Joan Halifax Quotes

Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us.

May I see my own limits with compassion, just as I view the limits of others.

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.

Don't ever think compassion is weak. Compassion is about strength.

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?

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.

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.

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.

All beings, including each one of us, enemy and friend alike, exist in patterns of mutuality, interconnectedness, co-responsibility and ultimately in unity.

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.

No single answer can hold the truth of a good heart.

For me, Buddhism is a psychology and a philosophy that provides a means, upayas, for working with the mind.

Developing our capacity for compassion makes it possible for us to help others in a more skillful and effective way.

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.

Cease consuming, practice generosity.

When we have disorderly lives, it makes it difficult for our minds to be orderly and for us to be at ease with disorder.

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?

Compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear.

Since we are already Buddhas, happy and suffering Buddhas, wise and confused Buddhas, we are already Buddha.

When I first was exposed to Buddhism in the mid-1960s, I said it was so practical and utterly pragmatic. That's what attracted me to Buddhism.

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.

I am always cautious about naming the known, as we often forget to hold in regard those whose names will never be known to anyone outside of their close circle.

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.

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 test for veracity has always been: How this will settle with a person who is dying? Boundlessness seemed to me to open the door to the true nature of mind that is pointed to in the Heart Sutra.

The Shobogenzo is an enormous work that captures the vastness of Dogen's realization. Kaz, over many years, threaded the beads of these many fascicles into a great mala of wisdom.

We have even done a weekend on Japanese grammar! Not that I know anything about Japanese grammar, but it was Kaz's idea, and it was a bit of an adventure, to say the least.

Buddhist practice is the grounding for this work, this life, this way.

Kaz's wilder work captures the great beauty of the human heart and the natural world.

How about Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, our streets, our neighborhoods, our own minds. We don't have to look far - and we should look far as well.

[Kaz] is a great scholar, very funny - a true man of no rank!

Kaz's art is a powerful example of discipline and freedom. His classical calligraphy captures the inner movement and stillness of the brush and mind.

I am working on a technical paper on compassion. So I am reading everything I can on the subject, including my own mind and heart.

To work with Kaz on this kind of project is a fascinating process...He seems to be Dogen himself when offering the translations that we Western collaborators then refine with him.

This stuff of a past not worthily lived is also medicine.