Resilience has become one of the organising words of contemporary public health, and it usually arrives carrying assumptions about individual psychological capacity that travel poorly beyond the settings in which the concept was formed. East Java offers an instructive counter-case. Across the Tengger highlands, the Osing districts of Banyuwangi, the Madurese coastal settlements and the Mataraman interior, wellbeing has long been sustained through a dense repertoire of classical and popular therapeutic forms, among them the slametan communal meal, the ruwatan purification, herbal jamu , gamelan and mask theatre, and the trance performances of jaranan and seblang . Such practices treat suffering as a disturbance of relationship among persons, ancestors, land and the unseen, and they restore composure through shared work on rasa , the cultivated inner sense that Javanese thought places at the centre of personhood. Drawing on medical anthropology, art therapy and the study of classical spiritual practice, the article reads East Javanese healing as a distributed technology of resilience and examines the ethical questions raised when biomedicine and public health engage with it. Recommendations are offered for collaboration that avoids extraction, protects vulnerable patients from foreseeable harm, and treats local healers as knowers with standing and not as folklore.