Tricycle Talks

• Learning from Silence with Pico Iyer

  After his family home burned down in a California wildfire in the 1990s, journalist Pico Iyer found refuge in an unlikely location: a small Benedictine hermitage outside of Big Sur. Though Iyer initially arrived looking for a bed to sleep in, he soon found the silence of monastic life transformative, and over the course of the past thirty-three years, he has returned to the hermitage more than one hundred times. In his new book, Aflame: Learning from Silence, he explores the profound insights that come from silence—and how sitting in stillness can train us to care for one another in a world on fire. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Iyer to discuss how silence facilitates letting go of the self, why he sees monastic life as the true counterculture, and what his time at the hermitage has taught him about learning to love in the midst of loss.

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• Embracing Our Limitations and Making Time for What Counts

  Oliver Burkeman is an author and journalist based in northern England. In his new book, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, he lays out a practical guide for living meaningful and fulfilling lives as finite, imperfect humans. In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Burkeman to discuss what we gain by letting go of the delusion that life is something we have to solve, how our attempts at avoiding our anxieties often backfire, and why everything is much worse than we think—and why that’s OK.

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• Everything Is Buddha with Noelle Oxenhandler

  Noelle Oxenhandler is a writer and longtime Tricycle contributing editor based in northern California. Recently, she has been thinking a lot about what it means to be ready to die—and what will happen to all her belongings when she does. In her article in the November issue of Tricycle called “Everything Is Buddha,” she explores the sense of obligation she has toward the objects she has accumulated over the years, including a rubber zebra in a sailor suit and an intricately carved moose donning flannel trousers. Using the teachings of Suzuki Roshi as her guide, she asks what it means to treat everything around us as Buddha. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Oxenhandler to discuss how to let go of an object without devaluing it, what we can learn from Suzuki Roshi’s notion of everything existing in the right place, and what it means for things to be more than just things.

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• Finding Joy in Everything We Do with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

  Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche is a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author based in southern Colorado. In his new book, Diligence: The Joyful Endeavor of the Buddhist Path, he draws from the teachings of the 8th-century Buddhist philosopher Shantideva to explore how we can meet the world with joy and openheartedness.  In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Kongtrul Rinpoche to discuss the power of aspiration, how joy and steadfastness can protect us against laziness and low self-esteem, the importance of taking breaks, and how we can learn to find true joy in everything we do.

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• Saraha, Poet of Blissful Awareness with Roger R. Jackson

  When Roger R. Jackson was an undergraduate at Wesleyan, he came across the verses of Saraha, a 10th-century mystic known for his fierce exhortations to cut through the layers of delusion in order to experience the true nature of mind directly. While Saraha is considered one of the founders of the Vajrayana tradition and has been incorporated into a number of Tibetan Buddhist lineages, there have been relatively few academic examinations of his full body of work and its ongoing legacy. With Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness, Jackson presents the first thorough treatment of Saraha’s context, life, works, poetics, and teachings, including new translations of nearly all of Saraha’s dohas, or spontaneous songs. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Jackson to discuss the many legends surrounding Saraha, Saraha’s fierce critique of nearly every possible religious and social standpoint, and how to situate Saraha’s radical claims in the context of the Buddhist movements of his time.

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