Standing at the Edge, Joan Halifax
Standing at the Edge, Joan Halifax
1 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Standing at the Edge
Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

Author: Joan Halifax

Narrator: Joan Halifax

Unabridged: 10 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/01/2018


Synopsis

"In Standing at the Edge, Joan Halifax weaves together scientific research and her own powerful personal experiences as a social activist and humanitarian to show how we can transform our biggest challenges with compassion and wisdom. Standing at the Edge is essential reading for our time." — Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global

Standing at the Edge is an evocative examination of how we can respond to suffering, live our fullest lives, and remain open to the full spectrum of our human experience.

Joan Halifax has enriched thousands of lives around the world through her work as a humanitarian, a social activist, an anthropologist, and as a Buddhist teacher. Over many decades, she has also collaborated with neuroscientists, clinicians, and psychologists to understand how contemplative practice can be a vehicle for social transformation. Through her unusual background, she developed an understanding of how our greatest challenges can become the most valuable source of our wisdom—and how we can transform our experience of suffering into the power of compassion for the benefit of others.

In this audiobook, Halifax identifies five psychological territories she calls Edge States—altruism, empathy, integrity, respect, and engagement—that epitomize strength of character. Yet each of these states can also be the cause of personal and social suffering. In this way, these five psychological experiences form edges, and it is only when we stand at these edges that we become open to the full range of our human experience and discover who we really are.

Recounting the experiences of caregivers, activists, humanitarians, politicians, parents, and teachers, incorporating the wisdom of Zen traditions and mindfulness practices, and rooted in Halifax’s groundbreaking research on compassion, Standing at the Edge is destined to become a contemporary classic.

A powerful guide on how to find the freedom we seek for others and ourselves, this is an audiobook that will serve us all.

Praise for Standing at the Edge:

"...narrator Joan Halifax's meditative voice takes us by the ear and reorients us toward serenity...Her slow and steady pace allows listeners to keep up with the considerable wisdom she is passing along. This title will likely leave listeners feeling serene." - AudioFile Magazine

"Halifax offers an invitation to hold these states not only in our minds, but in our hearts." — Psychology Today

About Joan Halifax

Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D., is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in medical anthropology in 1973 and has lectured on the subject of death and dying at many academic institutions and medical centers around the world. She received a National Science Foundation Fellowship in Visual Anthropology, was an Honorary Research Fellow in Medical Ethnobotany at Harvard University, and was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress. She is Director of the Project on Being with Dying, and Founder of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. She is also founder of the Nomads Clinic in Nepal.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mary

It’s unfortunate that this book’s rather vague, unremarkable title doesn’t hint at the riches inside. Joan Halifax, an amazingly accomplished Buddhist teacher (she first met the now-popular Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh back in the 1960’s) and social activist, takes readers on a fascinating......more

Goodreads review by Roger

I read this book at a particularly difficult moment in my life, when realities like empathic distress and burnout seemed all too real for me. Halifax talks about empathy, altruism, and engagement as "edge-states," spaces where we have to be very skillful in order to not fall into the abyss of distre......more

Goodreads review by Nicki

It's difficult to describe Joan Halifax's book "Standing at the Edge". The author weaves in personal stories from her experience as a researcher, teacher, hospice caregiver and prison spirituality teacher, as she explains to readers how to avoid the "edge states" of various noble causes. Empathy can......more


Quotes

“Halifax’s medium is psyches, communities, and social systems. Through her many activities—teaching, bridging cultures…drawing people to social activism and a contemplative life—she can be imagined as a weaver or a sculptor, conjuring new forms out of her raw material: people and groups. To intervene in individuals’ lives takes confidence, which she has in abundance.”
—Rebecca Solnit, The New Yorker

"To help listeners cope with today's fast-paced, noisy world, narrator Joan Halifax's meditative voice takes us by the ear and reorients us toward serenity." -AudioFile