Thomas Hübl:
Welcome back to the Collective Trauma Summit. My name is Thomas Hübl, I’m the convener of the Summit. And I have the great honor and pleasure to sit here with Roshi Joan Halifax. So welcome, Roshi, and thank you for making it given your situation at the moment. I’m very happy that you’re here with us.
Roshi Joan Halifax:
I’m grateful.
Thomas:
Yeah. I’ve heard that there are big fires in your area, and I think that also is one of the subjects. The whole climate change/collective trauma intersection, I think, is something that is around your corner right now. And maybe that leads us to the first exploration. How does your own spiritual practice support—you’ve practiced for many, many years, or decades—and how does it support you in moments like now when you are facing a situation like that? Maybe you can speak a bit to what grows in us if we have a committed long-term practice.
Roshi Joan:
Thank you. It’s a wonderful question. Well, Thomas, I’m at the Prajna Mountain Forest Refuge, which is 3000 meters in altitude up in a high valley in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. And almost two months ago, a fire began. That fire actually was initiated by a prescribed burn set in place by the forest service. It’s really shocking, what has happened. And I live part-time here in the mountains in a hermit’s cabin and part-time at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. And our forests are now closed but since the valley where I live part-time, where I retreat part-time, is in the middle of the national forest we can actually enter the forest legally to come to where I live.
In any case, your question is an interesting one because how we can face the vastness of destruction with equanimity and concern. Now, I want to just say one of the issues that is very, very clear to me is that meditation practice can be an experience where we completely bypass the truth of suffering. And in our emphasis at Upaya, because our work is around social and environmental engagement, there’s a big emphasis on motivation, on intention.
And this is one of the pieces that I think is very important in terms of setting an internal field that is principled, that has a strong moral orientation. And that is to say, we are not doing our practice as a self-improvement program, as a program to protect us from the ills of the world. Actually, what we’re doing in the practice is creating the conditions where we are more resilient, are more resourced, and have more capacity to actually face the truth of suffering and to have the kind of concern that initiates action in the world, compassionate action. And that’s been my path since the mid ’60s. I turn 80—
Thomas:
Oh wow.
Roshi Joan:
—next month. This has been very much at the core of my life. And I think that one of the reasons why this particular perspective has been so important for me, Thomas, is that I was very ill as a child. I was paralyzed on my left side. I was unable to see for two years. And in that experience that happened when I was four, between the age of four and six, and what that experience did for me was instead of disabling me, it actually was teaching, if you will, an incredible gift. Because, first of all, it allowed me to discover that I had an inner life, and that inner life was one that was awakened, that was very obvious to me as a child. And that also became, if you will, the resource for the rest of my life to discover I had imagination, I had insight, I had discernment. I also cared about the world.
Now the latter piece, Thomas, was very important, because my family hired a woman to take care of me for the period of my illness. And she was a black woman originally from The Bahamas whose family actually was originally from Africa, needless to say. Her mother had been a slave, and yet she had an extraordinary capacity for love and for joy. So I had the experience of receiving care—my parents were also very caring—but of receiving care in a joyful and unconditional way. And it was not only I who received the benefit of it, in terms of being someone who was cared for and cared about, but I also learned as a child that this incredible woman named [Lilla?] Robinson seemed to also derive joy in giving care.
That’s a thread that is very critical in our discussion, and that is that compassion benefits not only those who receive it, but compassion also benefits those who give it. And what we’ve discovered in the context of neuroscience and social psychology and research in these fields is that compassion enhances thriving resilience. It enhances our immune function. It elevates our sense of moral identity. But also there’s a third [valence?] here that I think is very important. And that is those who witness compassion are morally elevated.
Let me just say that that theme from my childhood on has been a teacher for me. And how does it affect my experience of the climate catastrophe we’re in, or what has happened in our country around the absence of gun control and these mass shootings and the incredible grief that people are experiencing who have lost children or colleagues, or medical professionals in relation to facing this pandemic where in our country over a million people have died of COVID and the grief that’s held. And I will say, honestly, this practice is about is providing the resources that allow us to be with the truth of suffering as it is.
What does practice do? It allows us to look deeply, to have this balance between equanimity and compassion in the relationship between these two processes and also on our concern, which is coming out of the sensibility of interconnectedness, or what Thích Nhất Hạnh called interbeing. To have that sensibility of understanding, “I am part of this, and I’m also part of the solution. And may I engage?” And this is, I think, one of the most important aspects of what a healing path in relation to trauma is pointing to, that trauma is a no exit feeling, that there’s no possibility of getting out of this problem and time and space. But on the transformation of trauma through positive action, through compassionate action, I feel is something that is very important for us to understand at this time.
Thomas:
That’s very beautiful. Wow. You said so many important things in one go. I want to come back to a few things that you said. I love how you spoke about compassion and that it’s going viral when we see compassion, when we give it and then we receive it. The win-win-win is beautiful. And you said at the beginning one thing that I want to connect to another question I have. So you said our spiritual practice can be a bypass or can be deeply resourcing in life. And I would like you to maybe speak a little bit more to that. And also given that trauma is … When we go through an overwhelming situation, we shut down a part of the pain in order to survive better. But trauma also means that I cannot be in the experience because it’s too much.
The spiritual bypassing and not being able to be in the experience can have a marriage, but the one that you described, spiritual practice, is exactly doing the opposite. It’s resourcing us to come back here into the deep experience. And that’s beautiful. And I would love you to share a little bit more about that and maybe also in conjunction … So what I see often for people in meditation practice is that in the meditation we touch back in on the absent parts of ourselves.
So then meditation and absence in meditation can be linked for people. And it needs some skill to integrate this into a deeper practice. So this whole area, I would love … Whatever comes up in you when you hear me talk about, I’m curious to hear your thoughts—or your experience, also, as a teacher—how that shows up in your work. This coming back into life and serving—you spoke some of it—and how it’s not the bypass, but actually we integrate the absent parts of ourselves in meditation to become more present.
Roshi Joan:
Yeah. You’ve asked a lot of different questions there. So I’ll try to just—
Thomas:
Just whatever you can get to.
Roshi Joan:
So I’m remembering a line from Zen Master Keizan’s Denkōroku, and it’s a line that is always disturbing, not always, but mostly disturbing. People don’t get it. And the line is, “Do not find fault with the present.” That’s a pretty radical thing to say, because of course, when I sit here and I look at the billowing smoke on the other side of the ridge, the present isn’t pleasant. But what Keizan is saying is do not flee it, see it.
And often us finding fault—or us [praising?], if you will—this is how we flee it. And what practice is, in the best of circumstances, allows us to do is to develop this quality of attentional balance that makes it possible for us to see things really clearly. Now this is not enough, Thomas. I want to be clear with you and those listening. Attentional balance is absolutely an imperative because it allows for clear seeing, but also what is equally important is our motivation. And that’s why I quipped … Meditation practice is not about a self-improvement program. It is a means for us to deconstruct the small self and to realize interbeing, to realize I’m not separate from that smoke billowing above the mountain ridge that I’m gazing at in this moment.
And so to have the capacity to actually understand, number one, the deconstructed self—small self—allows us to actualize this sense of interconnectedness, interdependence, and interpenetration, or what Thích Nhất Hạnh calls interbeing or pratītyasamutpāda. To have that as a direct experience is really important, which is—in the right circumstance—our motivation that has altruism and compassion as its foundation makes that possible. Now, another thing that is very helpful is to recognize the truth of impermanence. So for example, I mean, I am looking at this gray swirling smoke billowing into the brilliant New Mexico sky, and it makes me feel pretty awful on one side because that is what is happening in the present moment. But also, Thomas, I’ve sat with dying people for decades. The truth is we’re all mortal.
These forests and the long body of the earth will one day come back. Probably not in our lifetime because of the nature of the climate situation. But what one realizes in deep states of practice is the complete groundlessness and transitoriness of our phenomenal experience. Not that I accept this as a good thing. I accept it as what is happening. And I also take responsibility, and I’ll do my best without attachment to outcome. And this is the attitude that I brought in working with dying people. Death was the inevitable outcome of every interaction I had with the people I came alongside, and I still do that work. But I never did less than my best, if you know what I mean. So sometimes my best was only this big, sometimes it was bigger, if you know what I’m saying, but in any given moment there’s this quality of wholeheartedness that you bring into any given situation.
Now, you asked a little bit, Thomas, about moral suffering, and there’s something called moral residue, which is we bring our best into a given situation but things don’t always turn out so well. And moral residue, this is the kind of stuff that’s left over, that can be cumulative and can really weigh us down. So part of the work of practice is to come to a place where you recognize there’s always going to be, if you will, a fly in the ointment, or moral residue, or things are not going to be perfect. And understand the gift of that, which is the sense of humility.
So I just want to mention that in all, because a lot of times we’re looking for perfection, and life is not perfect. Life is just as it is. And so it’s that capacity to have openness that allows us to live with a little more grace and humility as a result of ‘things are just the way they are.’ And no matter how hard we try, they don’t always unfold in a way that feels right or aligned for us.
Thomas:
Yeah. That’s beautiful. Also this being with life exactly as it is and this meeting life where it is, it’s a very beautiful quality of practice. Just a short question circling back, when you said, “I’m working with in hospice with dying people.” Can you say a little bit about what’s that work about? So I think it’s a very deep work, and these are deep moments. What’s the work that you are doing there with people?
Roshi Joan:
I really came to this work in my younger years as a result of the death of my grandmother, which was a very tough death. I said to her—she was gone, but her body was there—I said, “I want to make a difference in how people die in Western culture.” And I don’t know if I’ve made any difference for anyone, but I would say that my greatest teachers really have been dying people. First, teaching me the truth of mortality: we’re all going to die. And sitting with that, seeing how this person and that person met the dying experience and realizing it was their journey, and I was privileged to come alongside him or her in this final developmental phase of their life.
And as a result of that work, which first opened up for me when I was a young medical anthropologist at the University of Miami School of Medicine and recognized that the most marginalized people in that medical system in fact were dying people. So this was in 1970. It’s a long time ago. And then I married Stanislav Grof—the psychiatrist who worked with LSD as an adjunct to psychotherapy—and joined his project at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center as a co-therapist with him, and then doing this LSD assisted psychotherapy with people dying of cancer.
It was so powerful for me as a person coming alongside someone dying of cancer, who had consented to this very powerful therapy. That was a rite of passage, their more or less final rite of passage before they met death itself, the ultimate rite of passage. And to enter into that intimacy, Thomas, with a dying person and to recognize that we had vastly underestimated the human unconscious as it was evoked in the LSD experience. And to see that often what happened was, in Stan’s terms, reliving of the biological birth. In my terms as an anthropologist, going through a death and rebirth experience which allowed people to revision what it meant to be dying, and also to understand death as a radical transformation process.
So it was so powerful and so awesome. I will say parenthetically to see this work revived now, and I’m so happy Stan and I, though we’ve been divorced for years, but he’s alive to actually see the resurgence of this work. It’s just amazing. I’m very happy for him and I’m happy to see this work, experience that dying people went through, including reliving very traumatizing experiences from their past, but understanding those difficult and terrifying experiences from a different point of view—and from the point of view that I have tried to share a little bit in our conversation—which is seeing the perspectives of impermanence, understanding the value of trauma in terms of post traumatic growth.
I learned so much in the course of those years of working with Stan and dying people. Stan and I went our separate ways, and I realized that dying itself involved deep transformations of consciousness. That it wasn’t always necessary to take 600 micrograms of acid. That coming alongside an individual with this kind of not knowing, this openness and presencing, could provide the means for the kind of transformation that we saw in the LSD work.
Thomas:
Yeah. I can feel the depth of the work that you did as you’re sharing it, as you’re transmitting it here to us, and it’s beautiful. It’s very deep. When we come back a little bit to the moral injury, because in trauma you talked about reliving some of the trauma also in the process of dying. But when we look at ‘we carry trauma inside’, our ancestors were traumatized, or the collectives went through the Second World War, or any kind of racism and slavery. So when we come to the moral recognition of whichever sides, maybe you can speak a little bit to how do we learn morally or ethically our virtues, however we call that?
How does that learning happen? I also [inaudible]. And I think you also speak about the moral injury, that when we transgressed the fabric of life or the fabric of light, so then we feel it. We feel it as a distress inside. We feel it in many ways. How do you work also in your spiritual community, or how do people work the restoration process? Or how can we restore our moral injuries back into a recognition, a restoration and the flourishing? Maybe you can speak a bit to that whole part or journey.
Roshi Joan:
So I think that one of the ways, Thomas, is by recognizing what moral suffering is. Moral suffering is the anguish that we experience when we have been exposed to—through our own actions or the actions of others—transgressiveness, egregious harm. And I’ve identified four different expressions of moral suffering, each of which has its own flavor of anguish. And the first of these is moral distress, and moral distress, Thomas, is that experience when we are confronted with a moral dilemma. Let’s say we’re a clinician taking care of someone who is dying of COVID, dying of this virus.
And we are not able to bring the family into the room of the patient because of hospital regulations, or into the ICU should the person be in the ICU. And we feel this profound moral dilemma. We want to do something but the system says we can’t, and we feel a deep moral conflict. And moral distress arises because we know that if we bring the patient’s family to the bedside of the dying person, the person will benefit, the family will benefit, we’ll feel better as a clinician. But we’re not allowed to do that and so we experience what is called moral distress. In other words, we see a pathway through but we can’t actually follow that pathway. And so the patient dies, the family is in grief, and we ourselves experience moral distress. We feel that this could have gone down better.
I can give you many examples of this. This is where you really feel the impact of moral residue. You feel bad. You feel your own sense of personal value and personal worth is deeply compromised or affected by this experience. So that’s moral distress. Now, moral injury is a second aspect of moral suffering, and this is pervasive in the military. And it has been well documented in the military. I mean, during the war in Afghanistan and during the war in Iraq, soldiers from our country—military people in our country—saw things that were horrible and did things that were horrible. And as a result of that, they felt deep shame. They felt as though they were morally compromised.
Whether they saw horrible things or did horrible things, the effect was very similar. It was the sense of moral decay. The experience of moral injury had the outcome of really priming the suicide rate among people in the military. Now, what is really tragic in our country, what we are discovering in terms of the experience of many clinicians dealing with the pandemic is that they’re experiencing as well moral injury. They feel that they’ve been asked to do things to their patients which have been violating, non-beneficial for their patients.
And it could even be as far as intubating their patient instead of actually providing a context of care because the person would die, but they were going to die anyway, but they were then put on machines and their lives were sustained. The doctors and the nurses who were engaged in doing that, with so many deaths as the outcome, felt as though their own identity as a clinician was somehow compromised. And they have felt really the experience of moral injury, and the suicide rate among clinicians in our country is not inconsequential.
Now, the third expression of moral suffering is of moral outrage. So I think we all know this, or many of us know this. This is the sense of blaming the system or blaming people for bad things that are happening in our society or environmentally. So moral outrage can initiate good action, but also can become chronic. And so you know these kinds of people where the sense of self righteousness pervades their entire presence, and it becomes a sickness, if you will.
And the fourth is moral apathy, and this loops back, Thomas, to what you and I were speaking about in terms of bypass. That is that we are engaged in actions or find ourselves in social contexts—contexts of privilege, of separation—that do not allow us to actually be touched by the truth of the suffering around us. And whether it’s privilege or addiction—alcohol, drugs, sex, whatever—taking us away from the present moment, whatever it is. And that experience of moral apathy, which is a term actually that was used by James Baldwin, the great writer.
Moral apathy, needless to say, leads to complete moral disengagement, which is itself a form of suffering. The work I feel that we must do, one is to look at trauma not as a dead end, so to speak, like there’s no way out in time and space, but to emphasize the importance of, if you will, this view from complex adaptive systems that say, “When a system breaks down and learns from its breakdown, it can reorder itself at a higher and more robust level.” So you think about someone like Malala, for example, shot in the head doing a good thing, an important thing.
And instead of collapsing into a heap, becoming a world figure around issues related to the education of girls. Using something [inaudible] perceived experiences, horrible trauma, but metabolizing it into greater robustness and the experience of post traumatic growth. And so the real call, again, and by practice is important, is that it provides this powerful resource that enhances our capacity to look deeply and clearly and to have a motivation which is compassionate and altruistic, and bringing these two features together so we have the capacity to resource ourselves to meet a world of suffering and not to be collapsed under the burden of suffering.
Thomas:
Yeah. That’s beautiful. Also how you beautifully described the post-traumatic learning, that when we really take it on, so then it makes us more robust, more resilient, and we can engage even more if we integrate the suffering. It’s beautiful. You’re referring now to a power to transform our trauma into resilience, which we call post-traumatic growth. And I would love to explore what is …
That some people feel really weighed down by their trauma, and it seems like they don’t have the power by themselves to come out of it. And then other people that are equally traumatized feel like there’s a drive in them to take on that hurt or pain and transform it into learning. So that’s one thing. And the other question I have is, how do you see the role of community? Why do we need community, or do we need community? And if so, why? To help us to do that together, to do that healing and practice work together. So these two things, I’m interested how you look at this and what does your experience show?
Roshi Joan:
So I think your question about resilience is wonderful, Thomas, and also about community. But in your question about resilience, it’s interesting, because you’re saying, “How is it that some people collapse and don’t come out of that collapse as a result of their encounter with great difficulties, and others have the capacity to meet the world?” And you know what, I cannot say. I really can’t. I don’t know what, Malala, for example, how she did it. Nelson Mandela, 41 years or so in the prison in Robben Island, and how he came out of prison as a peacemaker after being subjected to so many humiliating and horrifying experiences. I don’t know. Or Jimmy Santiago Baca, the poet, after being in solitary confinement unable to read, teaching himself to read, and being now one of New Mexico’s great poets.
I don’t know what makes that possible. But I do want to say some things about resilience, because I think that this is an area that is really important, to talk about briefly ways that resilience is enhanced or expresses itself. And one of these ways is that I feel that we need better stories. We need more imagination. Somehow, when you think about Nelson Mandela and Robben island, I think that maybe what got him through was his imagination. To imagine a world that is not characterized by violence, though he was subjected to it and he also participated in it. And so this is how we develop our ability to reframe difficult situations in a way that is fundamentally generative, and it takes imagination.
And sometimes I feel that the hopelessness and futility that is being spread like a bad disease through our social media is robbing us of our ability to vision or to imagine what it is to live in a world that is thriving, a world that is same. So the first thing is our capacity to reframe, which is something that comes out of the experience of practice, but also my old friend, Richie Davidson, the neuroscientist, he talks about it in terms of mental nimbleness or our capacity to be adaptable and to be flexible. We’re sometimes, without imagination, really stuck in our views. How important it is for us to actually be adaptable and flexible in relation to what is unfolding in the present moment.
And that adaptivity, that capacity for adaptivity, is very important. And it means that we are not stuck in fixed views. So that’s the second thing I want to mention, that we are able to be responsive to this moment as it is. And then you mentioned community, and our ability to actually share positive emotions is critical with each other. If you’re just in sinking mind and spreading sinking mind, if you’re in the grip of futility, if your view of the world, of life is, “Well, we’re all going to die,” instead of being able—and again, I think about Malala and Nelson Mandela, two remarkable people—to actually be able to find, if you will, the jewel or the generativity.
Our resilience is really deeply enhanced by the experience of care for others, having a real and strong ethic and ethos of care. So often people who are depressed, who are morally disengaged, the way that we enhance our resilience is not by holding back but actually by giving. And in that way, there’s a sense of purpose, of meaning, and also of efficacy. That it matters that we care about the world. It matters that we feel concerned. It matters that we engage in service to others.
And then you mentioned community. I think that our dedication toward community, toward relationship, manifesting as respect, a commitment to engendering safety in that community, in our community, and the sense of warmth is holiness. The Dalai Lama speaks about this. In Zen, we talk about warm hand to warm hand. Resilience is deeply enhanced through the medium of our relationship with each other, through the medium of community. And then the final piece for me is compassion always. Compassion … I say it’s actually not a feeling. It is an emergent process that allow us to actually perceive the truth of suffering and then to have this sense of commitment to what it is to be a benefit into a world that is pretty fraught today. So those are just some features of resilience that I wanted to mention. It’s community, it’s nimbleness, it’s compassion, it’s moral character. Yeah.
Thomas:
That was beautiful. This was such a lovely flow. It’s so lovely to listen to you and flow with you through all these qualities that you transmit when you speak. I think that was a lovely [inaudible] for adaptability, relationality, and community and resilience building. This was very concentrated, and the way you spoke about it, it’s beautiful. Thank you. I don’t want to stress your time too much. I know you have a lot going on. So maybe we will wrap it up and say …
I mean, some of it you said already, but as your own experience, we are interdependently interwoven in the current climate situation or in other situations like the war in Ukraine right now, or the pandemic. We are experiencing this interdependence, this global interdependence. So for some of us, it feels like it sparks our creativity and we become even more creative and more enlightened through the contributions we make and channel the energy into that.
But for many people, it also feels like, “Are we going to make it? Where will all of this go?” And maybe you have some final words for people to see, yes, it’s sometimes heavy. It’s sometimes hard on us. But what you said before is opening the gates into the giving is one option. And if there are any other thoughts you have for this time, how we navigate through this time, that would be very lovely for our listeners.
Roshi Joan:
My wonderful teacher, the late Glassman Roshi, he emphasized the power of sitting in the [inaudible] ground. So whether it was Auschwitz where we were in retreat, or Rwanda, or sitting with the homeless, the unsheltered, or being with dying, or—as my own work in the penitentiary of New Mexico—sitting with men on death row for six years, I think we live in a time when science is really validating what humans have known throughout the ages, and that is compassion.
As his holiness the Dalai Lama has said, it’s not a luxury. It’s a necessity for our well-being and the well-being of others, of beings everywhere. It enhances resilience, it enhances transcendence, and it also ensures a kind of survival. As I said, we cannot be attached to outcome, and we don’t do it for a bodhisattva button, and we don’t do it because there’s social virtue in it. We do it because we are moved. This is what the heart tells us to do. And I feel that this is imperative for our time now.
Thomas:
That’s so beautiful.
Roshi Joan:
Actualize this experience of compassion really from the foundation of love and of joy.
Thomas:
That’s so beautiful. It’s like there’s not an ‘in order to’ we feel it. We do it because we feel it in our hearts in the present moment. That’s a beautiful sentence.
Roshi Joan:
Those of us who are going to be happy in this lifetime are those of us who serve. Being selfish is not the path to joy, but being unselfish and really benefiting others, this is the path to joy.
Thomas:
No, that’s a beautiful ending for a wonderful conversation. It’s an honor to talk to you, Roshi.
Roshi Joan:
Thank you.
Thomas:
And I really enjoyed our time and the resonance, and I really enjoyed the flow of your words. It’s very beautiful and saturated by your wisdom and your life, a deep life experience. So thank you for letting us participate in it. And thank you for joining this summit. It’s a real contribution. Thank you so much. And if we can do anything to support you, if you need anything, I’m very happy to be of service in your current situation. Yeah, I know it’s—
Roshi Joan:
Well, thank you. I wish you a wonderful summit, and I’m sure it’s going to benefit many people. And I look forward to connecting again at some point.
Thomas:
Yeah, me too. I’m looking forward to connecting again. Thank you so much and have a good journey and be blessed in everything that’s happening.
Roshi Joan:
Thank you. Bye-bye.
Thomas:
Bye-bye.
