Tricycle Talks A Buddhist Guide to Understanding Emotion with Maria Heim
4 snips
Mar 25, 2026 
Maria Heim, a scholar of early Buddhist texts and author of How to Feel, explores how feeling is central to Buddhist teachings. She discusses translating vedana as feeling, the Four Noble Truths ‘for one who feels,’ the paradox of pleasure and pain, how noticing feelings can reshape habit, and practices like the brahma viharas that create spacious freedom.
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Pali Vocabulary Reframes Emotional Experience
- Ancient Pali categories offer a different map of feeling than modern Western emotion labels, which are historically conditioned.
- Heim argues this alternate vocabulary lets practitioners observe and reshape experience rather than assume emotions are fixed.
Buddha Refused One True Number Of Feelings
- The Buddha refuses a single count of feelings (2, 3, 5, 6, 18, 108) to stress pragmatic context sensitivity.
- Heim explains he taught different enumerations depending on purpose, resisting reductionist universal lists.
Watch Feelings To Create Meta Awareness
- Notice and objectify your feelings through mindful observation to gain distance and reveal causes and trajectories.
- Heim points to early texts where the Buddha watches experience, sorting elements linked to ill will or desire into separate piles.
