The wholehearted life

Roshi Joan Halifax is an original, generous, gritty and profound Buddhist teacher. How does she look back on her life?

Joan Halifax. Photo by Kodo Noah Roen

is emeritus professor of family and community medicine at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of the novel Delivery (2004) and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Undark and Eclectica. He is also a documentary filmmaker at Tijeras Films.

Edited byPam Weintraub

Six weeks after two open-heart surgeries in 12 days, Roshi Joan Halifax invited me for a visit. She was recovering, but feeling ‘weak as a kitten’. When I’d last seen her, three or four years earlier, her hair had been shorn in a Zen tonsure; now it hung in a lush, grey-streaked braid to the middle of her back. She was pale and short of breath.

As a physician and her friend, I was reluctant to press on with the interview, but she wanted to begin. She was staying with Wendy Lau, her close friend, an emergency physician and Zen priest whose home overlooks Upaya, the Zen centre Halifax established in 1990 in the foothills above Santa Fe in New Mexico. We sat on Lau’s back porch, drinking tea.

Halifax is a medical anthropologist, a Buddhist teacher and a caregiver to the dying, who has worked with the suffering of others for more than 50 years: in burn units and jail clinics, in remote Himalayan villages, at the bedsides of people for whom there was nothing left to cure. She learned that the qualities that drew her there could also pull her under, and more than once they did. When she found her way back, it was Buddhist practice that helped her remain steady enough to help.

Halifax had almost died. She had gone into the operating room at Stanford cheerful, she told me – upbeat, confident. Surgeons repaired her heart’s mitral valve. Coming out of anaesthesia, intubated, she was certain the tube was positioned incorrectly. She couldn’t speak, so she made writing motions until someone put a pen in her hand, and – stoned, half-conscious – she wrote glottis. Wendy Lau understood. They fixed it.

Then came what she called the worst 12 days of her life. The valve replacement was failing. Her blood pressure plunged; she bled internally; she had a dangerous arrhythmia, and had to be shocked to restore a normal heart rhythm. ‘Death is easier than this,’ she told Lau. She meant it. ‘I actually wanted to die,’ she said. ‘I just was so sick.’

She was still on a gurney from the latest resuscitative shock when the surgeon appeared in his scrubs and told her: ‘We have to take you back in.’

‘I had a moment of Yikes!’ she told me.

In the intensive care unit after the second operation, she awoke convinced she was hanging upside down against a wall of moss. A warmth enveloped her chest and expanded, and kept expanding, into utter bliss. Then a male voice said: ‘You’re not done with your work yet,’ and she found herself back against the moss-covered wall. The cycle began again. ‘My recognition was: this is death. It’s fine,’ Halifax said.

Halifax has spent much of her life crossing thresholds, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, and in the process delivering a grittier, more hands-on and help-oriented form of Buddhism to the West. Now aged 84, facing her own mortality, she names the charnel grounds where she practised her art: refugee camps, prisons, cancer wards, war zones. To that list she adds one more. ‘My latest charnel ground was being hospitalised for this heart surgery,’ she said.

Halifax’s first encounter with illness had come 80 years earlier. Aged four, she woke one morning unable to see and partially paralysed on her left side. She remembers feeling her way along the wall into her parents’ bedroom. Later, when a doctor picked her up in his convertible, she knew the top was down only from the wind.

She spent much of the next couple of years in bed with polio, away from other children. ‘I discovered that I had a spiritual life, an inner life,’ she said. Even now, she can walk through a building in her mind, imagining its rooms and passages, ‘because that’s what I did when I was four.’

Her parents hired Lila Robinson, a local Black woman, to care for her, keep house and cook. The Halifaxes lived in Coral Gables in Florida, a restricted, all-white enclave where neither Jews nor African Americans were allowed to live. Robinson and her three daughters lived across the railroad tracks in West Coconut Grove, then known as ‘Coloured Town’, in what Halifax called a ‘concrete monster’ – one of the mould-filled, roach-infested semi-high-rises baking in the Florida heat. To Halifax, Robinson was ‘the most incredibly kind person in the world, a manifestation of unconditional love and brightness – the woman who raised me.’

As Halifax recovered, she sometimes rode with her father to pick up Robinson. The journey carried her between ‘two different universes’: one had a country club and an all-white school, and the other: understocked shops, tired cars, good music and warmth. She saw the gulf between the two but was not entirely convinced that hers was the better world. Looking back, she traced her attraction to places of suffering to that early collision of inequality and love.

‘You could be both contemplative and a social activist. I want to be like that’

At the H Sophie Newcomb women’s college of Tulane University in New Orleans, the disparity Halifax had registered as a child became something she could act on. It was 1960 and, with the civil rights movement gathering force around her, she joined protests and the fight for racial justice. ‘There was a whole cadre of us who felt that racism was abhorrent,’ she said.

Through that work, Halifax met Hodding Carter II, the progressive Southern newspaper editor who had established the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi. Carter was going blind. ‘For a time, I became his kind of eyes and feet and hands,’ Halifax said – his assistant in civil rights activities. Carter and his wife supported her, but her activism put her at odds with Tulane. ‘I graduated early from Tulane with Tulane’s help, so to speak,’ she recalled. ‘They really wanted me out of the system.’

In 1963, she left for New York, where her civil rights work opened into a wider world of artists, musicians, filmmakers and political activists. There she met Alan Lomax, the folklorist and ethnomusicologist whose field recordings of folk, jazz and blues musicians had taken him around the world. His project studied music, dance and language across cultures. The work carried her from a huge computer in a university basement to field trips in Morocco, the Bahamas and rural Arkansas. ‘I was in anthropology heaven,’ she recalled. ‘I just wanted to learn everything about anthropology that I possibly could.’

Two years later, a different kind of encounter opened a path inward. Halifax heard the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh speak when he came to New York to urge an end to the bombing of his country through the calm of his Buddhist practice. Halifax was then ‘angry all the time’ – at the war, racism, the government and the suffering around her. She understood that ‘you could be both contemplative and a social activist. I want to be like that,’ she thought. But for almost a decade, she remained a ‘book Buddhist’, absorbing what she could from reading alone.

Joan Halifax and her Pentax, photographed by Mark Moskowitz in Paris, 1968, from Flickr

For now, her focus was anthropology. By 1968, she was in Paris, indexing ethnographic films at the Musée de l’Homme. There she met Germaine Dieterlen, a French anthropologist who had spent more than 20 years among the Dogon people of central Mali. Dieterlen told Halifax that the Dogon were midway through the Sigui, a seven-year cycle of ceremonies moving through 289 villages and held only once about every 60 years. Most Dogon would attend just one Segui in a lifetime. To Halifax, it was a rite of passage that ‘reconsecrated an entire culture’.

The attraction was also personal. Robinson’s family had roots in the Bahamas and, farther back, in Africa; her grandmother had been a slave. Halifax knew little more – not when the family had been taken, nor from where. ‘I really wanted to go to Africa,’ she told me, ‘to understand the cultural roots of this woman who had raised me.’

In early 1969, Halifax drove a VW bus, modified for desert driving, from Germany to Marseilles in France........

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