Roshi Joan Halifax is affiliated with the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. The provided source material contains limited biographical information, listing no recorded talks or retreats in the archive.
Halifax's teaching weaves Soto Zen practice with engaged contemplative work in fields where most teachers don't go. Her central preoccupation is compassion under duress, what happens to caring attention when it meets death, suffering, injustice, and burnout, and how to keep it from collapsing. The edge states framework is the most articulated form of this teaching. Each edge state, altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, engagement, has a healthy expression and a pathology that distorts it, and her work names both with unusual precision. On the cushion, her teaching is recognizably Soto Zen, shikantaza-centered, with attention to posture, breath, and the discipline of just sitting. Off the cushion, she's developed the GRACE protocol for clinicians working with patients in distress, a structured approach to maintaining contemplative presence in clinical care. She's a long-standing voice on engaged Buddhism, the climate crisis, and the moral injuries that show up in helping professions, and her teaching makes space for the political and ecological dimensions of contemplative life rather than treating them as a side concern.
Roshi Joan Halifax is a Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, and abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which she founded in 1990. Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1942, she trained in medical anthropology, did pioneering fieldwork on shamanism in the 1970s, and worked with Stanislav Grof on early end-of-life and consciousness research. She received Dharma transmission in the Soto Zen lineage from Bernie Glassman in the 1990s and is also a holder of the Order of Interbeing in Thich Nhat Hanh's lineage. Halifax's career has braided Buddhist contemplative training with engaged work in death and dying, restorative justice, and the climate crisis. She founded the Project on Being with Dying, a long-running training program for clinicians and contemplatives in end-of-life care, and her book Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death is one of the central texts in contemporary contemplative end-of-life work. Her later book Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet maps what she calls the edge states, altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement, where compassion can either flourish or collapse into harm. She's been a chaplain in maximum-security prisons, a guide on environmental pilgrimages in Tibet and Nepal, and a teacher of the Zen Peacemakers. Upaya is now a major Western Zen center, hosting residential trainees, scholars, retreats, and chaplaincy programs.
Halifax holds Dharma transmission in the Soto Zen lineage from Bernie Glassman, the founder of the Zen Peacemakers, and is a holder of the Order of Interbeing in Thich Nhat Hanh's lineage. She founded Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe in 1990 and serves as its abbot. Her training also includes early work in medical anthropology and consciousness research, and she's been a long-standing collaborator in cross-tradition dialogue including Mind and Life Institute conversations with the Dalai Lama.
At Upaya retreats and trainings, expect formal Zen sitting, work practice, and substantial teaching segments. Halifax's voice is direct, often pointed, and grounded in decades of working at the edge of what contemplative practice can hold. The chaplaincy and Being with Dying programs are residential or hybrid trainings with a real curriculum, not weekend introductions. Daily life at Upaya runs on a Zen schedule, zazen morning and evening, work practice, oryoki meals at intensives, with attention to ritual and form.