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Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom (BK Currents (Hardcover))

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Charles Halpern is the acknowledged father of the public interest law firm having founded the first such firm in Washington, DC in the late 1960s. Halpern followed his success at the Center for Law and Social Policy by becoming the founding dean of the nation's first (and I think only) law school(Queens Law School a part of CUNY) whose mission is to train public interest lawyers. Not only do I echo the comments in the editorial reviews quoted above, but I also I conclude the book reflects an extremely honest account of the author's motivations and emotions as well as the pluses and minuses of his career choices. I was particularly struck by something he said in his introduction that each person has to make their own decisions "about how he or she wants to balance competing objectives: taking risks and finding security; personal life and career; idealism and compromise, service to the larger community and concern for self." Even though I've made different choices than Halpern made, I continue to admire the choices he made, but his book also made me feel more comfortable about the choices I've made.

In addition to being a memoir, Making Waves is a "self help" book on how to find wisdom and balance a high octane, pressure career with inner peace As Bill Moyers concludes in one of the editorial reviews, one "could not ask for a better guide" than Charles Halpern for learning to live in a way in which "body, soul, wisdom and health are one and the same."

An enjoyable and inspiring read!! I loved this thoughtful and honest account of the struggles of building a successful career that incorporates a contemplative practice. Great wisdom and advice runs throughout this memoir - and I return to it frequently as I try to balance all aspects of my own life.

From the beginning of this tale of Charles Halpern's remarkable accomplishments, it was obvious that he was an intelligent, effective individual with many skills. But competent doesn't necessarily mean wise. Fortunately for us readers, interwoven with the story of his doing is the story of his psychological/spiritual development -- the story of his growth in wisdom and the integration of that wisdom into his many activities.

Halpern had the courage to place himself in a wide variety of challenging, often uncomfortable, growth-fostering situations. Too many to recount here, they included a winter camping adventure in the Adirondacks, a week-long vision quest based on Native American traditions that included many hours in a sweat lodge, and a five-day mindfulness meditation retreat led by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. This last was a watershed event, about which Halpern wrote: "The experience of extended meditation practice...awakened my interest in exploring the connection between meditation and wisdom. Could I undertake to practice wisdom, living the wise life that would generate wise actions and decisions? Could this be a new way to approach activism, to start from the place of wisdom and compassion rather than the place of anger and insistence on legal rights?"

Meditation became a central focus in his life, and numerous retreats followed. To some extent facilitated by the Nathan Cummings Foundation of which he was now President, he met and got to know many of America and the world's foremost spiritual teachers. "Longtime meditators and respected teachers," he wrote, "gave me a new model for a way to be in the world--committed to serving others, cultivating wisdom, being open to changing themselves, and exposing their own vulnerability." Currently, Charles Halpern is Chair of The Center for Contemplative Mind and Society.

MAKING WAVES AND RIDING THE CURRENTS is a truly inspiring and uplifting book. It is the tale of a life marked by great accomplishment and developing wisdom, told with an engaging frankness about his own vulnerabilities by the man who has lived it.

Making Waves and Riding Currents is a book that everyone should read. No soft tale here but a journey not unlike rafting white waters. Charles sees the real and the ideal, the what "could be and is not yet", takes time to grasp the whole, sees the way and then takes it. He combines courage, a genuine interest in life and a willingness to "live and learn" both on a professional and personal level. This is a story of major entrepreneurial ventures that impact our own lives, created and co-created, experienced and shared in ways allowing every one involved to learn, use their experience, as well as to question and relinquish old patterns, recognize blocks and crack open into wider realms of understanding and living that center on Wisdom. This book documents changes in thinking that have make our society more humane and just. This is not your usual "lawyer" story. This is speaks to everyone's potential to develop wisdom, played out large, and saying: Come on, you can do it! I can't stop thinking about what one life can do.

No matter what your political persuasion or your profession, this book is a great source of wisdom and insight. Beyond a fascinating history of the birth of public interest law, Charlie Halpern provides a deeply personal and affirming account of how to pursue one's ideals in a way that is nurturing of our deeper selves and respectful of others. A key lesson of this book is that it is not just what you stand or fight for, but who you are and how you act as you do it. By cultivating an awareness that allows a deeper wisdom to emerge, Charlie points to ways we all can contribute to the world in a way that contributes to far greater tolerance and balance, without compromising our effectiveness. And in the process, we also become healthier and more loving and also create a world that reflects this.

I highly recommend this engaging memoir, which is an inspiration and fast read. Charles Halpern graduated from Harvard and Yale, and parlayed a legal career into the first public interest law firm and law school. Upon discovering meditation, Mr. Halpern, incorporated his practice into his life's work. As a result of Halpern's efforts, oil pipelines were put in Alaskan soil sustainably, DDT was banned, public interest lawyers found their needed education, and graduates started influential environmental groups such as EarthJustice. The ripple of Halpern's positive wave continues, and you can catch it by reading Making Waves and Riding the Currents.

This book is a wonderfully engaging, well-written autobiography; it also brings vividly to life a crucially-important part of recent US social history. Charles Halpern worked at the heart of an era of progressive change in law and society that started in the 1960s, and he stayed creatively active even throughout the subsequent period of reaction--which arguably has lasted down to the present day.

But Halpern's autobiography goes further even than providing a vivid, personal chronicle of our recent past. It also gives readers a present-day model of and incitement to progressive change-making. It models change-making as an intensely creative and imaginative activity, as it charts Halpern's succession of activities as an architect and leader of Center for Law and Social Policy, the nation's first public interest law firm; then as the designer and first dean of the CUNY Law School, an educationally and socially innovative institution that focused on public interest law; and ultimately as head of the progressive Nathan Cummings foundation. The scope and sheer variety of Halpern's constant, ongoing innovation and institutional invention is fascinating and even breathtaking.

At the same time, Halpern writes of what informs and grounds this unusual creativity. His book is also an account of intellectual and spiritual growth, as Halpern experiments with and incorporates contemplative practice in his life--drawing on it to sustain and empower him in his public career. Halpern then feeds back personal discovery back into institutional creativity, as he sets up a series of programs devoted to transforming intellectual and professional practice in a wide variety of fields--in law schools, colleges, universities, and social movements.

Making Waves and Riding the Currents takes a life well-lived and transforms it into a book that will interest, involve, inform and inspire generations of readers.

Halpern, one of the country's first public interest lawyers in the 1960s, has written a fine book, Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom. As to what's wrong with the way activism has been practiced, Halpern says, "To go back to the early days of the environmental movement, there were ways we could have proceeded that were less polarizing. We could have been less self-righteous. I think of my own self-righteousness in my early days as a public interest lawyer, and it makes me cringe."

He says, "Reagan became a symbol of a self-indulgent individualism, which is still a powerful force in this country. The idea that selfishness is a virtue, and generosity a kind of foolishness, received wide acceptance. That's still a widely held point of view, reflected in the fact that we have enormous and growing inequality between the rich and the poor, that we've created a new Gilded Age."

"We're starting to see the prices of that attitude in environmental destruction, indifference to the plight of the poor, and idea that government is the enemy and taxes should only be cut, never raised. These are attitudes that activists have to work against, but they shouldn't just be working to change corporate policy, or to get a new law adopted that will put, for example, stronger limitations on products sold to small children...they've also got to understand that these shifts in public policy are only possible, and ultimately, only effective, if they are attached to a shift in wisdom, and toward the values of community, mutuality, and interconnection."

Mr. Halpern reminds us that we have a choice, in each and every waking moment -- and then the next, to embrace values that transcend our individual concerns. For lawyers his is a momentous work because if not a blue print 'how to' accomplish this deeply personal journey, Halpern's life story is a 'pointer' within the tradition of Zen Masters where we might look to find our own beginning. Halpern manifested that integrity in his life within the realm of public interest law, which he pioneered. Fascinating that his journey began at Arnold & Porter, at a time when the values that formed that venerable firm had become caricatures of themselves -- as indeed the founding lawyers themselves had to some extent become. His remarks about Thurman Arnold in his final years are poignant and capture the essence of that man at that time, including the danger that arises when any man, once a maverick, becomes assimilated into the group or attached to particular persons or ideas.

Before Halpern released his book, he published an article in the ABA Journal entitled "Escape from Arnold & Porter: How One Lawyer Summoned the Courage to Leave Big Law to Pursue a Career of Conscience." It is fascinating to see the comments posted from ABA members to Halpern's short article -- one dismissed it a story "from 'the beautiful people,'" are "not straddled with financial burden," and who could easilly "play house with 'transformations' and 'new consciousness' while sipping lattes at Starbucks". Clearly, the author did not know about whom he was speaking but, alas, as with all trance, was quite "sure" he did know.

The disease of cynism today, which eats away at the souls of lawyers in particular, commonly takes the form of reactive judgmentalism based upon a sliver of information. This is natural. Indeed, it is how lawyers are educated and conditioned. But Halpern charts a different course, based upon ethics and a life-time commitment to ideals as beyond superficial conversation over lattes at Starbucls as the moon from the earth. It is would useful for all of us to look towards that to which he points. We just might find redemption there, as he clearly does.

Thurman W. Arnold III

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