The Beautiful Mind (1of2)

A Conversation with Gina Sharpe

I arrived at meditation teacher Gina Sharpe’s house prepared to talk about what it means to live a beautiful life and more: I wanted to find a good story. The bare facts of Sharpe’s life were promising. Born in Jamaica, Sharpe moved to New York when she was eleven. She studied philosophy at Barnard College, worked in movie production (on the iconic 1970s movies Little Big Man, Paper Lion, and Alice’s Restaurant), and later became a successful corporate lawyer.

I knew there had to be adventures. Undoubtedly there were villains and mentors, dark times that gave way to light. Best, there was the promise of a moral: In the midst of all her worldly wanderings, Sharpe began to practice meditation with a range of Buddhist teachers, ultimately training to became a Vipassana (or “insight”) meditation teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.

As we settled into her light-filled upstairs study, however, I realized that Sharpe was not going to help me do a kind of narrative math, lining up events in her life in an equation that would yield a tidy sum like, say, that practicing corporate law is a less beautiful life than teaching in a maximum security prison for women, among other places.

Spontaneous and playful in her answers and her manner, Sharpe, who co-founded the Manhattan retreat center New York Insight, kept the conversation in the present. As we talked over cups of green tea, I registered that transformations in the heart and mind (in Buddhism the two are not separate) are not a matter of progressing from point to point. They have to do with stopping, with daring to be still and attentive in the present moment. I began to understand how moments of being present can grow by dedicated practice into moments of presence—moments of realizing that who we are in reality is not an isolated individual on an isolated journey but a being who is an inextricable part of a greater whole. And I learned that the more we are able to open to the present moment, the less we are able to rule out, to judge as unspiritual or unbeautiful.

In Buddhism equanimity is considered a sublime emotion, the ground of wisdom and compassion. The Pali word for it is upekkha, which means to “look over.” (Pali, a vernacular version of Sanskrit, is the language in which the Buddha taught and the language of Theravada Buddhist texts). Sharpe explained that this means observing a scene or a person so clearly that we see their part in the whole. In other words, we see their beauty. After we talked, I discovered that a second Pali word is also used to describe equanimity: tatramajjihattata. It’s a fusion of root words that means “to stand in the middle of all this.” Sharpe persuaded me that this is the place to be.

—Tracy Cochran

Tracy Cochran: Do you have regrets?

Gina Sharpe: I used to regret having been dedicated to anything else but the Dhamma [or Dharma in Sanskrit] because time is precious. But as I get older and hopefully wiser, I’m more interested in bringing my sights down from an ideal to just as it is right now. I see that beauty can be an ideal that exists elsewhere, or what is here right now. In every single moment, you can stop and simply turn to the moment. It’s here. Increasingly, I see that if I move away from the present moment, I’m immediately lost. That’s true, however life unfolds. Beauty isn’t to be found elsewhere—it’s right where you are.

TC: Can you say more about the choices you made that led you to be sitting here right now?

GS: I don’t think of life as a sum of choices. I think of outcomes as a result of each choice. I’m not sure that so called “choices” would have been as wise as what actually happened. We fool ourselves to think that we are making big choices that are going to direct our lives. What’s actually happening is that in every moment small, intimate choices present themselves, depending on conditions that previously arose. And appropriate responses can happen if we’re present. Those appropriate responses come together to be part of a kaleidoscopic pattern that can later on appear to be a huge choice that we made. Actually, the pattern is always changing, and if we look at it with spaciousness, it’s beautiful.

TC: Most people don’t like every piece of their lives. They want to be in full sail. They don’t want the doldrums. We grasp this and reject that according to our idea of how things should be.

GS: The basis of a beautiful life is a beautiful mind.

TC: Can you define that?

GS: A beautiful mind is a mind that integrates everything, whether full sail or no wind. It can be buoyant despite conditions. It’s trained to be so. Our minds left untended are not careful. We have to be careful about what grows up in the garden of the mind; careful about what needs tending, feeding, and what needs cutting back. The quality of care is what makes a garden beautiful, as much as the particulars. Similarly, anytime you try to narrow things down to a particular definition—or when we try to make huge decisions—we get bogged down. It’s more beautiful to see with care how every small response is made, and how it makes a kaleidoscopic pattern.

TC: That takes a really sensitive attention. A lot of people would see your life at a different resolution. They would see you as very successful in worldly terms, then giving it all up to live a simpler life.

GS: There’s a theme emerging here, an interest in pinning down what’s beautiful and not. But as soon as we get into those polarities, we lose what we’re trying to cultivate. Rather, we can trust that if we tend the garden carefully, it will be beautiful.

TC: I’ve heard elsewhere that judgment is fatal to attention, to the effort to really observe.

GS: I’ve felt that in my own life and my own practice. It’s as if we decide that we know best instead of letting the universe show us—and a correct choice in this moment may be completely inappropriate in the next moment. Maybe this is why we get lost so often. As soon as we make a judgment, we say to ourselves “ok, that’s it.” We apply that judgment to everything going forward. It may have been totally correct and appropriate in the moment you made it, but it’s not when applied to all the other conditions arising. Because then you’re not meeting the situation exactly where it is. That takes equanimity, balance—a truly beautiful state.

TC: Why is this quality considered to be such an important attribute of an awakened human being?

GS: And probably one of the most confusing. One of the most frequent questions I get from students is, “If I have a balanced, accepting attitude towards everything, won’t I become passive?” There is fear about becoming too accepting, and that balance is dull. What’s missing is the understanding that balance is completely alive. If it’s not alive, it’s not balance. Because balance requires constant adjustment.The Pali word for equanimity is upekkha, which means “to look over.” It’s interesting because it suggests a larger view, and the larger view comes from being present in every single moment. Presence in every moment clarifies the larger pattern, the kaleidoscopic pattern.