A Buddhist Guide to Understanding Emotion with Maria Heim

Buddhism can often be mischaracterized as encouraging the elimination of emotion. Yet, as scholar Maria Heim points out, feeling is central to Buddhist teachings and practices—in fact, the Buddha presented the four noble truths as being “for one who feels.” Heim is the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion at Amherst College, and her new book, How to Feel: An Ancient Guide to Minding Our Emotions, presents new translations of essential early Buddhist teachings on emotion. Drawing from the Pali canon, she argues that the Buddhist psychology of emotions can offer us a different way of observing and relating to our feelings—and, in the process, bring about a sense of freedom. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Heim to discuss the misconception that Buddhism encourages the complete elimination of feeling, the paradoxical relationship between pleasure and pain in early Buddhist texts, how language can describe and shape experience, and how noticing our feelings can fundamentally restructure our behavior.