Tricycle Talks

Andrew Holecek, author and Tibetan Buddhist teacher known for meditation, dream yoga, and death and dying, describes decades of practice with dark retreat. He explains what a dark retreat is and why it can be powerfully transformative. He talks about how darkness reveals the unconscious, contrasts descent with ascent, and offers practical steps for starting and integrating a home practice.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu is an American Theravada Buddhist monk trained in the Thai forest tradition. He currently serves as abbot of the Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County and is a frequent contributor to Tricycle. Over the years, he has written extensively on the Buddhist concept of not-self, including the many misperceptions that have arisen about this teaching over the centuries.  In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Thanissaro Bhikkhu to discuss why the Buddha refused to answer when he was asked whether there was a self, what it means to consider not-self as a strategy rather than an ontological truth, why perceptions of self and not-self are types of karma or activity, and why all views and perceptions are eventually discarded on the path to awakening.

Ada Limón, award-winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate, reflects on poetry’s sacred power and public projects. She talks about engraving poems in space and parks. Short, curious meditations explore wonder, questions, repair, gratitude, and how poems reconnect us to each other and the natural world.

Arthur Sze, the 25th U.S. Poet Laureate and translator from Santa Fe, talks about translation as deep reading and a creative, devotional practice. He reflects on the impossibility and discoveries of translating, shares readings from Transient Worlds, and describes workshops that build bridges across languages and cultures.

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.

Daisy Hernández, associate professor and author exploring immigration and belonging. She traces her family’s immigration stories, treats citizenship as a social myth, and links U.S. policy to migration. She discusses criminalization, healthcare fears, movements that expand belonging, and how Buddhist practice and Thich Nhat Hanh help her cope with political despair.

Philip Ryan, Tricycle’s executive editor and author of a personal essay on his father’s dementia, reflects on memory, identity, and impermanence. He discusses noticing loss of professional self, how relationships shape who we are, the irony of living wholly in the present, and how Buddhist teachings frame unknowability of the mind. The conversation also touches on genetics, sensory loss, humor, and making present moments count.

Richard Payne, Yehan Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhist Studies and ordained Shingon priest, unpacks tantric Buddhism across Asia. He discusses why delineation trumps definition, tantra’s invisible spread and coherence, ritual forms from fire rites to deity-identification, and how practices serve communal and protective roles beyond personal transformation.

Sunita Puri, a palliative medicine physician and writer, shares how nature and Buddhist ideas of impermanence shaped her life and work. She discusses burnout, finding expansiveness outdoors, and shifting from mastery to ongoing practice. Conversations cover using nature to teach grief, radical honesty in care, and cultivating an inner refuge that travels with you.

Li-Young Lee, acclaimed American poet known for spiritual verse and a Daoist-Christian sensibility, talks about poetry as a spiritual practice. He explores reconciling opposites, writing from a don’t-know mind, silence and motion in verse, translating the Tao Te Ching, and poetic postures of awe, adoration, and turning toward the unknown.