Home › Living in the World › Relationships

Relationships

 All of our interpersonal relationships are a crucible for Buddhist practice
  • Tricycle Community 13 comments

    No Gain Paid Member

    By Barry Magid
    More »
  • Tricycle Community 1 comment

    Talk Like a Buddha Paid Member

    By Marshall Glickman
    I’M SITTING knee-almost-touching-knee with Ted, a chubby and towering sixty-something-year-old with a few days’ gray stubble, bushy eyebrows, and nose hairs calling for a trim. We met just fifteen minutes ago, and tears are running down his face. Ted’s breathing is labored, and I can smell his sour breath, yet I feel content. I comfort him—not so much with words but simply by being present, by gently meeting his gaze and accepting him and the moment. During our hour together, I work at remaining openhearted and mindful, and it seems to help Ted regain his balance. When our hour together is over, he’s much calmer, maybe even happy. More »
  • Tricycle Community 17 comments

    Bread and Stone Paid Member

    By Jacob Needleman
    IT IS THE MIDDLE OF December, the last day of classes. Outside, the sky is darkening and the wind is rattling the windows. I am meeting with students in a course called "The Nature of Religious Experience." We have been reading from the Upanishads, the Life of the Buddha, the Zen Buddhist Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, the Tao Te Ching, the books of Job, Isaiah, Matthew, the sermons of Meister Eckhart, and the poetry of two great masters of Islamic spirituality, Rumi and Hafiz. We have been speaking about religious experience—we have not been trying to have religious experience. More »
  • Tricycle Community 17 comments

    Bad Reputation Paid Member

    By The Dalai Lama
    See the equality of praise and blame, approval and disapproval, good and bad reputation, For they are just like illusions or dreams and have no true existence. THIS VERSE REFERS to the Eight Worldly Concerns: wanting to be praised and not wanting to be criticized, wanting happiness and not wanting suffering, wanting gain and not wanting loss, and wanting fame and approval and not wanting rejection and disgrace. We all experience these, don't we? Even animals probably have them in some slight measure. More »
  • Tricycle Community 7 comments

    Lighten Up! Paid Member

    By James Baraz
    Life, though full of woe, holds also sources of happiness and joy, unknown to most. Let us teach people to seek and to find real joy within themselves and to rejoice with the joy of others! Let us teach them to unfold their joy to ever sublimer heights! Noble and sublime joy is not foreign to the Teaching of the Enlightened One. Wrongly, the Buddha’s Teaching is sometimes considered to be a doctrine diffusing melancholy. Far from it: the Dhamma leads step by step to an ever purer and loftier happiness. —Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) More »