Breaking Down Love to Practice It in Each Moment

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James Shaheen: Welcome to the Tricycle Talks podcast. I’m James Shaheen, editor and publisher of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Today we’ll be chatting with meditation teacher and best-selling author Sharon Salzberg about her newest book, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection. In it, Sharon explores an authentic love for ourselves and others based on direct experience, cutting through the habitual preconceptions we hold of one another. She also examines what it could possibly mean to love all beings, even those who, well, we don’t particularly like and even work against. Sharon is cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and among the first Westerners to teach mindfulness meditation in the United States. She’ll be speaking with Carolyn Gregoire, a journalist who covers health, science, and spirituality. Carolyn is also coauthor of Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind

Carolyn Gregoire: Sharon, thanks so much for being here. 

Sharon Salzberg: Well, thank you. 

Carolyn Gregoire: Your book Real Love follows real happiness, and real happiness at work. What made you decide to write a book on love and relationships?

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, isn’t it an interesting question? Well, my very first book was called Lovingkindness—it came out in 1995—and the matter of love, not necessarily in the form of relationships, romantic relationships, but love in our lives, has been of compelling interest to me my whole life, and certainly my life as a meditator, as a practitioner, and as a teacher. I think there actually was a line in a movie that was almost like the goad for this book, and that movie is Dan in Real Life, from maybe thirteen years ago, something like that, and the line is, “Love is not a feeling, it’s an ability.” I realized that, of course, it is a feeling in the sense that that’s what we yearn for, that’s how we tend to identify with it, but so many of my really transforming moments in my own meditation practice have come from again and again saying, “Oh no. It’s an ability. It’s a capacity within me. It’s not really in the hands of somebody else to deliver unto me or take away from me. It’s a capacity that exists inside of me.” I think that’s maybe one of the greatest empowerments we can have in life. 

Carolyn Gregoire: We tend to see love in a much more limited way than what you’re describing. When you were doing your research for the book, and just in your work and your observations, how do people tend to look at love that perhaps doesn’t encompass the full spectrum of what we’re capable of?

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, well, certainly that came up again and again. And I think one characteristic of this book was that I really kind of crowdsourced it. I asked a lot of people. We had regular groups in different cities where I just asked people, “Tell me your stories. Tell me what word do you think of when you think of love? Do you think it’s a weakness? Do you think it’s a strength?” And I really learned so much. From the perspective of, say, Buddhist psychology or the world of meditation, the sense of love—first of all, it’s not limited to romance, you know, and intoxication or any of that, and it’s not about the particular form that a relationship will take. It’s about that moment of pure connection where our sense of the other is not distorted by our own agenda or our own assumptions. That’s something that came up again and again in talking to people. It’s like, “I thought I had nothing in common with that person or that kind of person. Then I really learned to listen, and I saw a whole other aspect.” Or, “I thought I could never do this kind of thing, and then I realized that was just a thought, you know, that wasn’t the kind of thought that’s based in reality, that was just a construct.” How much letting go there is in love of our own withholding and our own fears and so on was a surprise, in a way. I mean, it wasn’t a personal surprise, but seeing how universal it was, that was a surprise. And it was really surprising to see how lonely people are, because it is really a prevalent state. I quote this book—it’s almost exemplified in its title—the book Bowling Alone, about the disintegration of different social structures and ways we used to come together. Like a bowling league, you know, that doesn’t necessarily exist anymore for people, or church, which exists for some, but not for perhaps as many, and things like that. How do we find each other nowadays? 

Carolyn Gregoire: Again and again when I was reading the book, I thought about this famous Rumi quote. I think it’s “Seek not for love, but for the barriers inside of yourself that you’ve built against love.” What are the most common barriers and habits of mind you see that block us from fulfilling this deep desire we have to love?

Sharon Salzberg: Of course, there are many, but it’s workable, it’s all workable. There are things like idealization, just to love this moment—not necessarily like it, but to have that sense of intense connection really being here. Is it not quite good enough according to what we think should be happening? We have, commonly, a lot of fear, and, certainly, we have a tremendous habit of assumptions, which I found fascinating. I found it fascinating in my own mind and in the minds of others. I also tell the story in the book about a friend who was a writer talking about a lecture he had given in the Midwest somewhere, and in the course of the lecture, he mentioned Remembrance of Things Past by Proust, which had been a very formative thing for him to read, had been very important for him. Then he was having dinner somewhere, and this woman came up to him, and his assumption about her, you know, his take on her, was that she’s probably not highly educated, and she looks sort of frumpy, or, you know, whatever. She started by saying, “I was at your lecture,” and then his heart sank because, he said, “Oh, she’s going to say I didn’t understand a word you said,” or, “You were really off,” or something like that. And to his amazement, she went on to say, “I was at your lecture and I want to say that I find it so much more fulfilling to read Proust in the original French.” Like whoa, you know? So how do we categorize people? 

Carolyn Gregoire: The automatic filtering.

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, exactly. There’s so much of that, and, of course, one of the great blessings of mindfulness is that we can finally see it, rather than have it be unconsciously determining our reactions. 

Carolyn Gregoire: Mindfulness you describe as being at the core of this ability to develop our capacity to love. Could you speak specifically to some of the ways that mindfulness can deepen our love for ourselves and also love for others?

Sharon Salzberg: I think there are so many ways. I think it is an enormous gift in that journey. For one thing, if you think about different components of mindfulness, one is seeing quickly what we’re experiencing, and the other is seeing what we’re experiencing in a more balanced way. When an intense emotion comes up, or some kind of assumption or reaction—if we see it even—we have one of two responses to it. One is, we dive into it, like we have this mode of anger and it overtakes us. We feel overwhelmed by it. We feel defined by it. Our actions and our choices are determined by it. The other reaction that’s common is the opposite. It’s like we hate what we’re feeling. We fear it. We’re ashamed of it. We want to push it away. We want to repress it or deny it. And we say mindfulness is a place in the middle where we’re neither getting overcome by what’s coming up, nor are we pushing it away. So that allows us to keep learning almost like in right relationship to what we’re experiencing, and we can see it much more clearly. 

So this is another story from the book where I talk about if your inner critic, that kind of critical voice, is pervasive or prevalent. Give it a name, you know, give it a persona. Give her a wardrobe. Maybe I say her, because mine happens to be female, but you know, give them a wardrobe, whatever it might be. So I tell the story about how I named my inner critic Lucy—so I always apologize to the Lucy’s of the world—based on the character in the Peanuts comic strip, because I’d seen this cartoon once where Lucy’s talking to Charlie Brown, and she says, “You know, Charlie Brown, the problem with you is that you’re you.” The cartoon goes on from there. And somehow, whenever I saw that cartoon, somebody had left it on a desk in the room that I had moved into, and whenever I saw that cartoon, my eye would fall right on that line. “The problem with you is that you’re you,” because that Lucy dominant voice had been so strong in my earlier life, and I’d also been highly trained in this one particular technique of mindfulness called mental noting, where you start with applying a silent mental label to your breath, like “in, out, in, out” as you feel the breath, and then, if the word comes easily, you place a label on the predominant experience, like “joy,” “sorrow,” whatever it might be. I felt like after seeing the cartoon, I had two new mental labels. One was “Hi Lucy.” And that came about because very soon after seeing it, this really great thing happened for me, and my very first thought was, “That’s never going to happen again.” And I just responded with “Hi Lucy.” My favorite form of it was actually “Chill out, Lucy. Just chill out. I see you, I know who you are. Put your feet up and take a rest.” And that’s different than, “You’re right, Lucy, you’re always right,” and it’s also different than “I cannot believe I’ve been meditating all these years, and Lucy’s still here, and I’m such a failure, and this is so shocking.” Right? It’s just slicing down the middle, which is what mindfulness is. So it gives us the gift of knowing what we’re feeling, and it also gives us the gift of having a more balanced relationship to it.

Carolyn Gregoire: And the character brings this sort of lightness and humor, which I appreciate. I’m already starting to think of what the name for my inner critic might be. I’m going to have to do some brainstorming, but that seems like a really helpful practice. The first part of the book you dedicated to self-love and talking about this as the foundation for our other relationships. And you touched on something that I think is really important, which is that, you know, we always hear that you have to love yourself before you can really love someone else. And while there’s truth in that, it can also start to feel like fully loving yourself is something you have to achieve before you’re worthy of love, which is a trap. I think a lot of us start to fall into thinking that way. What is maybe a better way to look at it?

Sharon Salzberg: I’m actually having an ongoing conversation with bell hooks about this, because we did an evening together in New York City, and she challenged me on that very point. She said she felt like you could offer care to others, but not really love unless you loved yourself. And I said, my point was really about the word “completely,” that we do get into a project mentality, like, “I can’t begin to love anybody else until I totally, completely love myself.” And I think, first of all, that’s a long time. Second of all, it’s not true, because I feel like I know many people who love others, and yet I don’t think that love for others is sustainable in a good way without love for oneself. I think generosity becomes martyrdom; giving becomes something kind of distorted and we’re filled with resentment at some point, or we burn out. There’s just not enough balance. And this is why some of the most caring, empathetic people who are serving others and helping others just can’t sustain it over time, because there’s just too much imbalance. They’re not figuring into the whole vision of who needs to be healed, or who needs to be helped, or who needs a break, and so I just don’t think it’s sustainable. But I wouldn’t wait! We have this waiting mode, like, “I can’t love anybody until I really, truly, totally love myself.” I wouldn’t wait. 

Carolyn Gregoire: And so for people who are reading this book who would maybe describe themselves as unlucky in love or having been unable to find the kind of love that they’re looking for . . . Again, we learned that romantic love is just such a small part of what love is. But what can they do in the meantime, besides continuing to work on loving themselves and being open? 

Sharon Salzberg: One of the most frustrating feelings we can have is this sense of, “I have nothing, and I will forever.” So one thing we can do is really directly challenge that on both fronts. Nothing is forever, and also it’s so unlikely that we actually have nothing. When we feel that kind of inner impoverishment and the sense of being deficient or bereft, it actually helps, even though it sounds a little clichéd, just to look at what you have to be grateful for, get back in touch with it. Because the truth is, for most of us, just through the force of conditioning—some would say evolutionary biology—we don’t tend to look at the positive stuff very much. Some people say we’re wired to look at threat, to look at danger. For others, I think it’s more a consideration of their personal, familial conditioning. Not everybody is brought up to look at the blessings they have so much as what’s not enough. So it’s actually turning your attention toward the parts of life we don’t often give much air time to. You don’t have to feel that that’s forced or coerced or phony. It’s just what I described, really. It’s like filling in the blanks. 

Carolyn Gregoire: Something kind of related to that that I learned about myself reading this book was that I think what I’m the most challenged with is sympathetic joy and being really genuinely happy for others, especially in areas that I feel a sense of competitiveness or comparison, maybe, with my work with other writers. And then, also, with social media, when we’re getting sort of a highlight reel of people’s lives that just naturally invites this kind of comparison, it becomes a little stickier. I mean, do you think that the way we use technology and social media might be affecting this? How can we come back to a place of being just genuinely happy for other people’s happiness?

Sharon Salzberg: In Buddhist teaching, there are these four qualities that are talked about often as a bundle. The first is loving-kindness. The second is compassion. The third is sympathetic joy, or feeling happiness for the happiness of others. And the fourth is equanimity or balance or perspective. Many teachers would say that, of those four, sympathetic joy is often the most difficult. We may not feel compassion for somebody, but if we can register, “Oh, that’s a painful place to be,” rather than just, “That’s bad,” then the compassion will often come. But to actually be happy for someone else’s happiness when you don’t feel you yourself have enough, it’s very tough, but not impossible. It just means challenging a lot of assumptions that we may be holding, like around enough and how little we have, or where, “You have everything, and you will forever!”— both statements being probably not true—and so it’s part of a practice, really, of continually looking at what’s holding us back, because not having joy and happiness for others is a path of a lot of resentment and loneliness and unhappiness, and being happy for others is a path of a lot of happiness. But it’s not easy, and we look at those challenges with a sense of learning and exploration. It’s experimentation is what it is, and that really helps us quite a lot.

Carolyn Gregoire: It struck me as somewhat related as well to the loving-kindness practice of directing compassion to someone that you find difficult. I’ve been trying that as well as a way to work on this sympathetic joy. 

Sharon Salzberg: How’s it going? 

Carolyn Gregoire: I’m just starting, but it’s changing the way that I think about it. It’s making me more aware of those tendencies within myself.

Sharon Salzberg: I think a lot has to do with understanding and questioning, and it’s one of the most invigorating aspects of meditation. I found that with all of the myths we’ve been told and the things that have been presented in a certain way, we get to look for ourselves and question them. Like, “Does that kind of obsessive vengefulness really make me happy? How happy does it make me ? Is compassion or love or kindness really weak and sort of stupid or sentimental? Is it really? Look at that.” And so we get to look directly at our experience. To come back to what you asked about social media, we do live in a time where a prevalent way of relating is through presenting your best experience. This may be somewhat age-related. I’m not totally sure, but this professor friend of mine talked to me once about his students, and he said that he feared that they were using social media largely as a way of just comparing and feeling bad about themselves, because nobody puts up a picture of their mediocre meal, you know. So he’s like, “Wow, look at that.” And I said, “Well, that might be age-related. My friends tend to post lamentations about their shoulder surgery or something like that, you know, or the sciatica, ‘I have to find a sciatica group now,’ something like that.” So it could be different, but it is, I think, creating in general a sense of a curated life, like, “Look how exciting this is! I won’t tell you about the rest of the week.” It doesn’t have to be on social media, or it may not even be appropriate, but somewhere in our lives, we have to feel we’re completely authentic, and not hiding the parts of us that are troubled or uncertain or whatever it might be. 

Carolyn Gregoire: I think that’s a great point. I wanted to come back to this point you just made about the myth that we buy into that there’s something weak about love or compassion, that there’s some sort of weakness associated with these qualities. You mentioned this Martin Luther King quote that we should love everyone. But I think we have this sense that loving everyone would make us kind of a doormat, maybe, or something of a pushover. I mean, what kind of person loves everybody? How can we kind of rewire our thinking on that and really come to see love and compassion as real strengths? 

Sharon Salzberg: That’s why I keep using the word “experiment.” I don’t think it’s a question of convincing ourselves, or analyzing it so thoroughly that we decide, “Oh, that would be better after all,” but it’s really putting ourselves in the position of trying it out. What does that feel like? What does it feel like to cultivate love for ourselves, even as flawed as we may be? Not like “I’ll love myself when I finish my doctorate,” or whatever, but like right now when I’m procrastinating as well. And really see that compassion doesn’t mean giving in, loving ourselves doesn’t mean being lazy, that these tendencies to hold qualities like love and compassion as weaknesses are really just myths. They’re just constructs that have been given to us. What happens when we really look at “How did I learn best? How did I make the most progress in that goal? Was it by putting myself down for four hours after I blew it? Or was it by kind of being resilient, picking up and saying, ‘I’m going on, I’m starting again’”? And so we really see for ourselves. And what about this person we don’t like? How many hours have we spent going through the list of their faults, never even discovering a new fault, but just going over the same list, and how much of our own life energy and our time has been given over unto them? And how about if we recapture that? And how much of what we say in anger is really fear? And what if there was another way of not being afraid? So all of that is incredibly interesting just to explore.

Carolyn Gregoire: A practice that a lot of us are probably working on right now is transmuting some of the anger and outrage that we’re feeling at the collective situation, and trying to turn that into something more productive in order to make our contribution and to find a way to give back. Are there some particular mindfulness practices that can be helpful?

Sharon Salzberg: I was just teaching somewhere, and it’s talking about taking action, and somebody came up to me and said, “You should have said that we always have to lead with love.” And I said, “You’re right.” And then, when I was speaking next, I said, “By the way, it’s looking at our motivation, first of all, because the intention from which we’re speaking or acting makes a difference,” and realizing that, in the Buddhist psychology, anger is likened to a forest fire which burns up its own support. The positive part of it, of course, is the energy. You know, we’re not complacent, we’re not indifferent, we’re not passive. There’s a lot of energy there, and sometimes that energy is the real spark for taking action. But if it’s likened to a forest fire which burns up its own support, it means that it can damage us, the host, quite a lot. It can actually destroy us. What we want to do is really look toward ways of having that kind of energy without the burning and the sort of obsessiveness and the fixation of the state of anger. That’s part of what we actually explore through mindfulness, is, say, compassion, which would be the kind of regular answer, the traditional answer to that question, “How weak is it?” And can there be a compassion with a kind of rigor, or intensity about our actions? And we’d, of course, say, “Yes.”

Carolyn Gregoire: And you talk also about this idea of awakening to our interdependence, which, of course, seems more critical now than ever before. What are the main things that keep us stuck in this hole of isolation, and in a shell of our own selves that keeps us from seeing this? And are there ways to break out of that?

Sharon Salzberg: Yes. Here, too, the role of assumption, especially around what I guess these days we’d know as privilege, it’s like the centrality of our existence, rather than realizing . . . It’s a little bit like when I was in the car with somebody, I can’t remember who it was, and we were talking about how terrible the traffic was and how awful it was, and just complaining, and the person I was with said, “Remember, we are the traffic.” To others, we’re the traffic, we’re the problem. There was a kind of equality, really. Rather than thinking, “I own the world, and you’re causing me a problem by being traffic,” I’m out there too. There were a couple of times when I really saw it in a clear way. One was after the nuclear meltdown in Japan and after all the things that preceded that. I was reading a lot of international news, for some reason, online, and there was a French newspaper that said something like, “Whatever nuclear material might have been leaked—radioactive material that might have been leaked—was going across the Pacific due to fortuitous winds.” And I thought, “Yeah, maybe they’re fortuitous if you’re in France, but they’re not that fortuitous if you’re in Hawaii, or whatever.” And I thought: Look at that. I saw the same thing after Hurricane Sandy, when I was not in New York City, but, of course, so many of my friends were. It wasn’t actually Hurricane Sandy, it was Hurricane Irene. So I was not in New York then either, and so many of my friends were, and I was reading New York media. First there was all this stuff about it being so devastating and so incredible and so awful. And then it didn’t happen in New York City that way. And so then I was reading these headlines saying that Hurricane Irene was just hype, there was nothing to it, it wasn’t real. And I thought, “Yeah, not if you’re in Vermont, which is drowning.” It just happened that that particular one spared New York City, which had not been expected. But, you know, it’s that sense of, “It’s my world. It’s central to me, and other people exist on the margin. It’s not going to be nice to them, but it’s not the same.” That’s what we have to dispel. Every time we see that kind of thinking, we can just see it and let it go, because we can see it for what it is and and come to what’s really a more truthful sense of how things are, which is that we are all interconnected and that, you know, it’s not that New York will never feel the consequences of Vermont drowning either. 

Carolyn Gregoire: Yeah, I think that gets to this idea of the empathy gap that psychologists talk about. It’s so much easier for us—even if you look at something like the Paris attacks versus, just a few days later, there was a huge attack in Beirut—I think the natural tendency as a person in the West is you maybe feel more empathy toward the victims of this attack in France versus this attack in the Middle East. And that gets to a lot of these unconscious biases that we have, which you talk about in the book. And I think we’re seeing those really come out on a new level now, how these things are so quick and sort of ingrained. What hope is there for dislodging those very deep biases?

Sharon Salzberg: Oh, I think there’s a lot of hope on a lot of levels. We feel more akin to others, some others, because we don’t necessarily know those others. And just through genuine interaction . . . Here’s where I actually do have a lot of hope for technology. I’m not the kind of person who’s really disparaging of social media or whatever. I mean, it certainly could be misused and one could be addicted to it, but you know, I do hold out a lot of hope that we can come to know one another differently, and that’s through paying attention. It’s also being in situations where we’re put together, or we are together voluntarily, so that we can meet anew. And it also comes, I think, very much from being able to see those assumptions come up in our minds, and we can, hopefully, before we’ve said anything or done anything, see them for what they are. And then even if it’s a matter of not knowing, we can ask rather than just assume we know. 

Carolyn Gregoire: I really liked this idea that you mentioned as well of our everyday communities, these little pockets of people that we’re a part of each day that we don’t necessarily think of as our community. Maybe even it’s just the dry cleaner that you go to and using that as a site for practicing compassion and for practicing love. Can you elaborate a little bit on that idea?

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah, in the classical loving-kindness practice, we begin by offering loving-kindness to ourselves, and then we go through this sequence of beings, not necessarily people, and so I say beings, even though it’s an odd term, ending with the offering of loving-kindness to all beings everywhere. Somewhere in that sequence is someone known as a neutral person. It’s somebody we don’t particularly like or dislike. This is like the proverbial stranger, you know, and it’s actually my favorite part of the practice, because I feel like that exemplifies how that practice works. It’s not through trying to force a feeling or an emotion, certainly not through trying to cover over conflicted or difficult emotions with this thin veneer of hypocrisy at all, but it’s by paying attention differently that we come to have this genuine sense of connection with others, even not knowing their story, even not knowing their situation. So the neutral person is someone we don’t strongly like or dislike, and often people will choose somebody like their dry cleaner or clerk in the supermarket. What happens is that in the course of that practice, you extend loving-kindness to that person. You may not know their name, but you kind of hold them in your heart, and you repeat phrases to yourself wishing them well, like “May you be happy, may you be peaceful,” so, in effect, you’re paying attention to them instead of looking right through them or ignoring them. One of the reasons I love that part of the practice is because we’re urged to choose somebody we tend to run into now and then, so that you get to see if that evolution of a relationship has really happened. And it really does, you know! You can walk into that store and see your dry cleaner, and there’s this rush like, “Oh, there’s my friend,” still not knowing their story or their particular trials or tribulations. It really does get to be a different sense of connection.

Carolyn Gregoire: That seems to be such a powerful practice for people who do feel lonely and disconnected, is just to recognize that the people around you are people that you’re interacting with. There is an opportunity to practice love, even if it’s from a little bit of a distance. 

Sharon Salzberg: Yeah. My friend Barbara Fredrickson, who’s a researcher at the University of North Carolina, she wrote a book called Love 2.0, so she got the title before I could, and she talks about those mini-moments of connection, like a stranger on the street, you know, or being in the elevator with some people and really being there, fully present, as love. And she says that’s different than the structure of a relationship or making a commitment to somebody, or whatever that might be. That moment is the moment of love. And she, being a researcher, has all the biochemistry, the vagal tone changes and all that. And I thought it was interesting.

Carolyn Gregoire: Even just not being on your phone while you’re checking out at the grocery store. I mean, I see so many people doing that now, and I think that’s just such an important tiny action, to be present with someone that you’re interacting with, and in such a small way to remember that we’re all human. You talk in the book about the space in between that exists in any relationship as being the site of practice and of learning and love. What exactly does that mean? And what does this space signify in our relationships?

Sharon Salzberg: It’s a great phrase. I think the space in between is kind of the co-created set of agreements and understanding. It’s almost like a kind of contract, even if it’s silent, even if it’s pretty unconscious, that happens. Another goad for me to write this book was a conversation I had with somebody, a man, who was saying that he felt his move toward a state of real love involved not being so central in his marriage, in the sense of, you know, sometimes his wife wanted to do something that didn’t really work for him, and he would find himself thinking, “Well, you know, that doesn’t really work for me, but she really wants to do it, so I’ll get out of that position of being the center of the universe, and we’ll do it,” or something like that. And so, he said, he’s not really insisting on his views or his opinions or whatever. And I said I really agreed with that, but there are an awful lot of people in this world who don’t tend to express their needs, so for them, a state of real love is actually finally saying what they want and being themselves in that connection, rather than always trying to pretend or or give in or submit. And so in the book, I have that kind of telling, and also the story of a woman friend of mine who told me that a long, long time ago when she had a pretty dire cancer prognosis, which she outlived by at least forty years, honestly, but right at the beginning of her healing journey, she said to me, “I used to be the kind of person who’d be sitting in the car next to my husband. I’d be boiling hot, and the most I could bring myself to say was, ‘Are you warm, dear?’” And she said, “Part of my journey was claiming that voice of saying, ‘I’m really hot,’” Because if one can do that, at least there can be genuine communication. They can fight about it, whatever happens, but then that space in between is alive because both are participating in some way. And so I think it is that co-created set of understandings that can be one way or the other. It can be mutual and beneficial, or it can be way too one-sided in terms of generosity or many possibilities.

Carolyn Gregoire: It was so nice to speak to you. Thank you for being here.

Sharon Salzberg: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Sharon Salzberg discuss her newest book, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection, with Carolyn Gregoire. If you’d like to tell us what you think about this episode, please email us at feedback@tricycle.org. Thank you for listening to the Tricycle Talks podcast.