I am currently in the process of researching and writing a monograph on the subject of Tibet’s culture of long-term meditative retreat—unique within Buddhist Asia, and among the world’s eremitic traditions. The primary source material for this study is a series of manuals for undertaking long-term retreats that have been composed over the past eight hundred years. This material allows me to compare how different authors have suggested meditators deal with certain challenges that are inherent to the retreat endeavor, exposing a rich intellectual tradition devoted to transcending the limitations of what we know of human embodiment.
Concurrent with this, I am also working on a monograph examining the practice of long-term meditative retreat in contemporary globalized Tibetan Buddhism.