51 Quotes by Joan Halifax

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.

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.

In accepting death as inevitable, we don't label it as a good thing or a bad thing. As one of my teachers once said to me, “Death happens. It is just death, and how we meet it is up to us.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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