Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet Audiobook

"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

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“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