Standing at the Edge Quotes

“Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow … indispensable. That we matter.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others—and if we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another’s pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“Nowhere to go, nothing to do … Lost and found in the moment … Just practice this … Maybe here is where we find wholeheartedness and our true freedom.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“the way out of the storm and mud of suffering, the way back to freedom on the high edge of strength and courage, is through the power of compassion.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“I have come to see that mental states are also ecosystems. These sometimes friendly and at times hazardous terrains are natural environments embedded in the greater system of our character.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“There is evidence from evolutionary biology, sociology, neuroscience, and many other fields that we need to abandon our old misanthropic (and misogynist) notions for a sweeping new view of human nature.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“if we manipulate others into not sharing so we don’t have to hear, so we don’t have to listen, or if we react with horror or abandon the scene, we stifle our empathy and rob ourselves of this fundamental virtue of humanity.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“Shantideva wrote in chapter eight, verse ninety-nine (VIII: 99) of A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life that if someone is suffering and we refuse to help, it would be like our hand refusing to remove a thorn from our foot. If the foot is pierced by a thorn, our hand naturally pulls the thorn out of the foot. The hand doesn’t ask the foot if it needs help. The hand doesn’t say to the foot, “This is not my pain.” Nor does the hand need to be thanked by the foot. They are part of one body, one heart.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“Iris Murdoch defined humility as a “selfless respect for reality.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet

“Birdfoot’s Grampa The old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain. ******** The rain was falling a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you can’t save them all accept it, get back in we’ve got places to go. But the leathery hands full of wet brown life knee deep in the summer roadside grass he just smiled and said they have places to go too.”
― Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet