Valerie (Vimalasara) Mason-John is a senior teacher in the Triratna Buddhist Community, and their work focuses on how Buddhist teachings can support a sustainable path to recovery. In their new book, First Aid Kit for the Mind: Breaking the Cycle of Habitual Behaviors, they lay out practical tools for uprooting harmful habits, building emotional resilience, and reconnecting with our bodies.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Mason-John to talk about how they first developed a practice of meditation after their experience in solitary confinement, how the Buddha’s teachings have supported their path to recovery, and how they’ve come to understand addiction from a Buddhist perspective.

Please note that this episode includes mentions of sexual assault and suicidal ideation.

Kimberly Brown is a meditation teacher and author based in New York City. In her new book, Happy Relationships: 25 Buddhist Practices to Transform Your Connections with Your Partner, Family, and Friends, she lays out a practical guide to help us cultivate and maintain healthy relationships with the people who matter most to us.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Brown to discuss how mindfulness can help us navigate conflict in relationships, the power of changing how we pay attention to the people around us, and why she believes happy relationships are possible for everyone. Plus, Brown leads a guided meditation.

No-self is a core teaching across Buddhist traditions. Yet what does it look like to actually live without a self? In How to Lose Yourself: An Ancient Guide to Letting Go, scholars Jay L. Garfield, Maria Heim, and Robert H. Sharf present a series of accessible and engaging translations of key Buddhist texts on why we are selfless persons—and why this insight leads to greater freedom and compassion.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Garfield to discuss why our preoccupation with the self causes us so much suffering, how dismantling the self is a project of moral development and spiritual freedom, and what it means to be a person without a self.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sameet Kumar is a clinical psychologist at the Memorial Cancer Institute and Moffitt Hematology and Cellular Therapy program. His work focuses on mindfulness-based approaches to grief and loss. In his new book, How to Grieve What We’ve Lost: Evidence-Based Skills to Process Grief and Reconnect with What Matters, which he co-wrote with four other therapists, he lays out concrete strategies for finding meaning and cultivating resilience in the face of loss.

In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Kumar to discuss how we can work with the embodied experience of grief, what feelings of powerlessness can teach us about equanimity, and how distress can motivate us to examine what really matters.

When journalist Katy Butler first committed to the Buddhist precepts, it didn’t occur to her to consider her two abortions in their light. Now, fifty years later, she has come to understand abortion in the context of harm reduction and the alleviation of suffering. In her article in the November issue of Tricycle called “Abortion and the First Precept,” she discusses the Buddhist ethics of abortion and why she believes abortion can be a wrenching, sacred, and even morally necessary act.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Butler to discuss the stigmas and hurdles she encountered in her experience of abortion, how the realities of women’s lives have long been overlooked by Buddhist teachers and communities, and how she thinks about Buddhist ethics in terms of harm reduction.