Joan Halifax is an American Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist and pioneer of care for the dying, founder and abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Before becoming a Zen teacher she studied shamanic traditions, and her books Shamanic Voices, which gathers shamans’ own accounts, and Shaman: The Wounded Healer brought shamanic traditions to many Western readers. Therapeutic Shamanism shares her sense of the Earth as a living community and of darkness and descent as fruitful, and works through shamanic journeying where her path is Zen practice.
Who is Joan Halifax? #
An anthropologist turned Buddhist teacher, born on 30 July 1942 in Hanover, New Hampshire. After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1964, where she was involved in the civil rights movement, she worked with the folklorist Alan Lomax at Columbia University from 1964 to 1968, then in the ethnographic film section of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Her fieldwork took her to the Dogon of Mali and, in the 1970s, to the Huichol of Mexico, both farming peoples. She took a doctorate in medical anthropology.1
From 1972 to 1975 she worked with the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, whom she married in 1972, at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, with dying cancer patients; together they wrote The Human Encounter with Death (1977), an account of that work, which used LSD as a support for people facing death.123 In 1979 she founded the Ojai Foundation in California, which she led for ten years. She studied Zen with the Korean teacher Seung Sahn and with Thich Nhat Hanh, and received Dharma transmission from Bernie Glassman, in the Zen Peacemaker Order. In 1990 she founded Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, where she is abbot.1 Through Upaya she directs the Project on Being with Dying, which trains clinicians and caregivers in the care of dying people, and she has founded a prison meditation project and a clinic for nomads in Nepal.2
What did she write about shamans? #
Two books on shamans. Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives puts shamans’ own voices at the centre, gathering their accounts of their own visionary experience from many cultures. Shaman: The Wounded Healer (1982) gave a name that has stuck, the shaman as someone whose path begins with suffering, often illness or crisis, and who is healed and made able to heal others.1 See What is the wounded healer? and What is shaman’s sickness (initiatory illness)?
What is the fruitful darkness? #
The title of her 1993 book, later reissued with the subtitle A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom, and the idea at its heart. The darkness she means is the unformed ground of not-knowing, shadow, silence and woundedness, and she holds that it is fruitful. From it comes what she calls “the gold of compassion in the dark stone of suffering”, and our personal wounds are bound up with a wider wound of the world. She describes the Earth as a community, “constantly talking to itself”, and speaks of its many beings, whales, forests, rivers, stones and species now extinct, as a “natural sangha”, a spiritual community. The book draws on Buddhist practice, on time with Huichol shamans and Native American elders, and on journeys in places such as the Yucatán, the Sahara and Tibet, where in 1987 she walked around Mount Kailash.4
What does she teach about being with the dying? #
That those who care for the dying can learn to stay present, with compassion and without fear. Her book Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death (2008) grew out of decades of sitting with dying people and training others to do so, and her later Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet (2018) looks at five “edge states”, altruism, empathy, integrity, respect and engagement, and at how each can tip over into harm, such as burnout, empathic distress and moral suffering.1 See Why do shamans say shamanism is preparation for death, and how does how we live shape how we die?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism meet her work? #
Above all in valuing the dark and the low. In Therapeutic Shamanism the judgement that “up is good and down is bad” is a deep sickness of our culture, and shamanism is entirely free of it. The Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer is no better than the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, and humans are no higher than animals, plants or stones.5 Plant teaches the same lesson, that descent is as valuable and as essential as ascent, and that healthy beings and cultures are deeply rooted.6 The phrase “the fruitful darkness” itself appears in Rewilding Yourself, in a line of the herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner’s on how continually striving upwards towards the light means never growing down into our own feet.7 See What did Stephen Harrod Buhner teach about plants?
Her picture of the Earth as a community of beings is close to the animist one. Hunter-gatherers experienced themselves as individuals and, at the same time, as part of a tribe, of all living things and ultimately of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.8 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons? The Fruitful Darkness is also one of the books listed in the bibliographies of all three of Paul Francis’s published books.
How does the Therapeutic Shamanism path differ from hers? #
In its method, and in how it treats spiritual paths in general. Halifax’s practice is Zen meditation; Therapeutic Shamanism works through shamanic journeying to the Lower-World and Upper-World and relationship with Power AnimalsPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer and GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this. See How is journeying different from meditation, and can the two work together?
Therapeutic Shamanism is also wary of any spirituality that turns its back on the world in the name of transcending it, which it sees as a bypassing of compassion, and it observes that dedicated practitioners of every tradition, Buddhists included, need good psychotherapy as much as anyone else.9 That is a general view, not a judgement on Halifax, whose Zen is an engaged one, carried into hospitals, prisons and clinics. See What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
Her early research used LSD with the dying; Therapeutic Shamanism does not use psychoactive substances. See Do you need psychedelics or plant medicines to practise shamanism?
