Teacher Reflections with Gina Sharpe

Interview by Yoav Ben-Yosef, a New York Insight Sangha member

Continued from Newsletter …

How did you get started in the practice?
GS: I have always been a seeker, from the time I was a baby, really. I don’t remember not being a seeker. When I was twenty, my mother introduced me to someone who was a spiritual teacher and I studied with her for several years.  She just looked at me one day and said, “Zen,” and I went in that direction.
In those days we just had one spiritual bookstore in New York City called Samuel Weiser’s, somewhere in the Village, and they had a shelf thirty inches wide for Buddhism. It was all the Victorian texts…Tibetan texts, really, and I just devoured them. I had no idea what I was reading, but I knew it was something important.
So I started meditating on my own, and I had no idea how to meditate. I asked my teacher how to meditate, and she said, “Just sit.” So I did just that for fifteen years, every day—I just sat.

What did you learn from the Spiritual teacher?
GS: [Laughs] Oh, that’s another story. Well, you know, I think I learned that we shouldn’t be so attached to what we can hear, feel, see, smell and taste--the five physical senses, even though that is the way we experience the world, this life. That the world is often different than it first appears and we can know it by looking more deeply.  What we may think is true from the physical senses superficially is not necessarily all there is.

That’s interesting because Buddhism, I think, is not always clear about such things as out of body experiences.
GS: Well, it’s a balance. We can trust the experience of the physical world here and now; and also know that there are what we think of as extraordinary experiences that may come in our practice.  However, if you get too attached to those out of body experiences, then you’re not here, not present. So it’s not about having extraordinary experiences, although they may come in practice, but really to understand what it means to be an alive and awake human being, right here and right now in this ordinary body and this ordinary life. And we can also understand that there is a visible and invisible world, and the fact that it’s invisible doesn’t mean that it can’t be known.
So, going back to Zen, I would get up every morning for something like fifteen years and just sit, with no direction. And I finally went to a retreat that the Dalai Lama gave--the first Kalachakra initiation. That was a 7 day retreat.  He gave teachings for 5 days and led the initiation for 2 days. And the entire teaching was about emptiness, and I was completely enraptured. Again, I know I didn’t understand intellectually or experientially everything he said, but I knew there was something important there to be known. So when I started sitting silent vipassana retreats, it all came together. It’s only through practice that we can begin to understand the empty nature of phenomena. We can’t understand it through our minds, which is what I was trying to do--

Through the books?
GS: Yes. Or to understand it conceptually. You can’t understand it conceptually.
The books only point to what to look for in one’s own experience.

So you didn’t end up with Zen?
GS: No, I had a Zen teacher for a while, but it’s not where I ended up.

And how did you end up with Insight Meditation?
GS: I sat a retreat with Jack Kornfield, and when I sat that retreat I understood what I was looking for in terms of instruction. What I like about the Theravada practice is that it is so specific, showing you how to practice and it gives you specific tools. The teachings meld with the practice in a very direct and connected way. So that’s when I knew I was home.

Do you think that Insight meditation might be a better fit to the Western lifestyle than some other Buddhist branches, or just for you?
GS: I think that everybody’s different, and all practitioners have different inclinations, different ways of learning and different ways of seeing, so I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to make a huge statement about everybody’s practice. I think, for me, I appreciated the specificity and the depth of this practice.

And when you talk about specificity, what exactly do you mean?
GS: When you go on retreats, the instructions are progressive. They’re basically based on the four foundations of mindfulness. You start with mindfulness of the body; you practice mindfulness of feeling tones—pleasant, unpleasant and neutral; mindfulness of consciousness, emotions and thoughts; and mindfulness of the whole dharma—how we see the dharma through the practice. Then when you have interviews with a teacher, your practice is known and understood by the teacher, and then he or she knows how to make suggestions to adjust your practice according to what is happening in your practice, or how to work with what’s arising in your practice. So it’s very specific instruction.

I listened to a short talk that you gave, and you spoke about silence, how for you silence is a friend and an ally. In my experience, silence is sometimes that, and sometimes it’s just awful, not an ally at all. How do you work to make it into a more reliable companion, so you know that, okay, I’m now going to meditate to see my friend silence…
GS: So what is it about silence that you find difficult?

I think that I actually like silence a lot but life demands a constant attendance, so I think, ‘There’s no time for silence.’
GS: So that’s interesting. You’re defining your life as outside of silence.

Right, right.
GS: Isn’t everything that you do, and everything that you are a part of, your life? So whether you’re doing silence or you’re doing “blah blah blah,” it’s still your life. It’s not like silence is outside your life. Silence is behind all sound, the ground from which sound arises.  What happens, I think, is that we get addicted to activity, we get addicted to sound, we get addicted to business, we get addicted to all the things our culture tells us we need, or we should have or we should do or we should be. So the ability to stop and actually look and reflect and see and hear and touch and taste and smell, it’s fundamental to living a life that’s awake. So it’s not as if silence is outside of our life. It’s not as if silence is something that we put on, or some foreign entity that we go out and get, but just another aspect of reality, another ground from which we can see ourselves in a different way, from a different perspective. And the more perspectives from which we can see ourselves, the more clear we can become. So the ability to let the mind be still in the silence, to befriend what happens in the mind, to befriend our deepest being, our deepest aspirations, our deepest understandings—to the extent that we can do that, the dimensions of our lives increase.
So, if that is so, why would we think silence is separate from, or outside of, or not completely beneficial to our lives? Silence supports us in the ability to see clearly. It prepares us to see clearly in motion. If we are constantly in motion, it’s difficult to see clearly. It’s not like we’re asked to adopt silence as a way for life--for most of us, a combination of movement and stillness, or a combination of silence and sound are essential to well being and to wholesome living. That’s the natural order of things. And so to honor those rhythms, to honor all aspects of your life, makes it fuller.

And do you find that silence does become something of a transferable skill? Because for me, it’s much harder to stay silent in motion than in meditation.
GS: So the ability to be mindful, we learn in the silence, we learn in the stillness. And what is that ability that we learn? It’s not that we are mindful, you know, 168 hours of the week—or whatever that number is—it’s that we’re lost…we’re lost… we’re lost…we’re lost—we’re found! We’re lost…we’re lost …we’re lost…we’re lost—we come back.  We’re lost…we’re lost… we’re lost…we’re lost—we come back.
So in the same way, when you’re in movement, even when you find yourself lost, it’s possible to say, “Oh! I can actually feel my feet on the floor. I can actually notice this breath. I can be totally available for the next breath. Or I can be completely here when my friend is speaking to me rather than thinking about what I’m going to say to him or her, or the next appointment that I have with x.
Just as it’s possible for me in stillness to be lost for 30 minutes and then to come back in that one moment when I realize I’m lost--it’s the same way in life. And what happens is, that habit, the momentum of that discipline that is developed in silence, gets stronger and stronger and stronger when we are not silent, or, if you will, when we’re active. So before, you know ,we were lost-lost-lost-lost—found; and then we were lost-lost-found, lost--found, lost-lost-lost…found! It’s not as if we’re practicing to become some completely different person or that suddenly we’re going to become some super personality, or that all the troubles in our lives are going to go away; it’s that we can be present for it, whereas before we were asleep. We can wake up. And it’s a gradual and progressive process--if our practice is consistent. Just as when we go regularly to the gym, over a period of time muscles build. But if we go to the gym every couple of months, nothing happens, and we say, “Gee, I may as well not bother going to the gym because nothing’s happening.” Well that’s true, if that’s how you do it. Meditation isn’t any different. If you practice consistently, what you’ll begin to see is that there is a slow transformation of the way you perceive and understand experience. So it’s not as if nothing is happening as a result of your meditation practice, but that it’s not a quick fix. It’s a slow, progressive, cumulative practice.
You know, someone asked the Dalai Lama about the very same thing, and he said, ‘I myself, I look every 10 years to see: little change.’ I like that a lot. This way, you’re not so self-conscious. And we establish some depth of faith that it will happen. So we’re not so worried and checking all the time: ‘Have I changed, have I changed?’ We’re saying, seeing large scale change isn’t the point.  Rather, it’s slow and steady deepening through incremental change-- because I notice that if I meditate in the morning, my day is different. So even if that’s all that happens, good enough.

I noticed that the constant search for equilibrium, for this perfect state of affairs, is in itself painful. But if I’m just willing to give it up, then it’s such a big relief.
GS: Then the equilibrium will come. As soon as you give it up. Because the very search for the equilibrium is what throws it off. Because you want something else to happen. As long as we want something else to happen, we’re suffering. Because we’re struggling with what’s happening.
Think of meditation, not as states, but stages—so we’re not going from this state to that state. We’re going through several stages. Then wherever you are is fine; it’s just another stage. So you don’t say, ‘This is not a state that I want. I want some other state.’ If you’re agitated, instead of thinking, ‘Oh it means my meditation isn’t that good,’ you may think, ‘Oh, this is agitation. Agitation is like this.’ As soon as you turn to the agitation, accept it, recognize it, and not identify with it, there’s a state of equilibrium. Even if it’s a state of equilibrium that started with some agitation, it’s okay; it’s still a state of equilibrium—with whatever is happening.

This could be a little bit off topic, but according to a recent visiting teacher, the Buddha said that actual enlightenment happens to one out of—I’m not sure, some staggering number. So there does seem to be this goal of enlightenment, and I wonder if, not reaching enlightenment—since none of us is probably going to reach enlightenment in the next lifetime or two--is it still worthwhile?  Of course, I’m gathering that it is, but I do wonder about it.

GS: There’s a book called The Island, written by Ajahn Amaro and Ajahn Pasanno. In it, there are all of the quotes in the Suttas on nirvana. And in this book they point out that there are so many ways in which it’s talked about. Everybody’s got their own take on it. So be careful when you believe anything anybody said about what the Buddha said because they’re being selective. You need to decide for yourself why you practice. And remember that many of the scriptures that we read today are probably taken out of the cultural context in which the Buddha lived, and out of his own background and his own learning.  They started being written down 500 years after the death of the Buddha.
But more than that, at the end of his life, in the Parinibbana Sutta, he tells his disciples, ‘Be a light unto yourselves.’ What it says to me is, the practice is yours. It’s not the Buddha’s, it’s not your teacher’s; it’s nobody else’s practice but your own. Now that’s a little dicey because then we can make up all kinds of stuff about what practice is. But I think within a disciplined and thoughtful and contemplative context, it’s possible to understand for yourself where there is attachment and where there is freedom from attachment; where there is aversion and freedom from aversion; where there is delusion and freedom from delusion. If you use the four noble truths as the basis of your practice, and you really set out to understand and practice with those four noble truths, and you can study for yourself what the Buddha said about enlightenment, and understand for yourself when there are moments of enlightenment and when there are not. And you can decide for yourself whether or not enlightenment is a place and time in the future, or if it’s possible right here and now. Because that’s all we have. We don’t have the future. Future does not exist. Never has and it never will, right? The only thing that exists is the present moment. How is it possible for nibbana to exist anywhere but now?
So can you be free right now in this moment? Can you be free of clinging to your feelings, to your ideas about yourself, to sensual pleasures, to the desire to be, to the desire to not be? Can you be free of all those things? Is it possible right now and right here in this moment? And if that is so, is it true that only one in ten hundred trillion people have ever attained that? Or is, as Ajahn Buddhadasa calls it, ‘Everyday Nibbana’ possible?

So it happens even as we speak.
GS: Well, have you never had a moment of freedom? Right now, if you just close your eyes and turn inward and see. What else is needed in this moment? It’s a perfect moment. And when we move away from that, then there’s clinging and craving and attachment, and struggle, and Dukkha. And so then we can come back. What’s needed for this moment to be a perfect moment? Nothing. As we sit here, activity going on, whatever else—what’s needed? And if you can touch that, you’re awake.  That’s how the Buddha described himself, awake.

What do you think is the relationship between the more experiential practice of sitting or chanting and the more academic learning of the Buddhist teachings?
GS: So it’s an Eight Fold path, right? There’s Panna, Sila and Samadhi.
Panna is wisdom. Sila is integrity or morality. And Samadhi is meditation. Right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. That’s the complete path. And it’s not a linear path; it’s a circular path. And so as we meditate, wisdom dawns—we begin to see things as they are. And the wisdom teachings support that. They point us where to look and how to look and what to look for.
But the wisdom is not complete until we come to know the truth for ourselves. And of course, as my teacher says, ‘It’s hard to have a good day of meditation after a good day of killing.’ So wisdom is not disconnected from integrity, just as it’s not disconnected from wisdom; and as we get wiser we understand more and more the benefits of meditation, the benefits of stillness and silence, the benefit of contemplation and living a life of integrity. And as we meditate more and we study more, wisdom dawns, and the whole eightfold path keeps moving and changing and returning into itself.

Interview by Yoav Ben-Yosef, a New York Insight Sangha member.