Podcast
Tricycle Talks
Hosted by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review · EN
Tricycle Talks: Listen to Buddhist teachers, writers, and thinkers on life's big questions. Hosted by James Shaheen, editor in chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the leading Buddhist magazine in the West. Life As It Is: Join James Shaheen with co-host Sharon Salzberg and learn how to bring Buddhist practice into your everyday life. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review creates award-winning editorial, podcasts, events, and video courses. Unlock access to all this Buddhist knowledge by subscribing to the magazine at tricycle.org/join
15episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Finding Balance to Engage More Fully with Margaret Cullen
Yesterday01:02:17Tap to summarizeEquanimity can often be mistaken for passivity or indifference. But meditation teacher Margaret Cullen insists that it is actually about feeling the entire range of human experience—and, in the process, responding from a place of love and discernment. Cullen is a licensed psychotherapist and mindfulness-based stress reduction instructor, and she has taught mindfulness and contemplative practices around the world. In her new book, Quiet Strength: Find Peace, Feel Alive, and Love Boundlessly Through the Power of Equanimity, she explores how equanimity can help us respond to the challenges of our times with greater curiosity and compassion. In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Cullen to discuss the difference between equanimity and indifference, why equanimity is an expression of love, and how equanimity can help us engage more fully with the world rather than withdraw from it. Plus, Cullen leads a guided meditation.
Transcribe →
A Beginner’s Guide to Dark Retreat with Andrew Holecek
1w ago00:47:38Tap to summarizeAndrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and he leads seminars and retreats on meditation, dream yoga, and death and dying. For the past thirty years, he has been engaging in a form of esoteric practice known as dark retreat. In his new book, Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation, he lays out a comprehensive introduction to the practice of dark retreat and how it can utterly transform our relationship to ourselves and our world. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Holecek to discuss what exactly a dark retreat is, why he views dark retreat as the most transformative practice he’s done, how spending time in darkness can help us recover a lost way of seeing, and what the darkness can teach us about our unconscious mind. Plus, Holecek offers practical guidelines for starting a dark retreat practice at home.
Transcribe →
Did the Buddha Really Teach That There Is No Self?
4w ago00:56:19Tap to summarizeThanissaro Bhikkhu is an American Theravada Buddhist monk trained in the Thai forest tradition. He currently serves as abbot of the Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County and is a frequent contributor to Tricycle. Over the years, he has written extensively on the Buddhist concept of not-self, including the many misperceptions that have arisen about this teaching over the centuries. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Thanissaro Bhikkhu to discuss why the Buddha refused to answer when he was asked whether there was a self, what it means to consider not-self as a strategy rather than an ontological truth, why perceptions of self and not-self are types of karma or activity, and why all views and perceptions are eventually discarded on the path to awakening.
Transcribe →
Opening to Wonder with Ada Limón
Apr 1500:59:26Tap to summarizeAda Limón is the author of seven books of poetry, and she recently completed her term as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. During her tenure as Poet Laureate, Limón undertook a series of projects harnessing poetry to transform our relationship to the natural world, from installing poems on picnic benches in national parks across the country to engraving a poem on a spacecraft that is on its way to the second moon of Jupiter. In her new book, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry, she draws from her experience as Poet Laureate to argue that poetry can be a powerful force for healing, connection, and courage. In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Limón to discuss why she views poetry as a sacred language, how poetry can help us move through the world with courage and equanimity, what it means for poetry to exist in the questions, and how reading and writing poetry can help us imagine a different type of future.
Transcribe →
Bridging Worlds with US Poet Laureate Arthur Sze
Apr 800:59:16Tap to summarizeArthur Sze is a poet and translator based in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and he is currently serving as the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. His new book, Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry, takes readers through nearly two millennia of poetry from across the world and explores how translation can deepen our understanding and appreciation of poetry. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Sze to discuss why he views translation as the deepest form of reading, how poetry can prompt us toward moral and spiritual transformation, what it means for translation to be an impossible task, and how poetry can build bridges and connections across languages and cultures. Plus, Sze reads a few poems from the new collection.
Transcribe →
A Buddhist Guide to Understanding Emotion with Maria Heim
Mar 2500:50:28Tap to summarizeBuddhism can often be mischaracterized as encouraging the elimination of emotion. Yet, as scholar Maria Heim points out, feeling is central to Buddhist teachings and practices—in fact, the Buddha presented the four noble truths as being “for one who feels.” Heim is the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion at Amherst College, and her new book, How to Feel: An Ancient Guide to Minding Our Emotions, presents new translations of essential early Buddhist teachings on emotion. Drawing from the Pali canon, she argues that the Buddhist psychology of emotions can offer us a different way of observing and relating to our feelings—and, in the process, bring about a sense of freedom. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Heim to discuss the misconception that Buddhism encourages the complete elimination of feeling, the paradoxical relationship between pleasure and pain in early Buddhist texts, how language can describe and shape experience, and how noticing our feelings can fundamentally restructure our behavior.
Transcribe →
Reimagining the Story of Citizenship with Daisy Hernández
Mar 1800:57:09Tap to summarizeDaisy Hernández is an associate professor at Northwestern University and a Tricycle contributing editor. Her new book, Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth, blends memoir and political analysis to examine the shifting narratives around citizenship and what it means to be an American. This episode is a little different from our usual focus, but we wanted to talk with Hernández about how she brings her Buddhist practice to bear on this timely topic. In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Hernández to discuss her own family’s immigration stories, why she views citizenship as a story or a myth, how she works with feelings of political despair, and what she’s learned from revisiting Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings on the Vietnam War in our current moment.
Transcribe →
Dementia and the Sense of Self with Philip Ryan
Mar 1100:51:36Tap to summarizePhilip Ryan is Tricycle’s executive editor, and he has worked at Tricycle on and off for the past thirty years. In the Spring issue of Tricycle, he wrote an article, "Old Friend," about his father’s dementia diagnosis and the questions it has raised about memory, impermanence, and identity. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Ryan to discuss how Buddhist teachings on the mind have helped him to make sense of his father’s diagnosis, why we are ultimately unknowable to each other and ourselves, and how dementia is the perfect illustration of the truths of impermanence, suffering, and nonself—or maybe a mockery of those truths.
Transcribe →
Demystifying Tantra with Richard Payne
Feb 2501:07:04Tap to summarizeTantric Buddhism is often mischaracterized or misunderstood, both in the academy and in the popular imagination. Scholar Richard Payne has dedicated much of the past twenty years to studying tantric teachings and practices—and to dispelling some of the common misconceptions associated with the tradition. Payne is the Yehan Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley, as well as an ordained priest in the Shingon tradition of Japanese esoteric Buddhism. In his new book, Tantra Across the Buddhist Cosmopolis, he examines the evolution of tantric traditions from early medieval India to the present day. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Payne to discuss the difficulties in trying to define tantra, how tantra challenges popular and scholarly notions about the nature of religion, and how he came to ordain as a Shingon priest.
Transcribe →
The Practice of Refuge with Sunita Puri
Feb 1800:59:00Tap to summarizeSunita Puri is a writer, a palliative medicine physician, and an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. She is the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. She recently wrote an article for the Spring issue of Tricycle called “Seeking Refuge,” where she discusses how she has found refuge in nature in the face of burnout. In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Puri to discuss what first led her to turn to nature as a way to hold her grief, how her relationship to the concept of refuge has evolved over time, why she views refuge as a practice rather than a place, and how Buddhist teachings on impermanence have shaped her life and her practice.
Transcribe →