BY ROSHI JOAN HALIFAX, AUTHOR OF STANDING AT THE EDGE
Buddhist women’s voices can tend to be subdued in and sometimes even absent from public conversation. Not so with Roshi Grace Schireson. Her forthrightness, her strength, her humor, and her wisdom are threads that weave this marvelous book into a powerful tapestry of insight, inspiration, and teaching. This book explores the powerful territory of awareness—not awareness in the romantic sense but awareness as it opens itself in the context of one’s everyday life.
Brave and true, Roshi Grace pushes the reader to let go of the pretenses and pretending that shield us from who we really are. She wants us to recognize our innate wisdom and to actualize compassion that is not based on pity but on courage—the courage to look and the courage to see.
Filled with funny and startling stories, this book is also bursting with wisdom and has a special flavor of brave kindness. I know, from my own experience, that writing about “awareness” is no small task, but Grace has managed to break open this hard subject with skill and wit.
As I proceeded through this marvelous book, I found myself not only smiling from her humor but also nodding in agreement with her very sharp analysis of the meditative experience. Her insight about discovering sentience as a child was fascinating, as she became aware of the mutuality between beings and things. She points out that meditation practice is a way that we can amplify our experience of awareness, reveal it, and sharpen it. She then helps us understand that awareness can be circulated through our relationships, not only to others but to all of life, and thus, awareness can arise naturally, spontaneously through the fabric of our whole and precious life and the granular details therein.
Her stories of meeting Suzuki Roshi open a window through which we view the lifelong changes that come from meeting one’s teacher.The hook had sunk deep and she was caught by Suzuki Roshi’s tenderness and her own developing awareness.
As Grace’s friends will attest and her book reflects, she is not just a seeker of truth in the conventional sense; rather, she demands truth from herself and others. She stands not only in love but also alongside justice. Her practice is focused on accountability and responsibility in these changing and fraught times. She has learned hard lessons as a woman and as a post-modern human. She has taken those lessons to heart and is bringing them to her wider Zen community and the wider world. A leader in ending gender bias not only in Buddhism but also in Eastern and Western society, she teaches that her own journey with discovering, amplifying, and circulating awareness is not just a personal enhancement program but is also about ending suffering in our time.
I read her book and felt love and awe. This is a book that is both intimate and prophetic.
Joan Jiko Halifax is an American Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, hospice caregiver, and the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality, including Standing at the Edge. She currently serves as abbot and guiding teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a Zen Peacemaker community which she founded in 1990.
