Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D.

Roshi Joan Halifax will be teaching during Wisdom & Wellbeing Week 5 | Multi-Faculty | January 30 – February 6, 2027 about the following topic:

Mutual Belonging: Exploring the Bodhisattva Way

The Bodhisattva Way asks us to see clearly, to feel deeply, to understand causes and conditions, to remain open-hearted, to refuse accommodation to harm, to act without hatred, and to cultivate compassion that is spontaneous, responsive, and unprescribed. The Bodhisattva’s path is the path of compassion. Compassion is life awakening to its intrinsic interdependence and arises from the recognition that we are beings who come into existence through relationship, participation, and mutual influence. Nothing stands alone. Everything is co-created through an immeasurable network of causes and conditions. When we awaken to our mutual belonging, we respond to life at every level, from the intimate and personal to the institutional and systemic. Such compassion is solidarity grounded in the recognition that our lives arise together and that our liberation is inseparable from the liberation of all.

Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, activist, and author.

She is founder of the Ojai Foundation and founder, abbot, and head teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery and Zen Peacemaker community in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A practitioner of socially engaged Buddhism, Halifax has done extensive work in the area of death and dying for more than 30 years. She has worked with the dying and has taught and lectured on the subject of death and dying at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Medical School, Georgetown Medical School, Columbia University, and many other academic institutions, monasteries, and medical centers around the world.

In 1994, Halifax founded the Project on Being With Dying, which has trained hundreds of health-care professionals in the contemplative care of dying people.

Halifax studied for a decade with Zen teacher Seung Sahn, received the Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh, and was given Inka by Bernie Glassman Roshi. A founding teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than three decades has focused on engaged Buddhism.