Wisdom Quotes from Joan Halifax
The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.
When we walk slowly, the world can fully appear. Not only are the creatures not frightened away by our haste or aggression, but the fine detail of fern and flower, or devastation and disruption, becomes visible. Many of us hurry along because we do not want to see what is really going on in and around us. We are afraid to let our senses touch the body of suffering or the body of beauty.
We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow … indispensable. That we matter.
I have come to see that mental states are also ecosystems. These sometimes friendly and at times hazardous terrains are natural environments embedded in the greater system of our character.
This stuff of a past not worthily lived is also medicine.
Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.
We believe that it takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world.
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Everybody has a geography that can be used for change that is why we travel to far off places. Whether we know it or not we need to renew ourselves in territories that are fresh and wild. We need to come home through the body of alien lands.
Speaking in Creations tongues, hearing Creations voices, the boundary of our soul expands. Earth has many voices. Those who understand that Earth is a living being, know this because they have translated themselves to the humble grasses and old trees. They know that Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself; a communicating universe. And whether we know it or not, we are participating in the web of this community.
Within and around the earth, within and around the hills, within and around the mountains your authority returns to you.
All beings, including each one of us, enemy and friend alike, exist in patterns of mutuality, interconnectedness, co-responsibility and ultimately in unity.
Conceptual knowledge is so valued in our world. Yet in many cultures wisdom is equated not with knowledge but with an open heart.
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There is evidence from evolutionary biology, sociology, neuroscience, and many other fields that we need to abandon our old misanthropic (and misogynist) notions for a sweeping new view of human nature.
I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men —
with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the
plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers,
with our president and with all beings.
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.
All are interconnected...the environment; rights of the dying; care of caregivers; education and medical care for peoples of the Himalayas; prison work; those living on the margins of society, particularly kids.
The secret of life,” say the Utes, “is in the shadows and not in the open sun; to see anything at all, you must look deeply into the shadow of a living thing.
May I see my own limits with compassion, just as I view the limits of others.
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Denial of death runs rampant through our culture, leaving us woefully unprepared when it is our time to die, or our time to help others die. We often aren’t available for those who need us, paralyzed as we are by anxiety and resistance—nor are we available for ourselves.
If we manipulate others into not sharing so we don’t have to hear, so we don’t have to listen, or if we react with horror or abandon the scene, we stifle our empathy and rob ourselves of this fundamental virtue of humanity.
Life-threatening illness calls us to a place—metaphorically a desert or mountain peak—where, as we sit, the hard wind of reality strips away all the trappings of life, like so much clothing, makeup, and accessories.
Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.
A
world without empathy is a world that is dead to others—and if we are
dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another’s pain
can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even
cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and
compassion.
* * * * *
The
way out of the storm and mud of suffering, the way back to freedom on
the high edge of strength and courage, is through the power of
compassion.
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.
Compassionate action emerges from the sense of openness, connectedness, and discernment you have created.
Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But 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.
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?
Don't ever think compassion is weak. Compassion is about strength.
Developing our capacity for compassion makes it possible for us to help others in a more skillful and effective way.
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Yes, creation is moving toward us; life is moving toward us all the time. We back away, but it keeps pushing toward us. Why not step forward and greet it?
[I'm inspired by] courageous young people who take a stand and go into the field to serve; really old people who see that every minute of life is to be lived fully and compassionately; and so many between this world and that world.
No single answer can hold the truth of a good heart.
Shantideva wrote in chapter eight, verse ninety-nine (VIII: 99) of A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life that if someone is suffering and we refuse to help, it would be like our hand refusing to remove a thorn from our foot. If the foot is pierced by a thorn, our hand naturally pulls the thorn out of the foot. The hand doesn’t ask the foot if it needs help. The hand doesn’t say to the foot, “This is not my pain.” Nor does the hand need to be thanked by the foot. They are part of one body, one heart.
In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.
Cease consuming, practice generosity.
Death can come at any moment. You could die this afternoon; you could die tomorrow morning; you could die on your way to work; you could die in your sleep. Most of us try to avoid the sense that death can come at any time, but its timing is unknown to us. Can we live each day as if it were our last? Can we relate to one another as if there were no tomorrow?
In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, “Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us."
In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?
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