Wisdom Area: Mission and Fulfillment · Web viewShe is founder of the Ojai Foundation, was an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University, and has taught in many universities,

LEGACY OF WISDOMwww.legacyofwisdom.org

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Project Directors: Jay Goldfarb Tom Valente Mostackerstrasse 11 7350 S. Tamiami Trail, Suite 214 4051 Basel, Switzerland Sarasota, FL 34231, USA Tel/fax +41- 61-361 5375 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 FulfillmentThe 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 re-examining 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: What about using tools like "life review" or a "bucket list" as a way to focus on this part of our lives – (and through that to be able to be more conscious of the possibility that this last phase brings)?

YouTube Video Title: Legacy of Wisdom - Roshi Joan Halifax - Bucket List and FocusYouTube URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRm9v7yD4A8Length: 7:53

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.

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http://www.legacyofwisdom.org/


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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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Question: What about using tools like "life review" or a "bucket list" as a way to focus on this part of our lives – (and through that to be able to be more conscious of the possibility that this last phase brings)?

RJ: Well, I think there are so many ways to enrich the lives of elders and provide the means for elders to enrich the life of the world. But they’re not so common in the west. I mean strangely enough, it’s usually when someone falls ill, that the bucket list gets made or when there’s an acute loss of capacity. But it’s usually the diagnosis that gets you. Say it’s a wakeup call: „ Wow, I have a year to live. Gosh, I haven’t been to the Antarctic yet, I wanna go! That’s on my bucket list.“

But we don’t know when we’re gonna die. It could be this afternoon. It could be sitting here in front of you, suddenly I have a catastrophic event in my cardiovascular system. So it’s one of those things I feel we should really we should start a lot younger, pre diagnosis. And the Chinese say: the minute you’re born you’re on the road to death. So in a way the diagnosis has already been made once you’re born.

For me it’s been a constant assessment and it’s what in neuroscience is called “executive function” in a way. How do we actually prioritize, sensitively, so that we’re not just squandering our life?

So for example when we sit Seshin, which is an intensive meditation retreat, at the end of Seshin a verse is chanted before all of us go to bed. And the verse goes:

“Life and death are of supreme importance.

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Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost. Let us awaken, awaken. Do not squander your life.”

So whatever age you are as you sit here in a zendo; it’s the last thing you hear before you go to bed at night. And it reminds you of something that is just so important, that this human life is precious. Sitting with children who are dying as well as sitting with the very elderly, being with people who suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s has given me a sense of tremendous appreciation of “I don’t wanna squander this life”. I have that verse printed in the back of my head and I wanna make every minute count. I don’t wanna waste my life. I want to have the sense of appreciation, of gratitude, gratefulness is essential.

And in this regard I love the work of Brother David Stendl-Rast who’s a very close friend of mine; who has for many years promulgated the practice of gratefulness. As my Zumi Roshi says to actively, pro-actively appreciate your life. And as brother David says: “Be grateful and practice gratefulness“, we can dwell in the dark structures of the psyche, but what we’re asked to do is to actually have a much more pro-social and buoyant approach to this treasure of our life even though it’s often characterized often by suffering.

Recently I saw something that just brought tears to my eyes. It was of a woman in Haiti who had been entombed by this terrible earthquake. And I think she was entombed for something like six days. And her husband was convinced that she was inside of the rubble of this bank where she worked. And every time the machines would go and pull another layer of rubble off he would rush up and he would say: „Are you there? “. And all of a sudden a voice came out of the rubble. And a rescue team appeared and began to excavate. And from within the rubble she said: “Even if I’m going to die, I want you to know - and she was weeping - I

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love you“. And then they pulled her from the rubble. And she burst into a song. The song was: “Death I’m not afraid“. And when she finished the song the reporter said: „well, you really weren’t afraid that you were going to die”? And she said, “No, why should I be”?

And that buoyancy, that resilience is something that we do not see enough of in our culture because there is such a kind of dwelling or narcissism or we live in such a self-referential world. I think one of the virtues of growing older is that you make many mistakes. I have made many mistakes, but I’ve picked myself up from those mistakes, because I live in a culture in the community in which I live where the sense of “Schadenfreude” or of punishment is really absent. But our culture is very punishing and quite unforgiving, extremely dualistic. And I feel that what happens as people grow older is that because of the diminution of physical capacities, the contemplative dimension grows; the opportunity to look deeply within. And doing that, the bucket list gets better.

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Documents

Wisdom Area: Mission and Fulfillment · Web viewShe is founder of the Ojai Foundation, was an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University, and has taught in many universities,