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Living in the World
  • Tricycle Community 3 comments

    Warrior Mind Paid Member

    By Sallie Tisdale
    TWENTY YEARS AGO, I didn't worry about my physical safety. I hitchhiked, camped out, walked alone at night, with a young person's imprudence. This unconcern gave way inexorably, first to a growing caution, and then to genuine anxiety and fear. In the last few years I felt myself to be in a strange state of paralysis. My fear of physical harm, of being a victim of violence, had come to affect my behavior many times a day, limiting where I went and at what times. I felt, like most women, resigned. I was always, however unconsciously, imagining and preparing for the assault any newspaper told me to expect. I resented this feeling, which seemed to have such gravity, pulling me down, forcing me to see the world through narrowed eyes, but I also felt helpless to change it. 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 »
  • Tricycle Community 6 comments

    The View From Above Paid Member

    By Manjusura
    We sometimes speak of losing perspective: overstretched, overburdened, we find ourselves lashing out at a loved one, letting slip a snide remark that we immediately regret. Or else, caught up in our own challenges, we lose awareness of other people’s lives, and of the world. There is a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus that describes how the perfect soul “soars upward and brings order to the whole world.” It describes a way of restoring perspective: if we imaginatively rise above our experience and look down from above, we see ourselves within a much wider frame—and find order in the world. More »