Episodios

  • Remembering Our Belonging with Sebene Selassie

    Remembering Our Belonging with Sebene Selassie
    May 21 2025
    As someone who has been living with cancer for nearly two decades, Sebene Selassie is no stranger to being with suffering. In her work as a writer and dharma teacher, Selassie focuses on how we can tap into a deeper sense of love and belonging in the face of pain, violence, and division. Her most recent book, You Belong: A Call for Connection, draws from Buddhist philosophy, multidisciplinary research, and her personal experience to lay out what she calls a “map back to belonging.” In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Selassie to discuss how loving-kindness can be an antidote to fear, what it looks like to center love right now, why we’re often divided from ourselves, and what we can learn from staying with paradoxes and contradictions.
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Buddhist Poet Ocean Vuong on Failure, Redemption, and Second Chances

    Buddhist Poet Ocean Vuong on Failure, Redemption, and Second Chances
    May 14 2025
    For poet Ocean Vuong, the act of writing is inextricably linked to his Zen Buddhist practice. In a previous episode of Life As It Is, he told Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg that he believes the task of the writer is “to look long and hard at the most difficult part of the human condition—of samsara—and to make something out of it so that it can be shared and understood.” Now, in his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong turns his attention to our cultural avoidance of illness and death, as well as the small moments of care and kindness that are essential to survival. Tracing the unlikely friendship between a young writer and an elderly widow who’s succumbing to dementia, the novel reckons with themes of history and memory, loneliness and heartbreak, and failure and redemption. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Vuong to discuss how he incorporates Buddhist notions of emptiness and nothingness into his writing, the role of ghosts and the dead in his work, how writing can be a form of prayer, and what he’s learned from Buddhist understandings of redemption. Plus, Vuong reads an excerpt from his new novel.
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    1 h y 4 m
  • Breathing Mindfulness with Sarah Shaw

    Breathing Mindfulness with Sarah Shaw
    Apr 23 2025
    Over the course of the last hundred years, breathing mindfulness has become the most popular method of meditation around the world. Yet its history remains largely unrecorded. In her new book, Breathing Mindfulness: Discovering the Riches at the Heart of the Buddhist Path, scholar Sarah Shaw provides a historical survey of some of the methods of breathing mindfulness and how they developed. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Shaw to discuss how breathing mindfulness is linked to the seven factors of awakening, the central role of joy in meditation, why the tradition of samatha, or calm, meditation has been marginalized and suppressed, and what we can learn from thinking about traditions of breathing mindfulness as part of a vast ecosystem.
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    1 h
  • How to Stay Engaged without Burning Out with Daisy Hernández

    How to Stay Engaged without Burning Out with Daisy Hernández
    Apr 16 2025
    For the next few episodes of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg will be talking about specific themes that have been coming up in their practice, with a particular focus on navigating our current social and political climate. In this episode, they discuss how to stay engaged without burning out—and how cultivating equanimity can provide a necessary balance between wisdom and compassion. Later in the episode, they’re joined by Daisy Hernández, a journalist and Tricycle contributing editor, to talk about how equanimity can be a support in times of uncertainty, how Buddhist practices have guided her work as a journalist, and what’s on her equanimity cultivation list.
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    58 m
  • The Edge of Language with Arthur Sze

    The Edge of Language with Arthur Sze
    Apr 9 2025
    For poet and translator Arthur Sze, poetry offers a way to ask difficult questions without any expectation of an answer. “It helps us slow down, hear clearly, see deeply, and envision what matters most in our lives,” he told Tricycle in a 2020 interview. “When one reads a poem, one has to pay attention to the sounds of words, to the rhythm of language, [and] experience the dance and tension between sound and silence.” His twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, experiments with this dance between sound and silence in presenting a startling portrait of the nuclear age, chronicling the plight of vanished languages and species and asking how to live fully in the face of catastrophe. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Sze to discuss the generativity of emptiness, how poetry stays present tense, and what it means for art to awaken us to what is.
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    56 m
  • Classroom Mindfulness Put to the Test with Emma Varvaloucas

    Classroom Mindfulness Put to the Test with Emma Varvaloucas
    Mar 26 2025
    Emma Varvaloucas is the executive director of the Progress Network, a nonprofit media organization that aims to take a constructive approach to solving some of our most intractable problems. In her article in the February issue of Tricycle called “Classroom Mindfulness Put to the Test,” she explores the surprising results of recent research on mindfulness programs for adolescents. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Varvaloucas to discuss how mindfulness first entered the classroom, whether mindfulness is developmentally appropriate for adolescents, and the importance of pairing mindfulness with broader access to mental health services.
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    54 m
  • The Grieving Body with Mary-Frances O'Connor

    The Grieving Body with Mary-Frances O'Connor
    Mar 19 2025
    Grief is often thought of as a psychological phenomenon. Yet loss also has a profound impact on our bodies, often affecting our cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems. As a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Arizona, Mary-Frances O’Connor specializes in studying the physiology of grief. In her new book, The Grieving Body: How the Stress of Loss Can Be an Opportunity for Healing, she draws from her clinical research and her personal experience to explore the toll that loss takes on our bodies—and what this can teach us about care, compassion, and interdependence. In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with O’Connor to discuss the phenomenon of dying of a broken heart, how grieving can be thought of as a form of learning, how meditation can change how we show up for others, and the challenges of rediscovering a sense of purpose in the wake of loss.
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    1 h y 16 m
  • A Journey through Buddhist History with Donald S. Lopez Jr.

    A Journey through Buddhist History with Donald S. Lopez Jr.
    Mar 12 2025
    Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan and a longtime Tricycle contributing editor. In his new book, Buddhism: A Journey through History, he lays out a comprehensive introduction to the history of Buddhism, tracing its development across continents and centuries. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Lopez to discuss the challenges in attempting to tell any single history of Buddhism, how translation has contributed to Buddhism’s survival as a tradition, the debates surrounding Buddhism’s decline in India, and the story of the Buddha’s nemesis and would-be assassin.
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    46 m
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