draw attention to that. We don't have a word in Tibetan for meditation illness. Right. There's just not a word.
- [32:14]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Great. Yeah. So that, that's helpful to maybe as a starting point. Yeah. So you just mentioned lung Deep pagan. What's the range of symptomology or the range of disorders that can arise when, when we're talking about meditation related adverse effects within the Tibetan context, what's the scope of what can happen?
- [32:36]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
So I think to talk about psychophysiological systems of the body, they also then have an expression when meditation goes wrong. Right. So we might have a loom constitution. Right. We might be very creative. We might, might be really drawn to different aspects of our sensory life. Right. This can be a very imaginative constitution, but it can also be a constitution that's hard to concentrate. Right. And one that also can easily disassociate when doing practices of de reification or open monitoring. Practices. Right. And so this is the. The constitution that tends to experience kind of nihilistic, dissociative adverse outcomes, especially when gone into extremes. And so our meditation outcomes, when we look at like the excess use or the deficient use or the misus of the senses or our body or long doses of a certain kind of meditation can exacerbate these kind of conditions. Right. Tipa, like a tea constitution might be super driven, have a really nice stability in their concentration, could meditate for many, many hours for a long, long time, but would have a vulnerability then to not cultivate compassion. Right. Have a disconnection from the interdependence or connectivity or interconnectivity among all beings. Right. And so there might be a excess that's expressed of arrog, arrogance and rage and irritability and a lot of inflammatory conditions that come out of that. Right. And blood conditions. Bagan is very much about harmony, is very much about overall contentness. Right. And lacks a little bit of motivation spontaneity. Right. So one that might be drawn to more delusional experiences, more hallucinations, might actually have very low affect, might actually get into depressive contexts as well, might tend towards suicidality from a begin context as well.
- [34:19]
Lan Lee
When.
- [34:19]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
And there's really a lot of focus on especially focusing on the suffering of others, right. And might over associate, reify their experiences with others. So this is just kind of an example of that. Each of these constitutions have different tendencies. One's inheritance of their. Of our patterns, of our habits can be both beneficial, but also can be the exact problem of how we approach different practices. Yeah.
- [34:44]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So. So just to be explicit, this is also a tradition where your constitution is somehow also determinative of your spiritual practices that you should be doing. You know, as a person who has one constitution or another, you're going to be guided to do certain kinds of spiritual practices over others because they're more suited to your. To you constitutionally. Is that correct?
- [35:10]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah. So historically, through the teacher, right. Certain habits of the mind, right. Would be noticed and direct one to use certain kinds of practices. And then the Vajrayana interpret, interpretation of that would be the yidam in the Buddha family. And that would be considered then the karmic connection to what you might need personally in terms of the shaping of that practice.
- [35:30]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Okay. So generally speaking, we can say we're already, you know, there's already a certain level of customization for the individual person. So it's not like everybody just gets the same set of practices from the beginning. And so we can also expect that it won't be the case that everybody is going to have the same set of advice when you run into trouble or if you run into trouble with meditation, it's going to be more personalized, more customized advice or interventions that you're going, going to be receiving from, whether it's a teacher, dharma teacher or a doctor. Right. You're going to be treated more individually according to your constitution, according to these, these principles. What would a first aid kit look like for meditators? What techniques should we have? What medicines should we have in our toolkit? Even as beginning med, but certainly as, as serious meditators going on retreat, what should we be carrying with us, either literally or metaphorically?
- [36:25]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, so this is actually an area of research that is really developing much more rigorously. So Michael Sheehy is doing a lot of the work right now at University of Virginia of going through a whole compendium of gexal texts. So gexal in Tibetan means dispelling obstacles. So it's a genre in many of the practice cycles across the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that will be brought on a different parts of a person's development as a practitioner to help support obstacles that will arise, often related to the body, but also the mind. And these can be often health conditions, but they can also be when there are experiences of excess and a certain kind of approach to practice. And this is in contrast to what we look at as enhancement practices. There's other kinds of practices that help enhance the practice.
- [37:14]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So not necessarily caused by meditation or spiritual practice, but just might happen when you happen to be on retreat. Is that, is that correct?
- [37:21]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
And might also be caused by meditation. Right. And so this is a resource that is then accessible to retreatants for whatever comes up for them. I think on a basic level, for people just to understand the functions of the winds is important because a lot of the people maybe who are doing more long term practice might actually experience different WN disorders. So I think just learning these different lung systems is important. And how that might feel would be a helpful kind of first aid. And then knowing that lung needs to have something that's nutritious, something that's warm. So a lot of people feel like they should be a little bit more aesthetic. Right. In terms of their input during retreat or lung practice. And so knowing that you need a really high quality protein, good oil, something that also temperature wise, also warming for the body is important. Warm liquids, really warm lighting. So we talk about like the light of a fire being a nice calming Aspect for lung. So thinking about lung is hypersensitivity to all the senses. So aromatic woods in terms of the scent, the smell sense, right? Really nice, warm and comforting tactile scent sense, pleasing sounds, not abrasive sounds, sensory environment not being too bright or too dark. These are all things that someone can do to also shift the environment in terms of supporting their lung. It could be just warm oil on the body. Horme is a nice therapy that we use. So these are medicinal herbs that we put in a compress you can put at the heart, on the hand palms, on the foot palms and the crown. And so using ways to actually teach practitioners, teach even new meditators about where the lung points that can help calm lung is another really helpful tip technique for at least that part of some of the exacerbations that happen in long term practice.
- [39:03]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So let me ask you a question based on what I know from compiling a collection of translations from around the Buddhist world that I've been working on, what I've noticed across this collection of texts from different times and places is that I think you can generalize and say that pretty much all Buddhist cultures in all times and places have, have acknowledged the potential dangers of engaging in meditation practice. That as transformative as the practices can be, they can also be potentially destabilizing, particularly if you're engaging with them too intensely or too monomaniacally, too focused too, you know, in an, in an unbalanced
- [39:48]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
way, because they're transformative. Destabilizing is inherently a change.
- [39:52]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yes, exactly. That's, that's, that's the way that I think about these two. It's. If there were no dangers, they would not be transformative. The practices are designed to destabilize the comfort zones that you have learned to occupy.
- [40:07]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
So change is inherently stressful.
- [40:09]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So that being said, it seems that different cultures, different Buddhist traditions have acknowledged there's kind of a line somewhere. And the line is drawn in different places by different traditions. But there's a line between the expected challenges, the kinds of challenges that are difficult but are signs of growth, and then there's a line and over that line there's a pathology that needs to be treated as a problem. And in certain traditions, it seems sometimes that involves medical care. In some, some cases it involves a very conscious effort to change your meditation practice in certain ways in order to rebalance what's going on. You know, we, we talked with Leon Video look on a couple episodes ago about, you know, Chinese practices of breathing or movement that might be employed at this point. You know, sometimes it involves consulting a physician, having medical care. So I know you're not, you're not able to speak for all Tibetans everywhere and throughout all history, but just help us to understand a little bit about how that line would be drawn on your knowledge of Tibetan medicine and Tibetan tradition. Where. Where do we distinguish between. This is a challenge, but I can manage it myself. I can continue going forward here. Versus this is a real red flag that needs some kind of professional or medical intervention.
- [41:41]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
So I would say, just speaking from the Tibetan tradition, that it's so different across different teachers, across different students and different practice cycles. So you can have someone experiencing psychic breaks, so mass insanity, hallucinations, delusions. And the approach to that individual might be they take a break for a while, right? And they get some medical help, they get a different instruction in terms of their practices, right. They are surrounded by loved ones, right. Connecting them back to the body, certain kinds of foods, these sorts of things. Right. Whereas someone who might be experiencing, for example for women, massive menstrual issues, right. It might not present in a similar severity, but might be also something that requires a step back, requires a rebalancing, a recalibration in certain ways. So I think that it just really depends on the context of that individual and their relationship to the teacher and the practices that they're engaged with. So we had one individual who was in long term retreat and she went into ketoacidosis, had an experience of type 1 diabetes, adult onset and had to go into the emergency room. And I think it's taken a long time to return to some of the practices that individual was doing. And so to think about how each person has a journey that they're experiencing and that in relationship to their teacher, in relationship to their sangha and the practices is going to take a different approach to that. So I really don't feel like there's a line that is relevant for everyone. I think the danger is that we have many people that are practicing without a closer relationship with the. A teacher or an asanga or don't necessarily have support to realize that what they're doing was part of the issue, right. How they were approaching their practice or their maybe diet or lifestyle was not supportive to that kind of practice or other things coming up. Right. For them personally in terms of their life. So I think that we need better tools to support individuals who don't have those supports. And I think this is where Willoughby and Jared's work with Cheetah House and, and Others have been in a lot of conversation about how do we just get more familiarity as a widespread global Sangha of some of these tools.
- [44:05]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
You're talking about Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl, who at Brown University started a very high profile research of meditators who experienced some kind of adverse reactions. And they were guests on this podcast a couple months ago talking about their research and kind of the, I guess the groundbreaking role of that research in bringing these problems to the attention of Western meditators for the first time. And anyway, they got a lot of pushback for that, but, but they have, I think, done some really rigorous research and people should check that out.
- [44:37]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, absolutely.
- [44:38]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Something that Jared and Willoughby talk about is this person centered approach that they're trying to take, where it's like, you know, independently, certainly from the, the Buddhist tradition or the, or the expectations of the Sangha that they're in, or the expectations of the teacher that they're following that, that, you know, they really want to emphasize both in terms of defining a adverse event, but also in terms of what it means and how to navigate it. They really want to prioritize the individual person. Right. The person centered approach is, you know, what is a problem for that person and the solutions are going to be whatever's, you know, kind of working for that person. Person. I'm, I'm. But I hear you saying something a little bit different because you, you are talking about constitutions as being a person centered, but then you're also really emphasizing the role of the community, the Sangha, the, the teacher, the tradition, the, the social frame that you're, you're part of in a, in a way that I think is different than the more individualistic Western psychological framing of these issues. And I'm wondering, as somebody who thinks about this deeply, if you can kind of parse out some of the distinctions that you're making there.
- [45:42]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
So constitutions are person centered. Right. It's a, it's understanding the individual in terms of their own habits, both body and mind. So it is very much looking at the qualities of that individual and what they need individually to support them in their practice. So I would say that's a very person centered approach. I'm emphasizing the role of the teacher and the Sangha, the community. Because I think just culturally in the US we tend to approach contemplative practices in a very individualistic way. And yet the importance of the relationship with the teacher as someone who is looking out for those individuals, individuals is seeing some concerning signs, is seeing aspects of their practice that maybe are red flags. Right. Or approaches to that practice. Right. I think it can't be emphasized enough as an important way to prevent adverse outcomes and meditation experiences. And I think that when that is not in place, it's hard for people to see themselves outside of themselves. And so sometimes they're just going. Thinking that they're doing the right thing. They're doing the practice as intensely and eagerly as possible. And I think in a similar way, we see that with the constitutions. I think the Sangha plays a really important part also in providing some of that feedback. And not in a hey, you're doing too much kind of way, but just supporting aspects of, like, harmonious relations. Right. To. To feel held by caring individuals in a community that are engaged in similar sorts of endeavors. Right. And to be supporting those routines that allow for that as well. What does it feel to be held in community? What does it feel to be held by a teach culture? And that view, and that experience is an embodied experience. Right. It helps people sink back into their body and back into their community and back into their place and back into the lineage of realized masters to help ground a lot of those views. And I think that's so important.
- [47:39]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So let me press a little bit just from a particular direction, which is that, you know, one of the papers that came out of Jared and Willoughby's lab at Brown was looking at the role of teachers. Now, their study was of Western meditators. I believe the majority of the teachers were themselves Western. But the finding was that teachers could be both extremely helpful but also extremely harmful. And so there were many cases where the teachers were either the cause of the problem or more likely exacerbated the problem with either not taking it seriously enough or giving, you know, exactly the opposite advice that.
- [48:21]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah.
- [48:21]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
That they should have or. Or what have you. So how would you respond to the critique that, you know, there are teachers who themselves cause harm? I mean, we. We have had a number of sex scandals and other kinds of things in the Tibetan communities as well. So.
- [48:35]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah.
- [48:36]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
How do we parse where teachers are being helpful, communities are being helpful versus whether they're. Where they are themselves causing harm.
- [48:43]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the. These are all parts of that puzzle. Right. And for people to understand that as well, that when there is a dynamic that is not supporting the path and not supporting their practice and not supporting their health, that can definitely come from that teacher side as well, too. I think that we see that obviously in the Tibetan community as well, because I think often there is a lack of knowing the full landscape. Right. That gets people into making assumptions of what they should be doing and not asking question and not looking at the trajectory perhaps, of where things are heading. And I think people get scared of asking those questions. Right. Because of what it might mean in terms of their path. I think Lama Willa Miller has done a lot of work in also talking about these kind of qualities, both in the traditional context as well as in the Western context. And I know you had her on an earlier episode.
- [49:39]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Another guest of ours. Yeah, Previous episode.
- [49:42]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
So learning from these case studies, so to speak, or other people's stories, I think are so important for people to understand their own context as well.
- [49:51]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Okay, so if we're building our first aid kit, so far we have, you know, warm, warming foods and oils and lighting and paying attention to the environment and to the sensory inputs. And now we also have added to that, let's say, helpful, knowledgeable teachers. Teachers also like a full understanding of the context in which we're practicing and supportive Sangha and understanding my own proclivities and my own constitutional imbalances and what. Where I might be prone to excessive behaviors or whatever. These are all the ingredients so far we have in our toolkit.
- [50:27]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Absolutely. Realizing that maybe connectivity is important. Right. Learning how to really think about bringing that aspect of interdependence into the practice.
- [50:36]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So understanding the full landscape. Landscape of the practice. And obviously, most Westerners are most likely encountering these practices through apps or through the Internet, through YouTube's, practicing in many cases, without asanga, without individualized instruction. You know, just using kind of like the standard one size fits all instructions that are given on whatever app they're following. And also potential, essentially, you know, probably mostly thinking about what they're doing in terms of mental health, in terms of well being, in terms of more pro. Being more productive and less stressed. So. So kind of a narrow sort of understanding of this practice and what it's for, and maybe a utilitarian understanding of what it's for. And so, you know, I mean, I. Probably most people listening to this podcast are aware that Buddhist meditation is about so much more than just mental health. But we, but basically, maybe we can hear from your perspective what advice. I mean, if we're. If you're talking to somebody who's getting into meditation for the first time, what should they know about the goals of this practice, the kinds of intentions behind the development of these practices? What should they know there as they sort of get started on this journey?
- [51:53]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, I think that's partly the responsibility of those who are making these offerings. Right. And that's why at the center for Healthy Minds, our Healthy Minds program really set that up to say, here's what we know about contemplative practices and the different kinds. Kinds of contemplative practices, and here's what they're doing. Right. If we are distracted in our lives, we are actually not as happy. And so if the goal is to have less distraction in our life and to have more focus, more joy in the experience of our present moment, then that is one set of skills. But we also know that loneliness shortens life. We also know that our feeling of disconnection from others also has adverse health issues, outcomes. Right. And so that building the skill of connectivity is a whole different set of practices. And to give them also some ideas of seeing what it might look like in terms of warning signs when those are not going. Right. And that's why we have people take a little kind of self quiz, right. That our ability to even track our mental events is a skill in itself and that a lack of insight can create distortions of reality and make us susceptible to hyper associating with our experience or our self or lack of purpose. Right. And so we kind of lay out these skills and also talk about when those skills are not well developed, what are the concerns that people can experience in terms of mental health or physical outcomes. So I think that is what I would like to see the field shift towards is to introduce people to different skills that we're helping people develop and what those skills are targeting and what also those skills might have in terms of risk factors as well.
- [53:37]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So what else is in our toolkit?
- [53:39]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, I would say the other toolkit is helping people connect to place. I think often we forget that the place, the physical place where we are practicing is so important. We get so kind of developed into our mind and the practice that we forget that where we are located in physical space and the actual land. Right. Getting our feet out on the ground is also an important part of helping people to reconnect with their body, with the interconnected aspect of our lives, of our reality. And I think so many practices, especially in the traditional context, are really about that interconnection. Right. Understanding that our experience of wellness and happiness and realization is fundamentally dependent on also that interconnectivity. Right. So I think that would be a major part of the tool cleave as well.
- [54:29]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah. So are you talking there physical, physical practice like walking on the ground barefoot or are you talking about energy work like grounding in your energy into the earth? Or are you talking about engaging with the spirits of the land and the nature spirits of the area? Or are you talking about kind of all of the above?
- [54:51]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yes, all of the above.
- [54:54]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So from a Tibetan standpoint, they're working on all of these levels, right?
- [54:58]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah. And I think like we're the weirdest culture in the world. We don't have connection into the cosmic socialities of our, of our landscape. Right. And I think almost every other culture has a very rich connection with all the unseen beings, all the. More than human. Right. And I think it helps people. And also from the Tibetan medical view, it also helps prevent a lot of conditions that are considered like dun conditions. Right. Of feeling spirit illness. Right. Different chronic inflammatory conditions that are really more. Have a mental health comorbidity and how to feel more at ease and connected is also about connecting to the land. And that can also be mentally like asking permission to be in that space of how we're practicing, where we're practicing connecting to the. The history of that landscape. Right. Who was there before and what will come after that. The benefits of our practice will benefit those who are there. Right. Human and more than human that we are actually the fruits of our practice are meant to be literally benefiting where we are and who we're connected to. So I think that does really, really shift the orientation a lot as well.
- [56:05]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Wonderful. Yeah. I'll give a nod to another previous guest of ours, Josh Schray, who spoke about this in detail, an early episode in this season.
- [56:15]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Oh, great. Wonderful. Have to listen.
- [56:18]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah, no, this conversation is great because it's really tying together, I'm referring to all these previous guests because you're really tying together so many of the threads that we've been exploring throughout the season.
- [56:28]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Wonderful.
- [56:29]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So, yeah, it's just a perfect, perfect kind of wrap up for the exploration we've been doing. I'm also noticing just a lot of, in terms of the practicalities of what you're talking about, a lot of similarities with our conversation with Leo Locke, who spoke from a Chinese medical perspective. And I think obviously there's differences in the, the languaging and differences in the, the medical doctrines that are informing these perspectives. But when you get down to the nitty gritty of what do you actually do, it looks like there's a lot of overlap there too. So people can check out that episode for basically a concurring second opinion.
- [57:06]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah, yeah.
- [57:07]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
And you're both, you're both medical doctors. So you know, from these two different traditions. So, yeah, a lot of. A lot of overlap there.
- [57:14]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
One thing that we also noticed, and this was teaching the art and science of human flourishing here at UW Madison. And that's a course that's about what do we know about flourishing, right, from the humanities to the sciences. And it's an undergrad course primarily for incoming freshmen. We have about 3, 350 that take each semester. It's a very big class now. But part of what that class is doing is also helping them take stock in their own traditions. Right. And this comes back to the beginning of our conversation, is saying that cultural traditions all over the world have developed practices around awareness, around connection, around purpose, around insight, and to help individuals also feel connected to those histories and to those practices and see how those skills, they'll show up through their own cultural heritage, through their own traditions. And I think that can help ground people in a way to who they are in this life that is a composite experience of all they've inherited from their lineages right of time and who they have developed into in this lifetime. And that can be a really nice way to ground people in their own experience too, and to not see it as some just foreign thing that they're exploring, but to really take stock in the skills that they have in their families and in their histories.
- [58:27]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Yeah, yeah. Lovely, lovely. I'm reminded of an essay by Bayou Okomolafe, who's. He's addressing people of European descent who are searching for this wisdom in indigenous cultures and kind of redirecting, saying that everybody has indigenous wisdom in their. Their own lineages and their own culture. You just have to, like, go back far enough to find it. Right. So, yeah, to bring our conversation back full circle to where we started it. You and I both are people who had to leave our cultures and look elsewhere. You know, in Asia in particular, Buddhist traditions in particular, to find language or the metaphors or the orientations or the philosophies or the practices that enable us to kind of reorient in this direction and then bringing those back and sharing them in the way that you're doing. Bridging actively with biomedicine and with West Western knowledge is I think, a really. I mean, obviously I'm biased in favor of this kind of activity because it's exactly what I'm doing too, but. But I think it's a really, really important, you know, pathfinding and really important teaching for the modern world. So thank you for doing everything that you're doing in this area.
- [59:40]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Thank you so much.
- [59:40]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Pierce, thank you for sharing it with us. Beautiful work that you're doing.
- [59:44]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
I think it connects to what you were sharing earlier, also about us learning to become human. Human again. Right. And how we can really that we are all in disconnection with our own humanity in many ways. And a lot of these practices are about just reminding us about what it is to be on this planet, on this precious planet, in this precious life, with the most remarkable beings that we share this planet with. And how to reconnect with that reality, I think is a lot of the path as well. So thank you for all your doing as well.
- [60:16]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
Thank you, thank you. That's a perfect spot to finish, cuz.
- [60:19]
Lan Lee
Yeah.
- [60:19]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Great.
- [60:20]
Dr. Pierce Salguero
So wonderful to see your face and. Yeah, like connect like this.
- [60:24]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Yeah. Thank you, Pierce.
- [60:33]
Lan Lee
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 to 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.
- [61:06]
Dr. Tawny Tidwell
Sam.