LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Directors:
Jay Goldfarb
Mostackerstrasse 11
4051 Basel, Switzerland
Tel/fax +41- 61-361 5375
Tom Valente
7350 S. Tamiami Trail, Suite 214
Sarasota, FL 34231, USA
Tel. +1-941 927 5907 Fax 923-3205
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Judy Goggin
Wisdom Area: Mission and Fulfillment
The quest to understand and fulfill life’s mission has stimulated Philosophical
and Spiritual literature for millennia. Each of us is faced with the issue of reexamining what we have done in our lives and reflecting upon “Who am I, Why
am I here… and what is there still to do?”
Question:
How can I find my “mission” to gain a sense of having fulfilled my
life’s potential?
YouTube Video Title: Legacy of Wisdom - Roshi Joan Halifax - Mission
YouTube URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG0_tnBTfTc
Length: 11:41
Interviewee: Roshi Joan Halifax (www.upaya.org)
is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is
Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist
monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She has worked in the area of death and dying for over thirty years
and is Director of the Project on Being with Dying. For the past
twenty-five years, she has been active in environmental work.
A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than three decades
has focused on engaged Buddhism. Of recent, Roshi Joan Halifax is a distinguished invited scholar to
the Library of Congress and the only woman and Buddhist to be on the Advisory Council for the Tony
Blair Foundation.
She is Founder and Director of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for
prisoners. She is founder of the Ojai Foundation, was an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard
University, and has taught in many universities, monasteries, and medical centers around the world.
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LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Directors:
Jay Goldfarb
Mostackerstrasse 11
4051 Basel, Switzerland
Tel/fax +41- 61-361 5375
Tom Valente
7350 S. Tamiami Trail, Suite 214
Sarasota, FL 34231, USA
Tel. +1-941 927 5907 Fax 923-3205
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Judy Goggin
Question:
How can I find my “mission” to gain a sense of having fulfilled my
life’s potential?
Transcript:
RJ: I think one of the most important things is to – when one looks back at one’s life as an
older person - is to feel that you have made a difference in the world that is positive. In my
work of sitting with dying people this experience of life review be
fore the actual dying
process – in the latter sense of moving closer and closer to the moment of death - before that
happens, is really important.
I think one of the most beautiful things that I have seen happen is when a young person sits
with a dying person. Sometimes with a tape recorder, sometimes with a video camera and
calls forth the stories of meeting in a person’s life. As one gets older, hopefully there are more
stories and more to be remembered. However sometimes, when people age, they can’t
remember the good they’ve done. And so that sensibility in a way has to be re-membered, has
to be brought to life again through the reflection of others, through appreciation and respect,
through a recalling of stories, through making of albums, through looking at old films and
videos. Because we want to feel our life as a whole cloth. And that cloth might be made of a
single thread of meaning like compassion or it might be a patchwork quilt, sown by the thread
of compassion. But there is a sense of making a robe of one’s life that we want to give away to
those who will survive us.
One of the extraordinary things I feel coming from elders today, is exactly this sense of
appreciation for the life that has been lived, for the gift that has been realized..... how can that
gift be realized? I would begin first with how do we take care of our mind as we age? And that
preparation starts when we’re very young. I mean we see it in elders who have a kind of light
shedding from them as you sit with them. That they have not engaged if you will, in seriously
non-virtuous activity which has created a sort of cloud of nervousness inside of them. But they
have lived a pro-social life, a life that’s characterized by compassion and kindness. So the
karmic effects are the sum of these mini-actions and the totality of behavior is one of the gifts
of being a wise elder in the world today.
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LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Directors:
Jay Goldfarb
Mostackerstrasse 11
4051 Basel, Switzerland
Tel/fax +41- 61-361 5375
Tom Valente
7350 S. Tamiami Trail, Suite 214
Sarasota, FL 34231, USA
Tel. +1-941 927 5907 Fax 923-3205
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Judy Goggin
And I think that the issue of virtue is consequential here. By virtue, the root of that word talks
about strength. It takes immense strength to stand heart-fully in the embrace of principles.
How do we live a principled life? Even though sometimes it feels so against the stream?
Whether it’s our politicians or our business people who sometimes are role models for the
world; which are not good role models.
And so the elders today – I think through trial and lots of error- have an opportunity to be
role models in a world that is profoundly fractured. Because they have a way, through
stabilizing their mind and through having lived a good life, of reflecting back into society the
principles that make for a decent society. In a way, the elders are the doorway into the future.
That’s something that is not appreciated so much in western culture. But in many other
cultures it is deeply appreciated where elders are respected.
Interviewer: How is it possible to gain a sense of Inter-generational respect –
elders are often not respected as role models – how to help people gain that?
RJ: I think there are many religious models for this in Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism for
this expression of intergenerational respect. It needs to happen more in education, in politics
and in business where the elders have the opportunity to bring their incredible experience
forward in the public eye so to speak. But there is also - we make our elders and we make our
children – society just doesn’t appear out of nothing. It’s more that we have to recognize that
we all have a responsibility for re-visioning the role of elders in society, creating the means for
elders to be mentally and physically healthier, to have the opportunity for their voices to be
heard and also to create the social contexts where elders can encounter young people.
I love living at Upaya. I’m a young elder, but I’m an elder nonetheless. Many of the people
who live here are in their late teens and their early twenties. And it’s just great, it’s like having
grandchildren. But because I’m the founder and the head teacher I’m accorded respect, I’m
listened to, with affection and awe, that sense of „I want the best for them.“ And it might be
not the best for this one or that one to even be here, I’ll help them leave here in a dignified
way. So I’m very fortunate to live in a community where the values that we see in other
cultures can be actualized as lived behavior, not simply as concepts.
As you grow older, of course there are physical limitations, and conceptual or rather cognitive
limitations that you encounter. But I look on, just from my own experiences and my own
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LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Directors:
Jay Goldfarb
Mostackerstrasse 11
4051 Basel, Switzerland
Tel/fax +41- 61-361 5375
Tom Valente
7350 S. Tamiami Trail, Suite 214
Sarasota, FL 34231, USA
Tel. +1-941 927 5907 Fax 923-3205
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Judy Goggin
physical limitations as a kind of blessing. Because the slowing down that has been
necessitated by the ills of the body has given me more time to reflect, to be with people in a
more subtle and sensitive way to appreciate relationally the experiences that I have with
others and to offer myself in a more immediate way.
So I think one of the things that we have to look at in our world is how just our neighborhoods
are set up. I mean it’s a very siloed world that we live in, whereas here in a Buddhist
monastery, you live, you practice, you serve, you relate, you have fun, you relate to each other
all in a medium that is pointing toward kindness, that’s pointing toward wellbeing, that is
characterized by a characteristic I spoke about earlier, and that is virtue. Where there’s a deep
appreciation for virtue.
And I think what we’re gonna see is just in terms of the actual living situations that we’re
going to find more and more communities that are similar to monastic communities that are
intergenerational and which are also multifunctional because this is an extremely fiscally
economic way to live but it also is an economy of the heart. There is something that happens
in an intergenerational community such as we have here and other religious and spiritual
communities have, where I’m learning from the young people and the young people are
learning from me. And there’s phenomenal joy in that mutuality. I will say, quite frankly, I
think it’s keeping me quite young.
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