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My guest today is the brilliant Joan Halifax—a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author of many books, including Being with Dying and Standing at the Edge. The founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist Monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Joan has dedicated her life’s work to engaged and applied Buddhism, with a particular emphasis on end-of-life care. 

Today, she shares with us wisdom gleaned from Zen traditions, mindfulness practices, and the Buddhist approach to death; drawing from her groundbreaking research on compassion and decades of experience working with the dying and their caregivers all the while. As our current reality pushes us all to the existential exploration of suffering, altruism, and meaning, Joan’s words become an exceptionally valuable source of inspiration, guiding us to the edges of our human experience in order to discover wise hope, truth, and a fuller realization of what it is to be alive. 

Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Face of Death

Explore Joan’s Website

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(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: I feel like everything that you write about is essential and it's one of the things that I talk about a lot on this podcast is our aversion for death keeps us from really living and it's not wise, right, it's half living, I think when we live clenched in fear. And do you feel like that's changed? I mean, going through this pandemic and the way that all of us have been confronted with mortality, do you think, do you see it changing or evolving?