Double-Edged Empathy

James Shaheen: Welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor and publisher of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Today we’ll be listening to Buddhist author and feminist Sandy Boucher chat with longtime Zen teacher Joan Halifax about her latest book, Standing at the Edge. Joan Halifax, or Roshi Joan, as she’s known to her many students, is the founder of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is also an anthropologist, humanitarian and seasoned social activist. In Standing at the Edge, Roshi Joan explains how five psychological states—altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement—can help us serve others more effectively when we learn to navigate the pitfalls of each state with care. Her book is a guide to working for the freedom of others and ourselves, remaining engaged in the world without burning out, and committing to sustainable moral action. Now let’s listen to Sandy Boucher and Roshi Joan Halifax.

Sandy Boucher: I’m delighted to be here with Roshi Joan Halifax speaking about your new book, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet. This, for me, is a tremendously relevant book because, in these tumultuous times, we experience ourselves often at what I would call “the edge.” I find myself looking for help in navigating the demands of all this, of trying to live a life of integrity and be of use in the world. I was eager to read Standing at the Edge because I was hoping for a guide—a wise, deeply experienced and compassionate voice—and I heard it in this book. I was moved by your stories, Roshi Joan, by your integration of scientific findings with experience, by the development of your understanding of our possibilities in these difficult times. You’ve given us a way to study our “inner ecology,” as you call it, and drawn a map of exciting, dangerous territory: a map of the risk and possibility that we traverse every day, and that leads us to transformation. Most of us want to be good people. We want to meet our challenges with an open mind and a warm heart, but how do we do that? You ask, Roshi, “How can we stand on the threshold between suffering and freedom and stay involved by both worlds? That threshold is the edge.” So I would like to ask you to please tell us what you mean by “the edge,” and maybe we can begin to talk about the five edge states that you’ve identified, which are altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement, and the role of compassion in navigating these states.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Thank you so much, Sandy. I deeply appreciate you taking the time not only to read the book but also to bring it into your life and to explore what it might be for you as an individual, and also how it can serve our current situation. As you say, we live in fraught times. So I’ve always been interested in edges. Edges are those kind of boundary conditions where ecologies overlap and where there’s greater diversity, in fact, a greater potential for life, and also for suffering. I think the Buddha, in a way, pointed toward edge states when he articulated the first noble truth, the truth of suffering, and then in number three, liberation from suffering, or freedom. Needless to say, Buddhism has influenced my perspective on the value of exploring not just the territory of virtue but also of understanding the territory of suffering. That edge between these worlds, which are interconnected worlds, is something that I’ve found very important at this time in my life and at this time in the world. It’s not just to stand within the strength of our virtue but to have understanding, insight, and even experience of what it is to fail, what it is to suffer. 

Sandy Boucher: This is such a strong dimension of the book. You talk about how, as we’re walking that edge, we can fall over to one side or another and find ourselves in a very difficult place.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Exactly. And the premise of the book is that the way to transform the suffering in any of these edge states is through the medium of compassion. Part of my work has been to re-vision compassion, to discover aspects of compassion which are not well understood in our everyday culture, and to revalue compassion. I look at compassion, if you will, as the lever or the medium of transformation of each of the fraught sides of the edge states.

Sandy Boucher: You write in the book, “We discover that compassion is the great vehicle that delivers us from suffering and gives us power, balance, and, ultimately, freedom, no matter what we have faced.”

Roshi Joan Halifax: Exactly. Thank you very much. Precisely! 

Sandy Boucher: Let’s take an example from the section on altruism. As you point out, this impulse we have to act for others’ benefit, this impulse to self-sacrifice, can actually sometimes cause harm. 

Roshi Joan Halifax: Yes.

Sandy Boucher: How difficult it is to know how to navigate that edge and not fall over into causing harmful consequences; this you call “pathological altruism.” 

Roshi Joan Halifax: It’s not my term, though. It’s Barbara Oakley’s term.

Sandy Boucher: Barbara Oakley called it “pathological altruism.” One fascinating example for me that you mentioned is the Vietnamese monks and nuns who immolated themselves in protest against the Vietnam War. Of course, these were acts of great heroism, but they were also acts of violence which could be experienced as harmful. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about pathological altruism and the ways that it can manifest, and how we can move away from it. 

Roshi Joan Halifax: It’s a fascinating question, Sandy, that you’re asking, because it manifests in relation to how we see an action. For example, with Sister Nhất Chi Mai or Thích Quảng Đức, there’s a whole sector of individuals who look at her act and his act of immolation as a violation of the precept of harming and nonharming. There’s another sector of the population who regard the act of self-immolation as an act that transformed our attitude in the West toward the war in Vietnam. So I conclude, at the end of recounting the story of Thích Quảng Đức’s immolation—and I actually heard it from David Halberstam in the 1960s when he was in the apartment of Alan Lomax, talking about the shock he experienced in seeing this monk immolate himself . . . 

Sandy Boucher: Was he actually there? 

Roshi Joan Halifax: He was actually there. He was one of the few journalists who was present. Malcolm Brown, of course, photographed Thích Quảng Đức in the act of immolation. It haunted Halberstam, and it’s haunted many people. And yet, that act transformed at least my life. When I saw Malcolm Brown’s photograph and read the story of the immolation, it turned me into an activist. That’s why I tell the story. It’s not to say my activism was significant, but it turned me into an anti-war activist because I wanted to understand what this war was about. Why would someone sacrifice himself in this way to bring attention to a war that not only was unjust but also was really against the precept of harm and nonharming? And so pathological altruism can refer to, but in a less extreme way, the psychological or physical harm we do to ourselves when we’re engaged in serving another. It can also refer to actually harming the people whom we’re serving, for example, by disempowering them.

Sandy Boucher: Which is not so uncommon.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Actually it’s very common. It can also harm the institutions that we’re serving in, or the nations that we’re trying to serve, like what happened in Haiti and what happens often in Nepal. It’s a powerful process within us that is important for us to recognize and to nurture the healthy side of altruism but also to understand that we often slip over the edge for reasons of ego, of wanting to be known as a good person, of psychosocial and gender pressures—for example, women tend to be more pathologically altruistic than men—or religious pressures or social pressures that end up creating harm for us or others. I’ve worked in the end-of-life care field for many decades, and listening to caregivers, physicians, nurses, chaplains, social workers, and family members speak about their experience of caring for a dying loved one, where they actually are engaging in behaviors which are self-harmful and in some cases harmful to those whom they’re endeavoring to serve, and the suffering that they experience from falling over the edge of altruism into pathological altruism. 

Sandy Boucher: One of the things that I liked very much about the book also was that you had some practical suggestions for working on these edge states to counteract tendencies like that; for instance, setting boundaries, looking at our biases, being part of a community. Can you talk a bit about how you came to your understanding of these measures? Because I know you have been very engaged with many groups and institutions as a creator, a founder, or a participant over the years.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Being all of that is one thing, but also having fallen over the edge of altruism myself is, I think, the really critical thing here. It’s not just me listening to other people, it’s me knowing pathological altruism from inside the experience myself. I have experienced stress, exhaustion; I’ve overworked in my own life in certain ways in the endeavor to serve others. But it actually has been a kind of challenge that I—as a woman, a Western person, a person of a certain generation—am familiar with personally. I felt very grateful when I read Oakley’s work because I realized, “Oh, this is what I’m doing.” And boundaries are important. Grounding is important. Distinguishing between self and other is important. Having a community of support who have the nerve and the insight to give you feedback: “Hey, Roshi, slow down, stop, take a rest.” It’s essential. And I will confess to you, Sandy, there’s not one edge state that I write about which I haven’t known the fraught side of.

Sandy Boucher: Related to this, of course, is empathy. There are many, many powerful stories in this book, but one I found most resonant was that of Dolma. You were serving at the Nomads Clinic in the Himalayas, and a father brought in his little girl who had been terribly burned and her wounds hadn’t been tended to. They were putrid. They even were maggot-infested. I can’t even imagine. There was no pediatric painkiller for this child, and they were about to, is the word “debride”? They were about to clean the wounds, right? So as the doctors cleaned her wounds, naturally, she cried, brokenheartedly I’m sure, and you, hearing her cries, felt her pain, but to such an extent that you were close to passing out and becoming completely useless in the situation.

Roshi Joan Halifax: And a major distraction as well. 

Sandy Boucher: And a major distraction, lying on the floor. Can you tell us how you made your way from this, I would say, awful mental state, back into the room to be there and support the doctors who were saving this child’s life.

Roshi Joan Halifax: I can recall the experience quite vividly, because it was somatic. I could feel my blood pressure dropping. I had broken out into a cold sweat. I felt as though I were about to throw up, lose consciousness, and I had this thought bubble, which was, “Oh, that’s not a good thing to do, this is not what I’m here to do.” So I reallocated my attention. I actually pulled it off the little girl, and I put it into this experience of sensing my feet on the floor, which is a completely neutral focus. The result was that I began to get grounded. Getting grounded, I could feel my blood pressure shift. I will tell you, Sandy, being able to do this really has come out of my experience as a meditation practitioner. 

Sandy Boucher: I was just about to ask you that. Is this a product of meditation?

Roshi Joan Halifax: Absolutely!

Sandy Boucher: And that grounding in the body too, you return to over and over. You talk about counteracting these states, and you always say: “You’ve got to come back to the body.”

Roshi Joan Halifax: Exactly!

Sandy Boucher: Which is a core Buddhist principle. 

Roshi Joan Halifax: The first foundation of mindfulness is mindfulness of the body. I explore this theme in a more extensive way as the book progresses. But in this instance, Sandy, it was because, through Buddhist practice, so often in meditation, I will sit on my cushion and the first thing that I do, even before cultivating bodhicitta, is I become aware of my bodily state. I’m sensing into my heart, my lungs, my gut, the sensation of my feet on the floor if I’m in a chair, or of my sitz bones on the cushion. I’m grounding, but I’m also seeing the biases that the body is reflecting. 

Sandy Boucher: What do you mean by that? 

Roshi Joan Halifax: That is, that the body knows before the conceptual mind does. Like, for example, if I’m standing with a parent who’s just lost a child and who is enraged, they feel completely helpless, but they’re yelling at me. I could feel threatened, yes, and I could shut down completely. That experience of threat and of physical shutting down is like a mindfulness bell. It’s really, “Oh, look what’s happening.” My threat detector is completely alive. I’m shutting down, but actually, this has not got anything to do with me. This is a person who’s really suffering and feels completely helpless and brokenhearted who’s standing before me now, yelling at me. Having this capacity to actually turn attention to the body not only allows us to get grounded but also the body is this processing machine with all this information coming through the somatic medium, that is telling us “I feel threatened,” or “I feel attracted,” or “I feel aversion,” or “I feel relaxed,” or “I feel safe,” or “My racist tendencies are being activated in this moment,” or “I see, oh, my gut is tensing up, and I’m throwing up a big wall between me and this other person,” and so on and so forth. So this is a very powerful way that we can actually scan our physical subjectivity in order to have a deeper read on what is going on in the present moment. In the case of this young child, a very fascinating sequence of things happened. One is that I reallocated my attention. I rested in the sensation of my feet on the floor. As grounding happened, I also let my heart and mind be more present, and with my blood pressure going up, normalizing, I also had this recall of why we were there, which was we were there to really serve, to end the suffering of people. And then I thought about the child’s father, who happened to have been a mute and was a very vulnerable, somewhat older man, wearing tatters. I’d learned through an associate that he had walked two days carrying this little girl in this sort of rancid nest, holding it in his arms, and I felt this gratitude dwelling inside of me in relation to this father bringing the little girl into the clinic, and this sense of admiration. What unfolded from that was me sending metta, loving-kindness, to the nurses and the doctors who were working on the child, and to the father. Again, it was all very spontaneous, but in retrospect, Sandy, I was exploring what my experience was. I realized that this was a reflex that I had engaged in. It just happened, right away as a save, but I also recognize the value of practice in terms of conditioning me to have a response that was safe.

Sandy Boucher: I hear the importance of being aware of the environment in which something is occurring.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Exactly. 

Sandy Boucher: What is the context? What are my intentions here? What should be happening here? Am I contributing to that or not?

Roshi Joan Halifax: Precisely.

Sandy Boucher: So it’s not about me and my responses. It’s about the context and the environment and the event itself.

Roshi Joan Halifax: I think this is a very important point, because it’s not just about our small subjectivity: It’s about intersubjectivity. It’s about inaction, to use a term from Francisco Varela. It’s to understand that our environment is shaping our experience, but also our experience is shaping the environment. And I was about to throw a curve ball into the environment.

Sandy Boucher: I’m so glad you didn’t.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Same here!

Sandy Boucher: You’ve spoken about your social activism—your political activism, we could say, where the Vietnam War was concerned—and part of that involves integrity. In the section on integrity, you do tell a number of dramatic stories in which people’s personal values and ethical principles were put to the test, and what they did in those situations. One of these individuals being the great civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer. You met her, and this was probably in the ’60s . . .

Roshi Joan Halifax: 1964. 

Sandy Boucher: You were in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and she was a major organizer. You were powerfully impacted by Fannie Lou Hamer, and you say that her lifelong struggle for justice took on a profound value for you as a guide in your own life. What was it particularly about Fannie Lou Hamer’s integrity that touched you so indelibly?

Roshi Joan Halifax: She was a woman who had a profound faith. She had faith not only as a Christian, but she also had faith in humanity and she saw her social activism as a spiritual path. That was, from my point of view, a brilliant insight that she actualized through the medium of her own life, because she brought faith and justice together and very much, from my point of view, as Thich Nhat Hanh did. He brought faith and justice together as Dr. King did. Dr. King spoke about faith and love, or love and justice, rather. What I realized with Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. King and with Thay is the possibility of being a change agent in society as a spiritual path, and the integration of social action and contemplation. Contemplation for me as a young Buddhist practitioner was where I had siloed meditation as a kind of mind training, of philosophy, psychology, but I realized it was actually a medium for nourishing justice and love in society as well. All three of those individuals influenced me deeply, but the first person who exemplified the integration of faith and justice for me was Fannie Lou Hamer.

Sandy Boucher: I think that bringing this together has been a problematic thing for many of us who maybe started out as political activists and only later came to the dharma or to spiritual practice. How do we put that together? So I loved your talking about it in that way. 

Roshi Joan Halifax: Another thing about Fannie Lou Hamer that, in retrospect, stands out for me was the absence of skepticism. She was so non-demoralized, in spite of being subjected to abuse, violence, disparagement; she stood up again and again and again. Every time she was knocked down, she stood up again, and for me, she exemplified these principles that I speak about so often now, of “strong back, soft front.” She had a back that had tremendous power, strength, capacity to uphold herself in the midst of these complicated conditions that were all over the civil rights movement of the ’60s. She never, as far as I heard about, stepped off the path of love and justice.

Sandy Boucher: And the capacity to or the willingness to take the blows, to take the abuse and move ahead.

Roshi Joan Halifax: You don’t have to seek suffering. Life will give you your good doses. 

Sandy Boucher: I’ve noticed this.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Right? But she made more out of adversity than almost anyone that I’ve ever personally known. She was extraordinary in this regard. She made a life not only for herself, but, really, for all of us. We are the beneficiaries of her courage. 

Sandy Boucher: If we’re talking about the edge of integrity, you indicate that it’s possible to fall off that edge in two directions, one being moral outrage, which isn’t very useful because it can exacerbate differences and cause separation, and on the other side is moral apathy, in which we sink away from conflict and avoid the reality of suffering, a kind of death of the heart, as you put it.

Roshi Joan Halifax: James Baldwin, actually . . .

Sandy Boucher: Did he say that?

Roshi Joan Halifax: I have actually four aspects where integrity begins to break down in this area of moral suffering. But it was when I saw I Am Not Your Negro and I heard James Baldwin talk about moral apathy, I just went back in and I said, “That’s it, moral apathy,” and I did a whole section on moral apathy. But there are actually four aspects around moral suffering that I think are important for us to know about. One is moral distress, and that’s the distress that you and I might feel when we are confronted with a situation of egregious harm and we see a way through, but we can’t affect it. We can’t actualize it, and so we feel this sense of brokenheartedness, or we’re distressed because we can’t change it. 

Sandy Boucher: I want you to address the monkey in the laboratory.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Oh, my goodness.

Sandy Boucher: That’s a piercing, piercing example. You were in a laboratory where a monkey was being used for an experiment. He or she was strapped into the machine and you looked at each other.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Well, this was shocking. I was actually with Francisco Varela and Harry Wolf, who was from Princeton, and we walked into a lab in Stanford, this basement lab where many different rhesus monkeys were cuffed in these small cages. Harry and I approached one of those cages, and the top of the monkey skull had been sawed off, and electrodes were directly implanted into the monkey’s brain, and Harry sank to the ground. I was struck dumb. I looked into the eyes of that monkey and that monkey and I just locked eyes, and the suffering of this primate changed my life. I could not fathom how a human being could do this to another creature, and so I experienced in that moment profound moral distress. I also experienced moral injury, which is the second category that I described. I was traumatized by what I witnessed. I said in the book: That monkey lives in me. It’s like a recurring nightmare every time I see the abuse of any animal, that monkey will appear like a flashback of how cruel we humans can be to each other. So that relates to moral injury. Moral injury is primarily associated with people in the military who witness or participate in acts that cause harm.

Sandy Boucher: You give some examples of that.

Roshi Joan Halifax: It’s all over the military. It’s defined in the military. It’s not identified as a syndrome like, for example, burnout is, but I see moral injury in medicine, I see it in law, I see it in politics and education. I think every teacher in Parkland who was in the school where this terrible shooting happened experienced moral injury because they witnessed the effects of gun violence on their students and on themselves. Now they’ve had that experience, moral injury can lead to moral outrage, a combination of anger and disgust in relation to what is perceived to be violations of integrity. But moral injury is more related to the experience of self-blame, of feeling ashamed, and moral outrage is an outward expression of blaming and shaming others. Those kids in that school, Marjorie Douglas School—this woman was, I think, the daughter the founder of the Miami Herald, and she was a social activist her whole life—these kids somehow picked up her spirit, and they’re experiencing moral outrage as the parents are who are standing in front of our politicians asking for gun control. So my contention is episodic moral outrage can be very important in terms of fostering social change. Chronic moral outrage is debilitating. Our good friend, Rebecca Solnit, who wrote the introduction to the book, speaks about this in terms of recreational bitterness. It’s a kind of moral outrage where you just simply pick apart the so-called opposition in a kind of expression of horizontal hostility.

Sandy Boucher: Of course, a contemporary one we have is the government. We get together and engage in recreational bitterness about the government.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Yeah, a wonderful term that Rebecca coined.

Sandy Boucher: But you were going to make another point. 

Roshi Joan Halifax: The last piece has to do with moral apathy. Moral apathy can be conscious or unconscious. For example, I recount the story of being raised in a racist community. In the community where I was raised, not only were Afro American, Black people, not allowed to reside in the community—they worked in the community as maids and gardeners—but people who were Jewish couldn’t live in my neighborhood. It’s kind of inconceivable now. These were called restricted communities. 

Sandy Boucher: What state was that?

Roshi Joan Halifax: This was in Florida. Coral Gables, Florida. And so the people that I grew up with, the world that I lived in as a child, was a world in a bubble of privilege, and that bubble of privilege protected me from the truth of suffering that was right across the tracks. It has its own version of suffering too. 

Sandy Boucher: Yes, right.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Privilege is also suffering. But how we contribute to the suffering of others is very important to understand. So there’s that kind of moral apathy, which is basically psychosocially constructed. There’s moral apathy when we turn away from the truth of suffering, when we engage in actions, whether it’s addiction, addictive behaviors, or whether it’s abandoning or numbing ourselves out from the suffering that we foster in beings in the world around us. Moral apathy: James Baldwin just nailed it. Boy, I was sitting in that movie, and I heard James Baldwin use this expression, and I was like: “Oh, I have to write a section on moral apathy.” Because I understand it from my own experience of having been raised in a restricted community, and also as a white person, even though I’m a social activist like you and we have a sense of conscientious engagement and an imperative to transform the conditions of discrimination that have prevailed in our world. It was like: “Oh, this is important to identify and call out.”

Sandy Boucher: Yes, it was a stunning movie. Wasn’t he so eloquent?

Roshi Joan Halifax: And so honest and so on, when he was in that car driving through Birmingham and sort of sliding down the back seat realizing, I actually chose to opt out of living in the middle of the suffering of racism by going to Europe. But he chose to come back.

Sandy Boucher: That’s right. Speaking of suffering and respect, I know that you as a little child had a major health glitch, and I believe you actually went blind, did you not?

Roshi Joan Halifax: For two years.

Sandy Boucher: For two years. So you were way behind the other students when you went back to school, and because you had been ill and hadn’t grown so much, I guess you were little and skinny, and they made fun of you, and they bullied you and teased you. Out of that, you had this sense of what respect is and what disrespect is and the need for us to respect each other. But one of the major places where disrespect and abuse is rampant is our prison system, that gigantic system of incarceration. You’ve worked in prisons and you’ve encountered this disrespect, this abuse. You tell one story about a very verbally violent white supremacist skinhead, I guess he was, who ranted at you in a very scary way, and how you reacted to him. And then you tell the thoughts you had about this man later and about his situation and how you might have reacted differently. In this I was particularly struck by your recognition the second time around that, as you put it, he had been stripped of his dignity. Can you talk a bit about your interactions with this man and what you learned there? 

Roshi Joan Halifax: Sandy, it was a very powerful experience for me to work as a volunteer in the prison system, sharing meditation with people on death row and maximum security. We had a fairly consistent group of men who came every week into the chapel and were brought into the chapel. We did a council process with them, a check-in, and then I had a kind of curriculum. We went through various meditation practices. One time I came into the room and sat down with some of the people I know, and then a prisoner was brought in. He was kind of enormous physically, and I’m not a particularly big person physically. I looked at this guy, and it was like, “Hmm, this is interesting.” And he turned around to the guard as the guard was leaving the room, and I saw tattooed on the back of his shaved head was “Aryan Brotherhood,” and I thought, “Wow.” He sat down, and I began this kind of check-in process, and he just looked at me like I was an absolute idiot, and said nothing. And then I began to lead metta practice,”May all beings be safe, peaceful, happy,” and so forth. I wasn’t one phrase in, and this guy jumped up—he must have been six-foot-four—and started cursing and yelling at me. I will not share the particular expletives that came out of his mouth but, in any case, basically he was saying, “You don’t know anything about what it’s like to be in this kind of place.” But he was saying it very violently. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the guard rush out of the glass guard box. He was going to have to actually go out into the yard and come into the door of the chapel.

Sandy Boucher: To protect you!

Roshi Joan Halifax: To protect me, except, in the volunteer orientation, they said, “If you’re taken hostage, we’re not responsible for saving you.” And I said, “Oh, well, thanks a lot. That’s a big incentive for being here.” But in any case, I said, very spontaneously, without even thinking, “I agree with what you’re saying. I just don’t like how you’re saying it.” The whole room, every guy in there, just cracked up. They thought it was hilarious, and it down-regulated the prisoner. The guard came bursting through the door, expecting me to be taken hostage or harmed in some way, and everything was OK. A year later, I’m walking down the hallway, I’m going to enter a pod, and I see the same prisoner—I never saw him in the intervening time—I saw the same prisoner, and he was being strip-searched. I saw how the guards were handling him just as an object, and I had this moment where I realized: Oh, my comment had actually humiliated him and had stripped him of his dignity further. It was such a wake-up call. Just that moment, being a woman walking through the space where this man was being strip-searched was already a violation of his dignity. The way he was being related to was just so abusive, from my perspective, but that, combined with the recall of the moment of cleverness on my part, which was actually humiliating for him. . . . I exited the spaces immediately, and I really had to sit with this a long time. What had been a save had actually been a harm, and that was a wake-up call for me. 

Sandy Boucher: Yeah. Well, let’s move on to engagement, which was one of your edge states. Of course, the goal is to be wholesomely engaged in our lives. You give us an example of this with Jose the Mexican gardener who goes methodically and peacefully about his tasks, but for many of us in our work lives, we can sometimes wind up in burnout. That is, I guess you would say, mentally and physically exhausted. This is something I didn’t know: That term was invented in 1974 by a German born psychologist named Herbert Freudenberger, and he said that it can involve the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results. Of course, we’ve all experienced this, and it sounds pretty bleak. So I wonder if you want to talk about burnout a bit, and the sort of relentless busyness that drives us there, that rules our lives at times and leads us to burnout. 

Roshi Joan Halifax: Freudenberger, I think, was the first person who identified this, and then Christina Maslach further elaborated on the experience of burnout. We actually have a whole sort of professional realm that has evolved around treating burnout—people who are coaches and therapists and so forth. What Maslach and Freudenberger talk about is the sense of lack of efficacy, that what we’re doing is not making any kind of difference, that there’s a lack of meaning, that there’s a potentially toxic work environment, and so forth. Now, the opposite is also kind of fascinating to look at. It’s people who work with enthusiasm and dedication. I think about Mr. Lawrence Rockefeller, whom I knew into his 90s, who went to work every day. He had a very nice privileged life, Buddha knows, but I think about other people that I’ve met who have less access to resources, who stay dedicated and enthusiastic and are “hard working” and who love it and feel totally fulfilled up until the time when their lives come to an end. But we have, in a certain way, become so identified with busy-ness and the attention economy.

Sandy Boucher: And with productivity too? 

Roshi Joan Halifax: Productivity. Quantity, not necessarily quality, right? You ask, how are you today? “I’m really busy.”

Sandy Boucher: Which is supposed to be a good thing.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Precisely. I love the Zen adage: “Nowhere to go, nothing to do.” How can we engage in our lives wholeheartedly, as Brother David Steindl-Rast talks about, and, at the same time, not have the kind of ego investment in what we do that creates fatigue and also takes us away from our hearts?

Sandy Boucher: You offer some practices in the book itself. I’ll just mention some of them, like work, practice, meditating inside the life you have. 

Roshi Joan Halifax: That’s a Clark Strand phrase, and I just love that phrase.

Sandy Boucher: I do too. Right livelihood?

Roshi Joan Halifax: Exactly.

Sandy Boucher: Choosing work that’s aligned with our values and refusing work that isn’t? 

Roshi Joan Halifax: Precisely.

Sandy Boucher: Integrity is brought in. No work. No work! Take a pause, waste time, be aimless.

Roshi Joan Halifax: I love that Thich Nhat Hanh, who has written, I don’t know, 120-something books, calls himself a lazy monk.

Sandy Boucher: That’s right. And then play, I bet he thinks of writing a book as play.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Well, I wish I had felt writing this book was play, but anyway, it was work, but it did not take me to burnout. But actually play. Exactly.

Sandy Boucher: Finally, you say connection.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Connection is really important.

Sandy Boucher: Not just with others involved in a task, but with everything, with the universe.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Connection with ourselves, connection with others, connection with context. Yes, connection is really essential. This is, in a way, the spirit of mindfulness, that we are not separate from what we’re doing. Some people say, “Oh, you know, mostly people are human doings,” but this is really about human beings, right?

Sandy Boucher: You end the book with a long chapter on compassion, which we spoke about earlier—the quality that can guide us in navigating these edge states. I see this book ultimately as a call to action. You are asking us to step up, challenge injustice, challenge inequality, and, in the process, showing us how compassion can activate us and guide us. Part of that quote I read before is “We discover that compassion is the great vehicle that delivers us from suffering and gives us power, balance, and, ultimately, freedom.” That’s a very stirring statement. I know there’s an experience you tell about in the final section that illustrates the deepest form of compassion, beginning when you fell in the bathroom in Toronto. Can you tell us about that?

Roshi Joan Halifax: That story was kind of hard to write, actually. I was in Toronto, I slipped on the bathroom floor, and I looked at the angle of my leg and I realized I’d done something really bad. The host where I was staying, Andrew, came and supported my back as he called to his wife to dial 911. The ambulance arrived, and I’m in excruciating pain, and the medics wanted to lift me onto a gurney. I was about to lose consciousness from such excruciating pain, and I said, “Give me something to deal with this pain.” And the medic said, “Well, I’m not licensed to do that.” And I said, “Get someone who is before you move me.” About ten minutes later, a person arrived, a man arrived who was licensed and was able to administer morphine. By this time, I was going into shock, and my veins were collapsed, and he kept looking for a vein. He stuck me in one arm, the other arm, in my wrist—right wrist, then my left wrist—and he went into my foot—my right foot, my left. After six tries, I looked at the young medic who had originally arrived, and I could see he was very distressed. His eyes kind of rolled back into his head, and I had this kind of pulse of loving-kindness, you know, kind of like, “Oh, I hope he’s OK.” And at that thought, my circulatory system opened up and the needle went in, and so did the morphine, and that was helpful. And so I was on the gurney being taken down these stairs at a scary angle in the ambulance, Friday the 13th, full moon, ambulance screaming. And I’m aware that the man who had given me the morphine is sitting next to me. I look at him and he appears to be really distressed. I put my hand on his knee, and I say to him, “Are you OK?” And he said to me, “My wife is dying of breast cancer.” And I heard him, I mean, it was just this sense of incredible love and compassion that opened up in me, and at that moment, my pain completely disappeared. When I went to Toronto Western Hospital, he accompanied me and sat with me in the emergency room for hours. There was this bond between us that really moved me, but it also took me out of my suffering. I was not the only being suffering. I look on this as an expression of—a manifestation of—what’s called non-referential or universal compassion. It wasn’t that suddenly I was seeking someone to be compassionate about or for, also to relieve myself of pain. That compassion arose spontaneously and it eclipsed my own suffering, and yet, there was not a sense of self-consciousness about it. So in the book, I talk about these three faces of compassion. Referential compassion, where you feel compassion for another in your in-group, or someone who’s like a co-combatant, or your medical team, or someone who’s suffered like you. Also, compassion that’s related to insight, where it really comes from the process of inquiry and understanding, and can also relate to the precepts: compassion as a moral imperative. But this kind of universal compassion really is born of practice where the sense of self and other is not present and we just spontaneously respond to the suffering of the world. We’re at the ready, and certainly in that situation, you have no idea what that man was holding. But that question was the right question in that moment, and it liberated both of us.

Sandy Boucher: Wow. Thank you. This may be a good place to bring our conversation to an end. I thank you so much, Roshi Joan for speaking with us today. And I wonder, is there one last thing you might want to say to those who are listening, to those who are reading the book? Is there anything else, or have we said it all here?

Roshi Joan Halifax: There’s a quote that I share, I have a graph for one of the chapters, which goes something like: “May I do a great deal of good without ever knowing it.” And, to just pluralize it: May we do a great deal of good without ever knowing it.

Sandy Boucher: Thank you very much.

Roshi Joan Halifax: Thank you, Sandy.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to a conversation between Sandy Boucher and Zen teacher Roshi Joan Halifax here on Tricycle Talks. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Write us at feedback@tricycle.org and let us know what you think. Tricycle Talks is produced by Paul Ruest at Argot Studios in New York City. I’m James Shaheen, editor and publisher of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thank you for listening.