Tricycle Talks

Maria Heim is a professor of religion at Amherst College. Her new book, How to Truly Love: An Ancient Guide to a Life of Kindness, presents a fresh and accessible translation of a chapter from the Path of Purification, a meditation manual by the great 5th-century sage Buddhaghosa. Through a careful exploration of the brahmaviharas, or sublime attitudes, Buddhaghosa offers practical strategies for releasing anger and hatred and finding freedom.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Heim to discuss why Buddhaghosa considers love a kind of attention, how love can help us see more clearly, why meditation requires a foundation in morality, and how attention to the particular can help us cultivate a universal sense of love for all beings.

Jonathan F. P. Rose is an urban planner and philanthropist whose work focuses on creating more environmentally, socially, and economically resilient cities. In 2003, he and his wife, Diana Rose, cofounded the Garrison Institute, a retreat center in the Hudson Valley dedicated to the intersection of contemplation and engaged action.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Rose to discuss how he first came to Buddhism, how the Garrison Institute supports activists to address social challenges through a contemplative lens, and what it means to harness contemplative practices to build resilience, both for individuals and for the planet as a whole.

A sixteenth-generation descendant of Bizen swordsmiths, Miya Ando is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the ephemerality of natural phenomena. Her new book, Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2,000 Japanese Rain Words, presents a visual compendium of terms for rain, featuring expressions from Buddhist rain sutras, Heian-era poetic anthologies, and regionally specific terms from throughout Japan.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Ando to discuss the concept of mono no aware and how she aims to capture impermanence and transience in visual form, what she’s learned from the radical 15th-century monk Ikkyu Sojun, and how attention to everyday phenomena like rain can invite wonder and awe.

Oneika Mays is a yoga and meditation teacher and former mindfulness coach at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, where she taught for more than a decade. In her new book, Sit with Me: A No-BS Journey to Mindfulness and Meditation, she draws from her experience at Rikers to lay out a clear and accessible guide to metta, or loving-kindness practice.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Mays to discuss how she came to be Rikers Island’s first mindfulness coach, how metta can be a practice of internal freedom even when external freedom is not a possibility, what she’s learned from bell hooks about love, and how we can remain whole in a world that breaks us apart. Plus, Mays leads a guided meditation.

When Viet Thanh Nguyen was growing up as a refugee in the United States, it was hard for him to find stories that represented his experience. Now, as a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, he is determined to center the narratives of Vietnamese writers and artists in the diaspora. His most recent book, The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora, which he coedited with Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and Lan Duong, is the first anthology to gather the voices and perspectives of Vietnamese diasporic authors from around the globe. Featuring dialogues among thirty-seven writers and artists, the book explores themes of history and memory, the ongoing legacies of colonialism and war, and the role of art in reckoning with the realities of diaspora and displacement.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Nguyen to talk about how writing can be a tool for fighting back against erasure and exploitation, why he rejects the trope of being a voice for the voiceless and believes instead that we should abolish the conditions of voicelessness, how contributors to the collection complicate notions of authenticity and authority, and how political imagination can be a resource for building a better future.