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Joan Halifax: Ceaselessly Encountering the Unknown

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Joan Halifax: Ceaselessly Encountering the Unknown JOAN HALIFAX: CEASELESSLY ENCOUNTERING THE UNKNOWN Leaders, innovators, and seers appear to their followers to know the path. Somehow they seem to intuitively sense the right way, the direction that leads to new openings. Yet often these same leaders voice their doubts, confirming their dark nights when no next step seemed possible, when no inspiration gave light for the coming day. This was much my experience in talking with Joan Halifax, a woman who has immersed herself in teaching and learning about dying for three decades, a spiritual leader in her community in New Mexico and around the globe, a social and peace activist and organizer, and a guide across wilderness expanses and mountain ranges around the world. I talked with Roshi Joan at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, meeting in the morning after she and Tempa Dukte Lama had engaged together in exploring and teaching Buddhist and Bon death and dying practices. Her honesty in recounting the story of the highs, lows, struggles and achievements over her six decades sparkled like the sun glinting on glaciers at 20,000 feet. Her determination to ceaselessly encounter the unknown and to integrate understandings traditionally divided by disciplines and cultural boundaries have been themes throughout her adult years. Roshi Joan has consistently used her life experience as the platform for learning, teaching and practice. Her life’s story has been thematic in each of her seven books as well as the 6-part tape series on “Being with Dying” distributed by Sounds True. The outlines of her life are summarized here, parts of which became part of the conversation we had at Upaya. Joan Halifax was born in 1942 in a Navy Hospital while her father was studying at Dartmouth during the war to become “an officer and a gentlemen.” Her early years were spent in the south, Savannah and southern Florida. At the age of four she was afflicted with a virus which left her functionally blind and bedridden for two years. It was, she now says, “a time I learned to invent a world inside.” The care she was given by the family’s servant Lilla, an African-American, remains a deep memory of love along with the ties she had to her mother, sister and grandmother. Her grandmother’s later illness and death brought her to question the meaning of life as a young woman. Joan explored issues of justice, worth and life’s meaning more deeply during her years at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, moving from there into civil rights and antiwar activism after graduation. Moving to New York, she worked with Alan Lomax and completed graduate work at Antioch’s Union Graduate School in anthropology. She worked as a cultural anthropologist in Africa, at one point driving across the Sahara desert and always living in physically-challenging conditions. She returned to the States in fragile physical health and mentally worn to her core. Recovering her strength, she continued connecting anthropology dynamically to other disciplines during her appointment in the medical school at the University of Miami, studying local Caribbean and Latin healers and cultural practices. In 1972 she married Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist, and worked with him for the next several years studying the use LSD with the dying. Their books written during this time remain seminal work. Moving to experience the depth of LSD, she took doses each weekend for nine months, saying later, “My husband felt the well of suffering within me was bottomless.” The years between 1975-78 were a period of “deep suffering” and intellectual growth as Joan explored shamanism, religion and cultural heritage with Joseph Campbell. In 1979 she founded the Ojai Foundation in California, a “living laboratory” for the dynamic combination of Eastern and Western approaches to human growing and social change. Joan left Ojai at he end of the 80’s and founded the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. During that same year she was ordained and has been the spiritual leader at Upaya since. During the 90’s she founded the Upaya Prison Project which offers programs in meditation to prisoners across the state of New Mexico. In her capacity to be a catalyst for starting innovative institutions, she is a leader like those described by Harvard researcher Ron Heifitz in his work Leadership Without Easy Answers, one who does not lead by following a set, carefully-articulated vision but by discovering at each step the next step, the moment to be. This style responds to new openings and responsibilities actively, then holds or revises as conditions change. Her adaptive leadership--to use the term Heifitz coined-- is now undergoing transformation as she turns sixty and reformulates her work in the world, a message she was ready to share in May 2002, just as she has been ready to share her life without fear for all her adult years. In 1999 Harvard invited Joan Halifax to speak as a part of the Harold Wit Lecture Series, and her teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote the following words as a part of his introduction to her speech: We know we must not run away from suffering. If we touch the roots of suffering, we can know how to be free from suffering. Suffering can instruct us. Looking deeply into suffering, we may see the way of our ill-being. The truth of suffering contains the truth of emancipation. The Buddha was a human being made of non-human elements. Like a rose that is made of earth, water, air, sunlight, human care, and compost from the garbage, the Buddha was made of this mother and father, his ancestors, his culture; he was also made of suffering as ell as joy. This is true of each of our lives. Each of us contains the freedom of the Buddha. Each of us contains the seeds of suffering as well. The Buddha’s heart was once broken. Out of his suffering came a true person. Suffering is important. Without suffering, you cannot grow. You cannot realize peace. An organic gardener needs garbage to transform compost for her roses. We may need suffering to transform into insight, insight in non-duality, insight that leads to compassion. This understanding is at the core of Joan’s work and life. =========================================================== VJD: Roshi Joan, you have been one of the most open Buddhist teachers on a personal level. How did you come to this “open boundaries” way when you are a part of a tradition of such hierarchy and definitions? JH: In Asia biography is not so important, and the personal is not so relevant. But in America our stories are where we begin. Biography, psychology, stories of our lives, that is where we start in the West. And I’m a woman. I learn and grow through my connection to others. This makes it easier to let the story be part of the teaching. The boundary between me and the world often feels nonexistant, the veil is often very thin. It’s not necessarily easy for me as my life is quite public. There are times I would just like privacy and a quiet life. Yet I’ve accepted this way that has come to be who I am. I’ve put myself in this situation, living with this transparency. One of my dharma names is “Chan Tiep.” This was given to me by Thich Nhat Hanh. It means “true continuation.” The flow of life continues over, around, under the walls. Also this mind of the Buddha is a vein that is continuous and connects us all. I ask: The Buddha’s mind includes boundaries but has no boundary. VJD: Some teachers have grown into that style of teaching from the self, but it seems from your earliest writings you were open in that way. From the beginning you saw yourself as not only a teacher but as..(pause).. JH: A student to life. VJD: To life? JH: Yes! Everything is a teaching for me. Everything, always, all that happens. I want to look at my whole life, to look deeply into myself at every moment. I have to connect the inside and outside. I want to learn from every part of my experience. Constantly. It’s not just theoretical. The continuous process of self-analysis, the practical experience of doing that inside as I work with others. VJD: Yes, which is enormously important, but which also looks like you have shared that without fear, without hesitation when working with others, in your writing too? Did others help you do that or was that always who you were? JH: I think that’s part of my personality. Personal inquiry has always been important. I had a lot of illness and suffering as a child. And loss, experiences with death that made me question. I had to look inside, search inside. And the only way I could know others was to know myself. My commitment to be present for others has made it necessary to delve deeply into my own life. I’ve had a lot of mental as well as physical suffering. I think my own experience is inspiring for some people, the fact that I have been through such difficult experiences and have come back up to a life that is whole. VJD: You said in your first book, Fruitful Darkness, that you were intuitively unwillingness to go down into the self while in your twenties. Yet you did. And so you wrote then of both fear, yes, but also of an absolute determination to explore what lies deep inside. JH: Absolutely! The unwillingness comes from fear.
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