Joan Halifax: Transforming Suffering Today: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Attitude

Roshi Joan Halifax has deeply explored the notion of hope. She began her talk reminding us that the young environmental activist Greta Thurberg has just arrived in the United States, and pointed out that people like her, Malala, and the Parkland students are igniting direction and wise hope in our fraught time.  She was interested to touch into recent feelings of futility, especially since she does not consider herself to be a hopeless person. In exploring hope, Roshi discusses the important differences between hope and optimism; she explored the notion of wise hope, and the power of radical imagination and the Bodhisattva attitude as shared by recent writings by Roshi Norman Fischer. Roshi Joan asks her audience to reimagine hope through the stories of Nelson Mandela and Robert Desnos, a Jewish surrealist poet who used an act of contrarian joy to save condemned men from the gas chambers of the Holocaust. For Nelson Mandela, it was his bodhisattva attitude towards adversity which “opened his own capacity for empathy and compassion.”  Roshi finished her powerful talk with vows directed toward dismantling war and cultivating peace.