For four decades, the Nomads Clinic has undertaken annual medical pilgrimages to some of the most remote and inaccessible mountain regions of the Himalayas in Nepal. An initiative created and led by Zen Buddhist spiritual leader Roshi Joan Halifax, the Nomads Clinic is the subject of Annegré Bosman’s multifaceted documentary, Into the Heart of the Mountain. It takes the viewer on a circuitous trail through Humla, a spectacular mountainous district by the Tibetan border. As the narrator, Roshi Joan Halifax’s words and teachings underscore a vision of mutually enriching interchange and balance.

Following the film screening, exhibiting artist Erika Wanenmacher will speak with Roshi Joan Halifax about intersections between Wanenmacher’s what Time Travel feels like, sometimes exhibition and Into the Heart of the Mountain. The discussion will explore topics of feminism, our relationship with the past, spiritualism, and more.

Special Guests

Roshi Joan Halifax

Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D. is a Buddhist teacher, Founder and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a social activist, author, and in her early years was an anthropologist at Columbia University (1964-68) and University of Miami School of Medicine (1970-72). She is a pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. She 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, was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress, received the Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Leadership in Health Care by HealthCare Chaplaincy, the Sandy MacKinnon Award from Covenant Health in Canada, Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Leadership in Health Care, received an Honorary DSc from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She has received many other awards and honors from institutions around the world for her work as a social and environmental activist and in the end-of-life care field.

From 1972-1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center with dying cancer patients. She has continued to work with dying people and their families, and to teach health care professionals and family caregivers the psycho-social, ethical and spiritual aspects of care of the dying. 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.

Her books include: The Human Encounter with Death (with Stanislav Grof); The Fruitful Darkness, A Journey Through Buddhist Practice; Simplicity in the Complex: A Buddhist Life in America; Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Wisdom in the Presence of Death; Standing at the Edge:Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet; Sophie Learns to Be Brave; and her latest work, In a Moment, In a Breath.

She has been involved with the Mind and Life Institute since its inception and is founder of the Varela International Symposium.

Erika Wanenmacher

Born in the mid-1950s in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, Erika Wanenmacher attended Kansas City Art Institute and the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles before settling in Santa Fe, New Mexico (whose landscape she had dreamed), where she has lived and worked for over 40 years. Her work has been shown and collected internationally.

“I am an unrepentant maker of things. I believe objects that are made with intent carry resonance that can shift energy, power, and beliefs. Clear intent focused by will and imagination are the components of a spell. I make spells in the form of objects.”