Today, Jason and Aaron are joined by Maria Heim, a professor of religion at Amherst College. She has a new book out called How to Feel: An Ancient Guide to Minding Our Emotions, which is a collection of early Buddhist writings.

We talk about what early Buddhist teachings can tell us about how we experience the world, and how paying closer attention to our feelings can help us become freer in our relationships with other people as well as in our own minds.

We begin with what Maria calls the upward spiral: a path from ethical conduct through joy and calm toward greater freedom. From there, we explore the relationship between anger and hatred, the challenges of translating Buddhist psychology into English, and the practices of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. And throughout, we ask what it means to cultivate those qualities while remaining engaged with a world that gives us plenty of reasons for anger and despair.


Produced by Landry Ayres

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