Tricycle Talks
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
Episodes
April 24, 2024 • 60 mins
Dr. Kamilah Majied is a mental health therapist, clinical educator, and consultant on advancing equity and inclusion through contemplative practice. In her new book, Joyfully Just: Black Wisdom and Buddhist Insights for Liberated Living, she draws from Black cultural traditions and the teachings of Nichiren Buddhism to lay out a path to liberation that is grounded in courage, curiosity, and deep joy.
In this episode of Tricycle Tal...
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April 17, 2024 • 56 mins
In the face of global crises and catastrophes, how can we work with our anger effectively? And how can we channel our grief and rage without becoming consumed by it?
These questions are at the core of Jungwon Kim’s practice. Kim is a multidisciplinary communications strategist and advocate who has chronicled frontline environmental and human rights movements for the past two decades. She previously worked at the Rainforest Alliance...
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April 10, 2024 • 60 mins
Unlike many contemporary American poets, Arthur Sze did not attend a traditional MFA program to learn to write poetry. Instead, he turned to translation to hone his craft. His latest collection, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry, compiles fifty years of his translations, illustrating the vitality and versatility of the Chinese poetic tradition across nearly two millennia.
In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle...
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March 27, 2024 • 61 mins
Gaylon Ferguson is an acharya, or senior teacher, in the Shambhala International Buddhist community and a faculty member in Religious Studies at Naropa University. In his new book, Welcoming Beginner's Mind: Zen and Tibetan Buddhist Wisdom on Experiencing Our True Nature, he uses the classic Zen oxherding pictures as a way of illustrating the stages of the spiritual journey, exploring the paradox of how we can awaken to what we alr...
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March 20, 2024 • 55 mins
Karma Lekshe Tsomo came to Buddhism because of a typo: years ago, her family name had been mistakenly changed from Zinn to Zenn. When her classmates started teasing her about being a Zen Buddhist, she took to the library to learn more about Buddhism and was instantly sold. After deciding to dedicate her life to Buddhist practice, she ordained as a nun and went on to found the Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women a...
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March 13, 2024 • 50 mins
In March 2008, journalist Amy Yee was assigned to cover a press conference in Dharamsala following the Chinese government’s crackdown on protests throughout Tibet. After an unexpected personal encounter with the Dalai Lama at the conference, she set out to highlight the stories of Tibetans living in exile in Dharamsala and around the world. Her new book, Far from the Rooftop of the World: Travels among Tibetan Refugees on Four Cont...
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February 28, 2024 • 50 mins
Haemin Sunim is a Korean Zen monk based in Seoul, where he founded the School of Broken Hearts and the Dharma Illumination Zen Center. In his new book, When Things Don't Go Your Way: Zen Wisdom for Difficult Times, he offers a guide to transforming life’s unexpected challenges into opportunities for awakening.
In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and co-host Sharon Salzberg sit down with Haem...
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February 14, 2024 • 56 mins
What does it mean to live an ethical life? And how can cultivating wisdom and virtue support us in navigating the crises of today’s world?
These questions are at the center of Zen priest and psychologist Seth Segall’s new book, The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom, and Pluralism. Drawing from Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist ethical traditions, Segall outlines a vision of liberal pluralism grounded in human flourishing.
In thi...
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January 24, 2024 • 56 mins
Laura Burges is a lay-entrusted teacher in the Soto Zen tradition, and she has been leading retreats on recovery at the San Francisco Zen Center for over twenty years. In her new book, The Zen Way of Recovery: An Illuminated Path Out of the Darkness of Addiction, she brings together Buddhist wisdom and the teachings of recovery programs to lay out a sustainable path to sobriety and freedom.
In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycl...
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January 10, 2024 • 64 mins
It can be so easy to feel like we’re not enough or that we’re somehow insufficient. According to meditation teacher Tara Brach, this feeling of unworthiness is fundamentally a disease of separation, as it alienates us from ourselves and the people around us. For Brach, one way to free ourselves from this trance of unworthiness is the practice of radical acceptance.
In the twentieth-anniversary edition of her classic book, Radical A...
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December 20, 2023 • 68 mins
Sunita Puri is a writer, a palliative medicine physician, and an associate professor at the UMass Chan Medical School. In her memoir, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, she explores her journey of helping patients and families redefine what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. In her article in Tricycle’s Winter 2023 issue, “A Gift,” she explores how she has learned to navigate love an...
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December 6, 2023 • 59 mins
After the Buddha’s enlightenment, his aunt and adoptive mother, Mahapajapati Gotami, asks him to ordain women and welcome them into his new monastic community. The Buddha declines to fulfill her request. But Mahapajapati Gotami doesn’t give up—accompanied by a large gathering of women, she sets out to ask him again.
In her new novel, The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women, scholar Vanessa R. Sasson offers an imaginative...
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November 22, 2023 • 56 mins
What is the role of contemplative practice in times of crisis? And how can meditation actually support us in meeting the greatest challenges of our time?
Oren Jay Sofer takes up these questions in his new book, Your Heart Was Made for This: Contemplative Practices for Meeting a World in Crisis with Courage, Integrity, and Love. As a meditation teacher and a member of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council, Sofer has spent decades explori...
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November 8, 2023 • 66 mins
Lama Rod Owens is an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, he draws from the bodhisattva tradition to rethink the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom, putting forth the notion of the New Saint. In the process, he pulls from the wisdom of the Old Saints of Tibetan Buddhism and the legacy o...
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October 25, 2023 • 52 mins
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, writer and artist Jenny Odell examined the power of quiet contemplation in a world where our attention is bought and sold. Now, she takes up the question of how to find space for silence when we feel like we don’t have enough time to spend.
In her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Odell traces the history behind our relationship to time, from the day-to-day pressures o...
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October 11, 2023 • 45 mins
Michael Imperioli has a knack for playing mobsters and villains. Best known for his roles as Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos and Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, the Emmy Award–winning actor has made a career out of exploring addiction and afflictive emotions on screen. Offscreen, though, Imperioli is a committed Buddhist practitioner. In 2008, he and his wife took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, and during the pandemic, ...
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September 27, 2023 • 46 mins
In 2016, poet Ross Gay set out to document a delight each day for a year. After he published The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights, demonstrating that the sources of delight are indeed endless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. For Gay, delight serves as evidence of our interconnectedness, and it is inextricable from...
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September 13, 2023 • 57 mins
When poet Jane Hirshfield first arrived at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center nearly fifty years ago, a Zen teacher told her that it was a good idea to have a question to practice with. She’s been asking questions ever since. Both in her Zen practice and in her poetry, Hirshfield is guided by questions that resist easy answers, allowing herself to be transformed through the process of asking. With her latest poetry collection, The Askin...
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August 30, 2023 • 49 mins
As a young oncologist, Anthony Back turned to Buddhism as a practical way of processing the suffering he encountered each day. Over time, his practice has become an essential support to his work in accompanying patients as they navigate illness and death, and it has radically transformed his understanding of what it means to provide care. Back currently serves as co-director of the University of Washington Center for Excellence in ...
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August 9, 2023 • 47 mins
When Anne C. Klein (Rigzin Drolma) first read that everyone, including her, was already a buddha, she was so shocked that she put down the book she was reading. Now, as a professor of religious studies at Rice University and a teacher at Dawn Mountain Center for Tibetan Buddhism in Houston, she continues to grapple with the relationship between our buddhahood and our humanity. In her new book, "Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longche...
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