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 , a woman who has immersed herself in teaching and learning about dying for three decades, a spiritual leader in her community in New 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 Center in Santa Fe, meeting in the morning after she and Tempa Dukte 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 . 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 , moving from there into civil rights and antiwar activism after graduation. Moving to , she worked with 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 , 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 , religion and cultural heritage with . In 1979 she founded the Ojai Foundation in , 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 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 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 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.

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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 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. And fear causes sickness, resistance, anxiety. But I wanted a whole life, a whole continuous life. A web maybe, a fabric that is whole and constantly woven, even the tatters of it. And so I try to be awake to life-as-it-is. That’s essential to my survival and my capacity to be of service to other. I don’t have a very lazy attitude. And sadly, not a lot of patience, especially with things that hold people back. I usually don’t accept the walls some live with all the time.

VJD: And in your interactions with people the two times I have seen you teach, that quality has come across, the way you help other get through their barriers.

JH: Yes. It’s the way to go, the only way to go forward. Inward too, deep within and forward at the same time. That is stepping back in order to go forward. Relationships are the context where we receive the encouragement to go deeper, to delve into more of what we really are. It’s from the earliest relationships that I began this journey--from my father, my sister, my mother, the Aftrican-American maid who became the closest person to me when I was young and sick, all these relationships helped me to start this life journey. They were all essential at that start. And then later a science teacher I had who was at Pearl Harbor and his face got blown apart. Mr. Fitzgibbons, he was brave and rough. And later it was Alan Lomax who was inspiration, my mentor, good friend. I worked for him for years, traveled with him and learned, learned so much. And people like Stan Grof, my ex-husband, and Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith. They all lived this. And my Buddhist teachers benefited me. Each brought me further... Yet my closest relationships have been with women, the earliest ones with my mother, my sister, the African-American woman who raised me. And then my dharma sisters, women who have lived profound lives and gone through fires themselves. And have finally come to a place of acceptance and equanimity from which they work and serve and teach. these are old and contemporary relationships. These women have been essential to my life So as I look at my life now in my sixtieth year, I recognize that men have had an important role in guiding and supporting me. But the relationships that have been more subtle and enduring, if not more important, have been the relationships with women. Starting in my family first, and then women who are dharma teachers who have dared to step out and assume some kind of responsibility for their lives and their work for the benefit of others. And in my work with the dying, the majority of the people that I teach and that are colleagues in this work—nurse Barbara Dossey, physician Bev Spring, social worker Irena Baker, all women. It is primarily women with whom I share this work of teaching compassionate care of the dying.

VJD: And your Buddhist teaching and care for the dying has been a new realm for us in the West, a new way you have shaped during the past three decades. How did begin for you?

JH: I was a person of the Sixties. I cared about human rights, so the civil rights movement was a natural channel for me as was the anti-war movement. But even though it was all about social change, it involved a lot of adversarial dynamics. During that time I started reading Buddhism, first Krishnamurti, then D.T. Suzuki and . And I heard about Thich Nhat Hahn in mid-60’s. I felt like I was a Buddhist! In my head, yes, in my heart too. I didn’t really meet a Buddhist teacher until 1973 when Stan Grof and I went to teach at Institute. I was practicing meditation by myself and felt like I was a Buddhist in my bones but didn’t have access to a teacher. Then I met Trungpa and felt he was spectacular, but it wasn’t the right approach for me. I didn’t want that to be my root practice, but I wanted it to be an important stream to feed me because of its emphasis on bodhichitta and the very rich realm of teachings related to death and dying. The Zen writings I had read felt right for me, so I practice naïve meditation alone. When I met in the seventies, he recommended a Korean Zen teacher, Seung Sahn. It was a fit. We practiced together for years. For the first time I had community, a steady meditation practice with others. Later it was Thich Nhat Hahn became was my second Zen teacher. I met him in 1985 in Plum Village. We talked of “American Buddhism” then and often afterwards, ways of manifesting meditation in action and building a world of peace through . He inspired me to reduce the complexity of my life and create a of simplicity for myself and other. And then later I had the great fortune of working with Roshi who was my third Zen teacher. He is one who finds gold among the rubble, who puts his altar in the streets. The circle of caring and compassion he has opened is ever-expanding, reaching the homeless and the dying and others so often left out or isolated. And I had the great advantage of having friends who were vipassana teachers including , Eric Kolvig, Joseph Goldstein, and other. They with Thich Nhat Hanh opened up my appreciation for the and a more methodical approach to the experience of meditation. People who come here to Upaya are surprised that I am not so Zen, and that I often teach methodically. Step by step, using the widest net possible with the sutras as a basis. It’s thirty years later, and the practice has developed into what I call “Upaya Zen.” It’s a Zen that has been enriched by the other two , and . I think it is appropriate to the kind of work I do training health care professionals in compassionate care of the dying, because all of Buddhism in its wide cultural reflections gives different skillful means to approach suffering, dying, and death.

VJD: Training that moves outward as well as inward?

JH: Buddhism does both. It has to do both. It applyies these methodologies to the work place and our service to others. Yet we cannot apply them without realizing them ourselves, this has to be first. And so our own “home work” is essential. Without it...really, just learning the practice superficially is not adequate. It must go deep. I ask the people I work with for a big commitment to practice. This has to be there. Otherwise the work is trivial, superficial, not tenable. You can tell when you are with a practitioner who has their seat, who has some quality of deep practice. It’s in their bones. Every practitioner has a difference quality, their personality is theirs. That doesn’t stop. But that sense of experience, depth, commitment, steadiness in the practice, the capacity to move deep into it: that’s helpful and inspiring to people. And for my co-workers -they all have this quality. All women, all exceptional women who are deeply committed to a strong meditation practice.

VJD: And the focus on death and dying has become stronger over the past 20, 25 years?

JH: It started out with my grandmother and her inspiration. And it was nourished strongly in 1970 when I was working as a medical anthropologist at the University of Miami Medical School. Seeing dying people marginalized in the hospital setting and saw death practices rooted in cultures misunderstood by mainstream medicine. And then Stan Grof and I got married in 1972 and he invited me to participate with him doing the LSD work with the dying. There I had a complete immersion in this world of suffering and dying. This has carried me for thirty years.

VJD: Reading the book you did with Stan Grof then brought back so much of the sixties, the opening of new paths, immersion in the unknown, what we feared to face.

JH: And did you read The Human Encounter with Death?

VJD: Yes, I went back to that last fall too. It brought back a different time, remembering doors opening that had never swung open before. How do you look back on that work now, Roshi Joan?

JH: When I look at the work over the decades of my work with the dying, there is nothing that has been done since that was so brave and so deep. it has been a continual source of learning and inspiration in retrospect. VJD: I used that work in our earlier talk because it seems to me that we went beyond what we knew as “reality” in the sixties with all the un-thought-out qaulity of children finding the key to a door that has been locked a long time.

JH: That’s part of the mystical life, the life of practice. That is our spiritual heritage, whether it’s the saints in Christianity or Christian desert fathers, or Jewish mystics over the centuries, all across Europe. The experience of oneness has been described by many in Western mystical traditions. But it has been somewhat ignored by our postmodern culture. VJD: So it’s been on cutting edge?

JH: But yes and no! For it’s the heart of Christianity, the very essence of that tradition and Judiasm and the Islam too. And that our world has become so secularized is tragic, especially the American life we see now, the mass culture overwhelms people. But I never actually felt myself a secular person. So now that I am ordained it doesn’t seem strange to be separate from the secular world. I never felt myself as a secular person. When I was sick as a child and since then, I always felt like the most important thing was the spiritual life. Even before the age of four I remember that, and it’s not changed. I’ve followed that sense of the importance of the spiritual life without any deviation--really, without ever stopping--since that time. So I don’t think that the word “naive” applies. I think that some people, perhaps through sickness or karma, develop a sense of spiritual imperative. For other people this develops later in life. Some people wait until they are diagnosed! You know, a catastrophic illness impacts so deeply! I feel blessed to have had a taste from my earliest years. But if I look at someone like Tempa (the Bon lama she had just taught with), he was born into the spiritual life. He has lived it completely. He does now, no divisions. It is a struggle to have a spiritual life in the Western world. The outer world here is based on consuming, and the spiritual world is based on giving away. The materiality of the world holds us back.

VJD: And in the sixties and seventies that seemed a shared understanding of so many, Joan, but in the past twenty years things have moved to the opposite extreme. Materialism rules us, seems to rule the whole world. Even if we try individually, it’s so hard. Feels like the external forces have taken over. But maybe it’s always been that way--

JH: Yes, exactly, it always has been that way! The spiritual life is a choice, you see, a deliberate move away from the material definition of daily life. Humans have always lived with that duality. But, of course, that depends now a lot on how your individual life is. It is certainly easier if you live in a spiritual community. That keeps you active constantly in the spiritual dimension. Or if you are working with the dying or those suffering, you are reminded, brought constantly in touch with what matters: love, kindness, and generosity. And our interconnectness. It’s easier if you are constantly exposed to these concepts. But I think it’s really hard for people who have to get up early, be at work at 9, who have kids and financial responsibilities. So many of them get caught in this big game. It seems so real, it’s really hard to see beyond! And even I still struggle with that. I have so many responsibilities that are material here.

VJD: And yet you have taken on the work of being birth-mother to Upaya. And before that to the Ojai Foundation.

JH: We need of practice, and I apparently have the constitution to start things. I can get them going. I see the global picture of non-duality, the interconnection of all we know and do. And I want places where we can come together to teach and learn from each other. So I start what is needed. I don’t know if I have the constitution to sustain them! But I certainly have had the ability to found them, to get institutions moving along the path. I feel that spiritual centers are essential, critical for everything going on in the world today. Ojai was an educational community deeply influenced by Buddhism and the wilderness, an experiment where teachers and students from different cultures came together to explore what it meant to live a spiritual life. It was an extraordinary experience, a time I lived with porosity, without a real personal life. And then after a decade I needed solitude. I found myself lonely among others. I left Ojai, knowing it had an institutional identity that would stand firm. But I needed to come back to the simple practice of meditation alone.

VJD: And can you speak to the vision process, if that hasn’t become too trite term, to how you came to start this place that you have now for a decade headed? Or the other projects and centers you’ve started earlier in your life?

JH: Ahh, I just don’t understand it! It all seems like an accident. I will be some place, and someone will say, “Here, here’s 40 acres of land, now do something with it!” And then I go, “Oh, my gosh...” It’s like that each time. Someone will give me something or I’ll be in the environment--in a physical situation like it was here at Upaya--and the resources magnetize. This happened at Ojai, now it’s happened at Upaya. And my basic nature is to respond, to say, “Yes, I’ll do it!” And then I do, I just do.

VJD: So it isn’t a vision so much as a response to what life brings?

JH: No, not a vision, not at all! I mean, I never meant to start the Ojai Foundation. And I never meant to start this Zen Center. I can’t even believe it today. I’m happy Ojai survives, and I hope that this place will have a long life as well. But I look back and find it incredible. I didn’t set out to do this. And there’s a part of me that now feels a little burdened by all the responsibilities that this place demands.

VJD: You expressed some of that last weekend. I was really surprised. I had the fantasy that from day one you had this clear vision, this direction for what you wanted.

JH. No, I just get through to the next thing, to live to the next day. That’s all, really all. It’s more a feeling of karma unfolding. Now, remember, Ojai was an institution that was built from the ground up. We lived in tents, we cooked on fires for so long. I was there ten years, and I did each day exactly that way: of building from the ground up. Whatever there was to do, I did it. Whether it was to teach a program or cook a meal or dig a trench, whatever it was, I just did it. That’s what a founder does. And after ten years, it simply needed more routinization, and I had to leave. Now I am at the same place with this institution. I know every job here. everything that is needed every single day. But now it needs more institutional rigor. It needs more structure. It’s gotten so big one person can’t do it all. So here I am as the founder at the age of sixty, it’s time to let it go, I have to let it go. I hope to stay here as a teacher, doing what I can for others, but I can’t do this by myself any longer. I am at the age now where my commitment is to practice and service, and I want to train successors both for Upaya and for the work with the dying. It is very important to do that now. I did all the work to lift this place off the ground, to put it in place and sustain it, and now my focus is to find the people to carry it on. Getting older is very key here because the enthusiasm for letting go of things increases. I don’t have the kind of ambition and energy I had when I was younger. I really want to use the resources I have now in the best way. And it seems clear that the best way is not to be responsible for all of this (opening her arms toward the windows with Upaya spreading down the hillside from the terrace where we are talking)! I am just one person, and I want to work with people who sincerely want to train in the areas of my expertise.

VJD: So what would be your hope for the next ten years, assuming that transition you are describing is done?

JH: But Victoria, I don’t work that way! I have a hint about what I should do now-- which is to do less. Step back a bit. And then I have to see what circumstances come, what the situation needs. It may be a disadvantage but that’s how I am, that’s who I am. I think a man would make a strategic plan, but I am not a planner like that at all. I live much more in the context, in touch with the situation, trying to respond to what life brings. Not to make it the take shape I want.

VJD: And what about the vision of your death?

JH: But I can’t think that way, I can’t live that way! I don’t know what my death will be. I have seen so many people die. Held so many people as they let go--or struggled and fought and try to hold on. I hope it will be a good death, a gentle passage, but I can’t know that before. I don’t live that way. And I learn from each death. was a teacher for me. Remember? I talked at the training last fall about him and Maitri Hospice. We were so close in our work. He was a “big roof Buddhist,” full of wisdom. Not walled in by knowledge. Knowing how to care, how to love, how to help others, those so in need. I went to see him in the hospital. He was so thin, transparent almost. I started to cry. He said, “Please don’t cry. It’s not necessary.” I had come to him as friend, caregiver, but Issan was the . His compassion and love connected us. And suddenly a life from Rilke was with me: “Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us. Mostly they are passed on unopened.” Life has given me so many gifts, so many people like Issan who live with unconditioned relatedness. Death will be my final teaching, that’s all I can know.

VJD: And I know you must have been asked many times about being a woman in a tradition that has been so patriarchal. You are so determinedly not that! So how does that work?

JH: Well, there are both tremendous advantages and yet tremendous disadvantages too. It’s hard to work with someone who is more intuitive, like me, I know, but also even though I have a strong personality, I’m also an introvert. I spend as much time alone as I possibly can. It seems inconceivable to people who only see me as a teacher because I am very present and full of energy, but I am extremely introverted. So I live with this peculiar paradox, being a teacher intensely working with others and yet spending as much time alone as I possibly can. When I am with others I am completely present to the external, engaged in everything there.

VJD: Yet it doesn’t seem to take an effort at transformation, at overcoming who you are, to move from one to the other. It seems to flow openly from seeing you teach.

JH: Well, it’s not strange to me, I live inside life. Always, deeply. But I don’t think I would have become so invested in meditation if I had been an extrovert. I spend hours every day meditating. And if I were into the social life--well... I mean, I don’t socialize. Or as little as I possibly can. And the meditation strengthens me and completely nourishes me.

VJD: So many people seem to come to a spiritual focus as external circumstances drive them there and their pain motivates them. But it sounds for you as though the emergence into Buddhism fit with who you already were, yes?

JH: When I read D.T. Suzuki for the first time, I said, “Oh, I’m one of those!” it wasn’t always so easy after that, but I felt I’d found my North Star. I’ve explored so many religions and traditions, both intellectually and experientially, and I feel very comfortable being anything in any tradition, opening and entering that experience, but my North Star is Buddhism. It has been the pole, the center, the ballast, and sun of my life. And I’m glad I have the enrichment of all the other perspectives of the spiritual traditions I have been exposed to.

VJD: And it feels like the capacity to integrate all these comes from within you, Roshi? Not from an intellectual conviction to bring these together?

JH: Exactly! You thought there was a plan? (She chuckles deeply at this idea.) No, it was much more just life unfolding. I had no idea I would end up in this situation at sixty, and I truly have no idea about my life ten years from now. But I do know that I have dissatisfactions about things now, things that need to be attended to. Turning sixty, sensing this aging beginning now, I have to pace this life I live. I live in a pretty disciplined way, and I am accountable when I find myself tired, just not buoyant for years at a time, then I know something must change in the situation.

VJD: You know, several of the women in the training this week were in transition, and the fantasy is always that the teacher, the one we look up to, doesn’t go through those things--

JH: Has the perfect life, huh! Whenever any person knows it is time to change, then you just have to step into it. Change is inevitable; growth is optional one friend said. You have to step into it, go fully with it. You have to, really, it’s too tiring otherwise! (Laughs)

VJD: Yet my experience in working with people is that this is where fear takes hold, where people want “the answer” rather than stepping into darkness. I hope you will teach more about this, Roshi.

JH: Everything I teach about is what I am learning at the moment. How I will be. I just know that I am entering a transition time again. My life and the way here at Upaya will be different from this time on. You know, we are all living in a very advantageous time now. A lot of different forces are at play. Major forces. Transition and change are happening in our lives and in our cultures. There is a dissatisfaction with the traditional ways, the old institutional forms, and an opening to finding new approaches. Or integrating ways from the past in what we do now to meet these challenging times. This makes change in the care of the dying, the whole drama of death and dying, especially open, more than it has even been here in the west. The alienation in the current medical establishment is pushing this. With medicine becoming so mechanized and medical institutions so fiscally-driven and health care professionals finding themselves in situations where their aspirations can’t be realized, with all of this going on all at once, there is tremendous disruption in nursing and medicine in general at this time. So change has to come, the forces demand it. And you know that the work with the dying began in the sixties, starting to challenge the system then, and now it’s forty years later. At this time, there is a more mature relationship to how we care for the dying; it’s not the pioneering work that it was then. Both in relation to our understanding of consciousness and to hospice as the vehicle for compassionate caring. Hospice is now institutionalized to a certain extent, and consciousness is better understood. And the discipline of palliative care has been well established--and we want it! We have seen so many hard deaths, and we have learned from that. So palliative care now is a team approach and based in a vision of compassion, relieving suffering, and healing; and not caught in the dilemma of curing. And I think that people involved in spiritual practice have now been doing it some for some time. They have 10, 20, even 30 or 40 years under their belts. They have a more mature relationship with practice, and they bring that to the whole field, the care of the dying and the process of change that has to happen now. So I think the timing is really excellent for compassionate care of dying people and the growing understanding of the importance of preparation for death. Now it a better time than any other era, at least in the decades I’ve been involved with this work. Coming to my attention in the mid- sixties, actively involved by the seventies, and now it’s more than thirty years later. And I know there’s been no more advantageous time for change. Time when conventionally and traditionally-trained health care professionals--physicians and nurses as well as social workers and hospice staff-- seek to re-infuse this work and their own lives with meaning. And where dying people are reaching out, asking for the spiritual dimension to be offered as a part of caring, not simply and solely the medical. This process has been going on for decades. It’s a slow maturation but a wonderful ripening now. The kinds of people I work with are mostly very conventional, most of them not practitioners or interested in Buddhism, but reaching for the spiritual. I get phone calls from those seeking, calls not just from this country but all over the world, asking for help and guidance about this. Good time is spent in this. And I know is being called like this too, is responding in the same way. And even though we can’t actually be there, we are still attending to people who have realized the spiritual dimension to life and to death. This is of utmost importance. Life by life, death by death, the deep roots have grown. How we live and die is being transformed. A time of enormous change, a time building for decades to spiritually embracing living and dying.

VJD: And do you see this making it possible for East and West to find understanding, peace? Having lived in the Middle East and still having family there, I can hardly watch the news now, seeing the suffering.

JH: When the light is really bright, the shadow is really deep. And right now the shadow is very, very deep. And yet there are extraordinary people in the world working for change. Young people, I see so many extraordinary young people who understand the past and are moving forward. Like Britt Olson, the young physician in the training this past week. She will lead medicine with spiritual depth. Or Tempa, just arrived in the West and teaching with such grace. These young people, there are so many who are inspiring, intelligent, committed. And they will make this transformation, I know that. More than any other time in our history I think the possibility for peace and a compassionate caring world is here. We’re moving out of a flowering, a starting, toward it becoming substantial. Whether it is the Moyer’s program or palliative care or the number of institutions engaged in complementary or alternative medical approaches and utilizing the work that I’ve developed over the past thirty years on death and dying, it’s all just part of the curriculum now. No longer a rare thing! And there are not so many people who have a lifetime of experience in this area. Ram Dass is one, I am another; and there are many more. But there are young people who actually have realized as much as we have in less than a decade. So we pioneers can kind of kick back and look at the young people who are coming up, those who have really excellent spiritual training as well as medical or nursing background and commitment, and now they are working in conventional medical institutions and it’s happening.

VJD: Yes, all across the country. In Pittsburgh where I had lived for twenty years, a Buddhist hospice opened this year.

JH: Yes, they were here last year for the “Being with Dying” training. And they have been working with the Zen Hospice in San Francisco too, another truly remarkable institution. Frank Ostaseki has made a great impact on hospice care, on the place of in work with the dying. I feel truly positive about the progress of human life across the world, the changes going on now. And you know, my own life has been nothing but obstacles, and yet I look at obstacles as nothing other than opportunities! The spiritual life is what it is. Since human beings began making those strange markings on the caves until now, the longing hasn’t changed, the spiritual struggles remain. Our ability to recognize this is increasing actually. Buddhist ideas are now seen as congruent with ideas in science. So there is more linkage, more consistency between these worlds that people had seen as separate. The understanding that all life is interconnected, life and death intertwined, that gives me hope for us all as we live, as we die, ever moving into the unknown.