New Books in Spiritual Practice and Mindfulness

In this episode, host Pierce Salguero sits down with Linda C. Ceriello, a scholar of mysticism and popular culture from Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Linda is one of the foremost scholars of metamodernism, with particular focus on contemporary spirituality and mystical experiences. She talks with us about what this concept of metamodernism means, and how it can open up new kinds of more capacious thinking. I’m sure you will agree that a lot of what we’ve been doing on the Black Beryl podcast over the past 4 years — juxtaposing different perspectives, exposing our full selves, exploring the dark sides of spirituality, leaning into sincerity, etc. — has all embodied a metamodern sensibility. Anyway, I think she’s the perfect guest to talk with as we launch season 4, and I hope you’ll enjoy the show.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in multidisciplinary conversations about Asian healing and mystical traditions, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. Also check out our members area on Substack (blackberyl.substack.com), as each episode our guests share downloadable PDFs of articles, book chapters, and other materials for you.

One last thing: we are planning an “Ask Me Anything” episode coming up soon, so reach out via Substack or my website here, and let me know your questions. Ok, on with the show!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

“What is Metamodern?” website

“What is Metamodern? Conversations” on YouTube

Bloomsbury Press series: Studies in Metamodernism, Theory and Criticism Across the Disciplines

Vermeulen and van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism” (2010)

Kersten, Polo, Wilbers, Glocal Metamodernisms: European Fiction After Postmodernism (2026)

Disambiguation video

Recorded lecture: “An Overview of the Academic Research on Metamodernism” (2023)

Recorded panel: “A Bodhisattva Move: Popular Mysticism’s Influence on the Metamodern Turn?” (2021)

Subscribe on blackberyl.substack.com to unlock our members-only benefits, including these PDFs of Linda’s work:


Metamodern Mysticisms (2018)

“Toward a metamodern reading of Spiritual but Not Religious mysticisms” (2018)

“The Metamodern Bend: Theorizations for Religious Studies” (2022)

Black Beryl’s host Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia. See www.piercesalguero.com
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Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness tool, the Buddhist tradition has long recognized its inherent psychological and physical risks. We explore multi-tradition historical texts, the anatomy of practice crises, and the ethical responsibility of teachers and app developers to provide something along the lines of informed consent.

Key Discussion Points & Timeline

Contrasting modern wellness marketing with historical accounts of meditative danger; the book provides a sourcebook for Dharma teachers, clinicians, and serious practitioners.

Multi-Tradition Mapping throughout covers Pali, medieval Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan sources, many of which we touch on.

Traditional sources diagnose destabilization and even offer a range of physical, energetic, and lifestyle remedies to mediate crisis: whether they would be a good fit for today’s practitioner is another matter.

Challenging the modern claim that adverse effects only happen to the unprepared or mentally fragile.

Classical lineages show that severe physical ailments and mental destabilization can happen randomly, even to advanced practitioners.

The hidden risks of unmonitored, commercialized meditation apps.

Why creators have an ethical duty to move past treating meditation as a risk-free panacea and offer clear safety guardrails.

How different cultures draw the line between a spiritual breakthrough and clinical pathology.

The ongoing project of integrating traditional remedies with modern psychology and neuroscience.

Links & Resources Mentioned

The Book: Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice.

Guest Website: here (Includes the book's introduction).

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I spoke with author Aliza Einhorn about her new book Tarot of the Unconscious: Uncovering the Hidden Link Between Psychoanalysis and the Cards (Weiser Books, 2026) United States: Red Wheel Weiser. Aliza Einhorn is a Psychoanalyst in training at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York City. She's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a longtime tarot reader, tarot teacher, and astrologer.

“My book is a method” Einhorn tells me. The method is free association. This is the link to psychoanalysis. Einhorn wants us to free associate to the cards as one free associates to dream imagery.

“Let’s break it down. In any given Tarot card, as in a dream, there are images, visual details (what Freud might call the manifest meaning), and then there are the hidden meanings beneath those images (what Freud might call the latent meaning), which we only discover after we analyze it.” (p.44)

She is enthusiastic about the “infinite” meanings of the cards. In Einhorn’s world Card 7, The Chariot, is on Freud’s royal road to the unconscious. While Tarot books have historically engaged with Jungian though, Einhorn’s book is a “love letter to Freud.”

One of the book's most striking ideas is that people develop a transference to their deck — that how you treat your cards mirrors relational patterns from your past. In this interview we discussed an approach to transference adopted by Modern Psychoanalysis and referenced a foundational paper on countertransference. Listeners interested in the specifics of this approach to transference can find it here Clevans, E. L. (1983) On Countertransference. Modern Psychoanalysis 8:129-130.

Einhorn concludes “if there’s one thing I want to teach you in this book, one thing I hope you will remember, it’s that your unconscious is your friend. It’s good to get to know it.”
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What does it mean to connect with mind and space without the typical baggage of contemporary meditation trends? In this episode of the New Books Network, Matthew Joseph O'Connell sits down with author and practitioner Ronald E. Purser to discuss his timely new book, Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator (Dharma Publishing, 2026).

Drawing from his decades-long engagement with Tarthang Tulku’s seminal 1977 work, Time, Space, and Knowledge, Purser offers a refreshing, experimental, and surprisingly playful guide to understanding our structural realities. Rather than preaching a prescriptive self-help routine, Mind Space serves as an experiential commentary that invites readers into a radical, non-dualistic inquiry of how we inhabit our lives.

Key Themes from the Episode

Beyond McMindfulness: How Mind Space transitions away from corporate, present-moment-focused trends and pivots toward a deeper, more expansive territory of human freedom.

The Anatomy of Mind and Space: An etymological and philosophical breakdown of mind as our generative source of knowledge, and space not as a passive, empty container, but as an active, alive, and accommodating dimension.

The Myth of the Inner Manager: A critique of the reflexive, modern impulse to over-manage every facet of our internal lives, and how to cultivate a state of un-management.

Digital Colonization: Confronting the psycho-physical compression, social comparisons, and anxiety induced by modern screens, and how the acceleration of time flattens our capacity for deep meaning.

The Playfulness of Inquiry: Why true contemplative practice thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and humour rather than rigid, sombre discipline.

"Space is not a thing. It is what permits experience to be experienced at all. When we realize space is projecting space into space, our rigid focal settings begin to thaw." — Ronald E. Purser
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What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money―or work for justice? To have children―or travel the world? The things we care about in life―family, friendship, leisure activities, work, our moral ideals―often conflict, preventing us from doing what matters most to us. Even worse, we don’t always know what we really want, or how to define success. This insightful book offers invaluable advice about living well by understanding your values and resolving the conflicts that frustrate their fulfillment.

What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters (Princeton University Press, 2024) is an essential guide to helping you understand what really matters to you and how you can thoughtfully pursue it.
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