Joan Halifax was born in
Hanover, New Hampshire in 1942. At age four a serious
virus caused her to go
legally blind, from which she recovered two years later. In 1964 she graduated from
Harriet Sophie Newcomb College at
Tulane University in
New Orleans, Louisiana, where she had become drawn into the
American civil rights movement and participated in
anti-war protests. Halifax moved to
New York City and began working with
Alan Lomax, and by 1965 she was reading books on
Buddhism and teaching herself how to
meditate. She worked at the
Bureau of Applied Social Research at
Columbia University with Alan Lomax from 1964 to 1968. She then went to Paris and worked at the
Museum of Man in the Ethnographic Film Section. She received her
Ph.D. from
Union Institute & University at
Cincinnati in
medical anthropology and
psychology and worked at the
University of Miami School of Medicine. She also went to
Mali, where she studied the indigenous
Dogon tribe. During the 1970s, Halifax went to
Mexico to study the
Huichols. Halifax entered a relatively short-lived marriage with
Stanislav Grof in 1972. ==Works==