Tricycle | Awake in the World

In the current issue of Tricycle—online and on newsstands now—Tsoknyi Rinpoche encourages us to give our humanity some space:

The difficulty most of us face is that we’re afraid of our humanity. We don’t know how to give our humanity space. We don’t know how to give it love. We don’t know how to offer our appreciation. We seize upon whatever difficult emotions or painful thoughts arise—in large part because we’ve been taught from a very young age that life is a serious business. We’re taught that we have to accomplish so many things and excel at so many things because we have to compete for a limited amount of resources. We develop such high expectations for ourselves and others, and we develop high expectations of life. Such a competitive, goal-oriented approach to life makes us very speedy inside. We become so tight physically, mentally, and emotionally as we rush through each day, each moment, that many of us forget—often quite literally—to breathe.

Read the rest of this teaching here.

Also in the Summer issue, Nancy Baker continues her exploration of the Zen precepts in "Precious Energy: The Ninth Zen Precept: Not Being Angry." She tells us the importance of moving beyond and oversimplified picture of what anger is. She writes:

First of all, it’s important to move beyond an oversimplified picture of what anger is. Anger takes many forms, and it’s good to explore its subtle and not-so-subtle variations so that ultimately each of us can find out precisely what works for us as a practice. Think of all the words there are for anger: nouns like rage, outrage, wrath, fury, resentment, annoyance, irritation, displeasure, indignation; modifiers like ticked off, pissed off, boiling mad, stewing, annoyed, simmering; verbs like blow up, snap at, hit the ceiling, see red, get under someone’s skin, lose it. In addition to all the different kinds of anger are all the different things we do with anger.

Read the rest of this Tricycle teaching here. The Summer 2011 issue can be found here.