Top 40 Joan Halifax Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We believe that it takes a strong back and a soft front to face the world.”

— Joan Halifax

2. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

4. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

5. “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?”

— Joan Halifax

6. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

7. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

9. “Don’t ever think compassion is weak. Compassion is about strength.”

— Joan Halifax

10. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

12. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

15. “Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me and changed me.”

— Joan Halifax

16. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

17. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

19. “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?”

— Joan Halifax

20. “Listening to the testimony of a dying person or a grieving family member can serve the one speaking; it all depends on how we listen. Maybe we can reflect back the words and feelings in such a way that the speaker can at last really hear what he’s said.”

— Joan Halifax

21. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

22. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

23. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

24. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

25. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

27. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

30. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

31. “Within and around the earth, within and around the hills, within and around the mountains your authority returns to you.”

— Joan Halifax

32. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

33. “Conceptual knowledge is so valued in our world. Yet in many cultures wisdom is equated not with knowledge but with an open heart. And.”

— Joan Halifax

34. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

35. “I’ve worked in the prison system, on death row and maximum security. I did that work for six years. I’ve worked with some of the most difficult people in our society. Buddhism was accessible and helpful for these individuals.”

— Joan Halifax

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

— Joan Halifax

37. “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.”

— Joan Halifax

38. “Compassionate action emerges from the sense of openness, connectedness, and discernment you have created.”

— Joan Halifax

39. “The second tenet, bearing witness, calls us to be present with the suffering and joy in the world, as it is, without judgment or any attachment to outcome.”

— Joan Halifax

40. “Realizing fully the true nature of place is to talk its language and hold its silence.”

— Joan Halifax

41. “Iris Murdoch defined humility as a “selfless respect for reality.”

— Joan Halifax

42. “Why climb a mountain? Look! a mountain there. I don’t climb mountain. Mountain climbs me. Mountain is myself. I climb on myself. There is no mountain nor myself. Something moves up and down in the air. Nanao Sakaki.”

— Joan Halifax

43. “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.”

— Joan Halifax