Joan Halifax
Joan Halifax
Joan Jiko Halifaxis an American Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, hospice caregiver, and the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality. She currently serves as abbot and guiding teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a Zen Peacemaker community which she founded in 1990. Halifax-roshi has received Dharma transmission from both Bernard Glassman and Thich Nhat Hanh, and previously studied under the Korean master Seung Sahn. In the 1970s she collaborated on LSD...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
CountryUnited States of America
Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.
Developing our capacity for compassion makes it possible for us to help others in a more skillful and effective way.
Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity.
We live in a time when science is validating what humans have known throughout the ages: that compassion is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our well-being, resilience, and survival.
Compassion may be defined as the capacity to be attentive to the experience of others, to wish the best for others, and to sense what will truly serve others.
If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to transform suffering?
Compassionate action emerges from the sense of openness, connectedness, and discernment you have created.
Don't ever think compassion is weak. Compassion is about strength.
May I see my own limits with compassion, just as I view the limits of others.
Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us.
We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range.
There is the in-breath and there is the out-breath, and too often we feel like we have to exhale all the time. The inhale is absolutely essential-and then you can exhale.
Whether or not enlightenment is possible at the moment of death, the practices that prepare one for this possibility also bring one closer to the bone of life.
My work has been in the field of engaged Buddhism. That is my own practice, which began in 1965 that formed the base for the work I was doing in the civil rights and anti-war movement.