“If we could surrender to Earth’s intelligence, we would rise up rooted, like trees.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
When all else fails, sit down and be still as a tree. Even if everything is not failing, take time every day to let go of all of the stories that are constantly spinning to just sit down. This can feel very risky, even reckless. You may feel like Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights (aka The Thousand and One Nights) who spins stories to keep a hurt-driven sultan in a constant state of anticipation so that he will not kill her. You may feel as if you will die if you stop. You may feel as if you are in a live-action version of Rumpelstiltskin, as if you have a huge pile of straw to spin into gold before dawn or something horrible will happen to you. Still, stop.
Sitting down like this doesn’t mean acquiescing to injustice or cruelty or giving up on life. It means calming and steadying the body and mind so that you can receive energy, insight, and inspiration flowing in from a greater intelligence. Sit down in a noble posture, back straight and your head up, rise up and take root like a great tree.
As if you washed up on a beach after being pulled under and tumbled around by a giant wave, just be full of the experience of being alive in the most basic sense, in a body, breathing. Allow everything in the world to go on without your input, noticing that it happens anyway. In a state of complete, washed-up relaxation, it becomes clear that your body is not just a source of pleasure or pain or a flesh vehicle for carrying you from place to place. It is our connection to a greater life. Sitting down, you may discover that the stories we cling to can be a distraction. The real excitement—the real insights–come when you take root where you are.
Remember that the Buddha discovered the value of sitting down and abiding peacefully in the wake of a seemingly huge failure, at a point when it seemed that all his efforts had come to nothing. He found himself washed up on the beach of life, a heap of rags and bones on a river bank, split from his yogi brothers, almost dead from starvation and all the efforts that were supposed to bring liberation from the body and the problems that come with the body. Efforts that seemed to lead him nowhere.
Along came a young woman who offered him something to eat. Taking food from a woman was very forbidden to an ascetic but since he had given up he was open to receive this gift of life, this basic gesture of generosity. Receiving it, he was strengthened and he remembered the goodness of life. He sat under a tree, remembering another time long ago when he sat under a tree. He remembered what it was like to be a little boy, watching his father and other men from the village plowing the fields. He remembered the joy in solitude that children can have, just being still and relaxed and open, smelling the grass, feeling the breeze, not crushed by anxious or burdensome thoughts. He took this recollection with him to the Bodhi Tree. It became the platform of his enlightenment.
Nice story, you may be thinking. And yet when you dare to sit down and let go, you may just have these little blips of sensation, these tiny flashes of light, but mostly tension or pain or sadness. How is this supposed to knit itself into some kind of answer? How is this supposed to replace our words and reasons, the narratives that hold us with centrifugal force, like that ride at the county fair shaped like a huge tilting wheel. Patience. It helps by showing us that things aren’t as solid as they seem.
From the inside, a tree is not a tree but a changing system, drawing in sunlight, water and nutriments, blooming, peaking, letting go again. In the same way, you begin to see that you are not a fixed identity. You begin to see what you usually overlook or dismiss as trivial, that you are this pulsing, breathing receiving being who is going on being part of life even after failures and heartbreak and great loss.
The practice of sitting down and being is a little like being still and getting a bird or an animal to eat out of the palm of your hand. After a long time, one comes, then more come, more often. The tension gives way to sensation and these little blips of sensation, these micro bursts of vibrancy, these flashes of light, slowly remind you of the deeper goodness of being alive and part of it all. For moments at a time, you lose interest in self and gain an interest in life. You see that everything is always shifting and changing and it you see that this feel like magic, like being part of an amazing creation.
Usually we think of impermanence as sad, and it certainly can be, especially when we try to hold on to things that change. But when we let go, when we sit down and take root, we find life waiting to lift us up as we take root.
“The world is not a problem to be solved; it is a living being to which we belong.” writes Sufi master and Parabola contributor Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. “The world is part of our own self and we are a part of its suffering wholeness. Until we go to the root of our image of separateness, there can be no healing. And the deepest part of our separateness from creation lies in our forgetfulness of its sacred nature, which is also our own sacred nature.”
I arrived at meditation teacher Gina Sharpe’s house prepared to talk about what it means to live a beautiful life for the “Beauty” issue of Parabola. The bare facts of Sharpe’s life were promising. Born in Jamaica, Sharpe moved to New York when she was eleven. She excelled in school and in the world of work, studying philosophy at Barnard College, working in the office of the mayor of New York, in movie production (on the iconic 1970s movies Little Big Man, Paper Lion, and Alice’s Restaurant), and finally becoming a successful corporate lawyer.
I expected a story about brave decisions and overcoming obstacles. Undoubtedly there were villains and mentors, dark times that gave way to light, a culminating turning point. After all, Sharpe ultimately became a Vipassana (or “insight”) meditation teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.
Yet as we settled into her light-filled upstairs study, 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. She was not going to tell me 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, co-founder and guiding teacher of the New York Insight Mediation Center, kept the conversation in the present. As we talked over cups of green tea, I slowly had to concede 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 the slow, patient work of cultivation in the humble agricultural sense of the word (the Buddha’s word was “bhavana”)– opening to the present moment, to influences beyond our self-enclosed narratives. I began to understand that the real adventure and beauty in life does not consist in grand gestures but in imperceptible acts of daring–moments of daring to be open, to listen, to not run away or defend ourselves from what arises. In those moments, we may realize that who we are in reality is not an isolated individual on an isolated journey but a being who is part of a greater life that is always in a state of flow. No feeling and no answer is final.
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 is a vernacular version of Sanskrit, which may be similar to language the Buddha taught in, and it is 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.” Again and again, in the course of the interview I sought higher ground, the conclusion, the moral of the story, the lesson learned. Again and again, Sharpe showed me that the middle of things was the beautiful 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.
COCHRAN
Can you say more about the choices you made that led you to be sitting here right now?
SHARPE
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.
COCHRAN
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.
SHARPE
The basis of a beautiful life is a beautiful mind.
COCHRAN
Can you define that?
SHARPE
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.
COCHRAN
That takes a really fine-guage 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.
SHARPE
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.
COCHRAN
I’ve heard elsewhere that judgment is fatal to attention, to the effort to really observe.
SHARPE
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.
COCHRAN
Why is this quality considered to be such an important attribute of an awakened human being?
SHARPE
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.
COCHRAN
To be present is to be aware that we are present with the whole of life.
SHARPE
Interestingly, I’ve found that one way to see the whole of life clearly is to focus on one small point, not trying to take everything in. Somehow just looking at that one point, the whole world emerges. As William Blake said, “seeing the world in a grain of sand.” The “looking over” of equanimity can mean looking through that one point to everything, seeing the whole picture by looking closely and carefully at one point.
COCHRAN
So this looking over doesn’t mean overlooking.
SHARPE
No. Practicing equanimity we come to a point where we understand what the Taoists call the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows, because a beautiful balance comes into our lives. We see that through the sorrow, we can also have joy, and that without joy, our sorrows would be unbearable. We see that our lives become beautiful when they become balanced—when they are with the way things are rather than the way that small mind thinks it should be.
COCHRAN
I think you are saying that from a balanced perspective, practicing having beautiful mind, being trained as a corporate lawyer can be just what is needed in the moment, sort of like the old expression, “The right tool for the job.” What is coming out is that beauty is situational, fluid.
SHARPE
That’s exactly right. Our lives are flowing like a river. We can’t freeze anything and say “that’s beauty.” Receiving a dozen red roses doesn’t always feel beautiful. It depends on the situation, on the quality of the thoughtfulness, the giving and receiving. A constellation of conditions come together to make a beautiful moment. How do we cultivate that beauty in our lives? We can’t cultivate it by deciding we’re just going to have beauty around us, beautiful people, beautiful objects, beautiful situations (all according to our idea of beauty). Life isn’t like that. Often, when we try to set life up in that way, something else happens. The river overflows or the oil spills over the beautiful water. Whatever we think will happen as we strive to set up conditions in a particular way will never happen precisely in that way because our small minds are incapable of completely knowing conditions. There is always going to be something we forget or one thing we didn’t take into account, or something unpredictable happens. Beauty comes from having a mind that is capable of seeing things just as they are in the moment and being able to repose in that. And, of course, it’s constantly changing.
COCHRAN
Everything you say seems to rest so much on knowing the wholeness of life—that we are an integral part of a greater whole. How can you help students find that? There is so much turmoil and torment in young people, especially in young women. They feel that beauty is elsewhere, not in them.
SHARPE
This relates to what we were talking about before. The mind does need to be cultivated. If the mind isn’t cultivated, then what happens is that we accept cultural definitions of beauty, of right and wrong, good and bad. When we accept those definitions, we are trying to freeze what is flowing. It comes back to what we have been talking about from the start. In a single moment, if we are aware of things as they are, rather than projecting how they should be: that is grace, beauty. In a single moment—and in every moment—it’s possible to not know how things should be, to not measure or judge things. We get frozen in ideas from the past.
COCHRAN
Our projections about the future are rooted in the past.
SHARPE
Yes. We get stuck on some idea that somebody gave us about something somewhere in our past, whether it was negative or positive. We develop a view and because it’s our view we think it is right. Some wind up killing because we get stuck on the idea that our frozen view is right. The understanding of how being present leads to Presence with a capital “P” takes that care we were talking about—being aware of how we drag that past with us. A beautiful mind is a mind in question presently, a mind that is curious and investigates.
COCHRAN
The truth is always in movement. It can’t be really grasped.
SHARPE
Yet even the idea that nothing should be solidified becomes untrue when we solidify it.
COCHRAN
Our Western cultural inclination is to go up into the head, into thought.
SHARPE
Yes, we always want to say “that’s it, now I understand.” But we can never understand anything fully because life is always in motion.
COCHRAN
There’s always this tendency to grasp. How hard it is to just be with experience, even after years of practice.
SHARPE
As you say that, can you feel the fear?
COCHRAN
Yes, definitely. Recently, I’ve been trying to stay present with fear. Sometimes, I say a phrase from the Metta (or Lovingkindness) practice: “May I be safe and protected from danger.” I say it without expectation, just casting this light net of open-hearted expectation and kind awareness over this negative emotion, this contracted state. Usually, it softens and dissolves.
SHARPE
You raise an important point. The quality of mind and heart (and they are not really separate) that you bring to this moment is important in addition to being with things as they are. The ability to bring a heart and mind of true well-wishing, compassion, joy, and equanimity to the present moment, brings balance and makes it beautiful.
Paying close attention to the quality of the presence that we bring to the moment is important—especially in our culture, where we’re taught to never be satisfied with ourselves, that there is always more that we can do and be. Instead of generating aspiration, this can generate an inner critic and even self-hatred. A gentle attitude in mind and heart balances—again that word—the precision of presence. Without gentleness and tenderness, precision can become cutting and wounding.
COCHRAN
You can’t skip any steps, can you? You can’t just live in your head and ignore a wounded heart. At a certain point, you can’t carry on.
SHARPE
Have you heard of the Impostor Syndrome?
COCHRAN
No. Please tell me about it.
SHARPE
It’s a Harvard study that revealed that very successful and accomplished people are often unable to internalize the truth of their accomplishments. Many of them feel like impostors, that they aren’t as competent as the rest of the world thinks they are and they think that one day they will be found out. What is that about? I think it’s about intense self-criticism, the inner sense that we’re never good enough.
COCHRAN
There is another side to this. When someone is really present, everyone—and probably even animals—can sense it, even if they couldn’t say what they were sensing. On the other hand, someone can say all the right words yet their listeners—and sometimes the people themselves—can tell that what they’re saying isn’t based on lived experience. I can tell, at least sometimes, when I am not all there, when I’m out of balance.
SHARPE
I think we all can all tell. We lose our balance when we forget that it’s possible to simply respond genuinely from moment to moment.
COCHRAN
We don’t think it’s enough. We don’t trust just being present. We think that somehow we have to be armed with more, with a great idea or a story or some super-readiness.
SHARPE
And we think there is some outer measuring stick by which we should be judged or by which we can judge everything we do. We want to appear clever or intelligent or masterful—appear, appear, appear. The moment we slip into that we’ve lost authenticity, and authenticity is certainly part of what it means to be beautiful. We do know when we are being met authentically by another human being. We know when we’re meeting ourselves authentically.
COCHRAN
It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you look playing the game. The author Jay MacInerney made that phrase famous in the 80’s. It can feel like so radical, dropping that anxiety about appearances, treating oneself with compassion, loving acceptance.
SHARPE
We would never dream of treating another person the way we treat ourselves. We would consider it horrific. Yet when we think of compassion, we usually think of it in terms of the way we are externally, not internally. We’re cruel to ourselves and we lose balance—and beauty.
COCHRAN
As you talk I begin to see that there’s another order of beauty, if we only we could see it. There is a subtle process of giving and receiving that’s always taking place—a kind of unseen economy–or maybe ecology. Whether I see it or not, whether I am closed to it because of my own delusion and self-rejection or not, there is another kind of exchange going on in the world and another order of beauty. It’s always taking place, whether we choose to consciously participate or not.
SHARPE
This phrase, an unseen or invisible economy or ecology goes back to the first question that you asked me, about whether I had regrets about my life. People in our culture like to plan. But in reality, you do step one and the universe responds by offering up new conditions, and then you respond to the new conditions that arise—which have nothing to do with what you knew about when you planned your steps—and then the universe responds again. This understanding is hard to transmit. There is a whole unseen network of life, a net through which we can’t fall, and everything we do shakes this web. Denise Levertov wrote a beautiful poem called “Web.” It starts, “Intricate and untraceable, weaving and interweaving …” and ends, “all praise to the great web.” To see how the universe unfolds, that’s a beautiful life.
COCHRAN
We are usually oblivious.
SHARPE
Yes, we’re too busy wanting everything just the way we want it. We want the answers—as if we could freeze our understanding forever. How awful would that be? I also want to return to what you were saying about young women not feeling beautiful. In my own practice and life, I see all the ways I have excluded others, and qualities in myself, and so much in life through fear of what is conceived as unbeautiful. In however many years I have left, I want to be more inclusive—so there is nothing I have to turn my eyes away from because there is an idea, a definition in my mind or my conditioning that views it as unbeautiful. There is so much we don’t want to look at or feel or include in our experience. Wisdom comes from including it all. The state of mind that we’re calling beautiful is not possible if we’re busy excluding.
COCHRAN
To be open, I have to be inclusive. That also means keeping the focus very specific. In practice and in life, I need mindfulness, that wide open quality, and focus, concentration.
SHARPE
Unless we completely inhabit ourselves, it’s not possible to be completely present. If we’re not completely present, we’re not inclusive—and when we’re not inclusive, that’s when we exclude others who have different views, different opinions, different upbringings—difference. In presence, we see the beauty in what was previously unbeautiful—in difference and in alikeness. It’s all of life.
One night at New York Insight, a meditation center in downtown Manhattan, I taught meditation in the midst of a protest against injustice. I taught people to take their seats, spines straight, feet planted firmly on the ground, affirming their right to take up space in the world, all the while people in the streets below were chanting and shouting for justice. We sat still as more and more news and police helicopters showed up, hovering low like huge mechanical hawks, tracking the protesters who marched up Fifth Avenue from Union Square.
Whup, whup, whup, the predatory sound of the choppers was louder than the big bell that called us to mindfulness. I told my students that taking time to be still does not mean inaction. We must all do all we can to end injustice in all forms. Being still is learning to listen and see and sense inside as well as outside so that we can hear and see and act in a way that helps instead of merely reacting.
In the midst of the shouts and the sirens and (most loudly) the whupping of the overseer helicopters grew louder and louder, we sat. This is not because we didn’t care, but because we need to know how to care.
Mindfulness meditation is a way to remember our own deepest values—re-connecting us with sensations and feelings that get drowned out in all our thinking. and business. Sitting is a way to ground ourselves in a sense of the basic goodness of life, a way of remembering our own innate responsiveness or compassion.
“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees, wrote the poet Rilke. Faced by images of terrible armies conjured by the devil Mara, the Buddha reached down and touched the earth, rooting himself in the knowing that most children have: we belong to life. We are more alike than different.
Great change begins by going back to the beginning, forgetting what we thought we knew as adults, uncovering what is essential. Returning to where we started, we remember that there is a responsiveness in us that is as natural breathing. As children, we know how to take in impressions, understanding that imagination wasn’t just entertainment and distraction but a way of understanding what is happening. J.K . Rowling famously said that imagination “is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
In times when you don’t know what to do, times that call for action, first sit down, be still, remember.
It never stops being wondrous and strange. Your brain can be boiling, your heart breaking, your fate like being wrapped and locked in chains. And then you sit down, give up thinking and straining and striving, just being with the breath and the sensation of sitting there—and you discover who we were truly meant to be. Often, you do this as a last resort, when you don’t know what else to do, when you are too tired and heartsick at the way everything is going to do anything but sit quietly.
From the outside it can look as if we are just sitting there with eyes shut, as if we are zoning out, dropping out. But we’re actually dropping into life. It turns out that this body that can seem so limited and problematic, so subject to moods and illness and not looking good in clothes, can be our best friend in the whole world. It can be our anchor to the present moment, our living, breathing connection to life outside of our heads. It turns out that sitting down and breathing is a way to open up to the cosmos.
True, it takes a while for the dust to settle. You can be afraid to sit down and watch the breath and stop thinking because of all the suffering that you fear might be waiting to overtake you. This suffering can be small like a fear of restlessness or boredom—or big like a tidal wave of grief or a tribunal of judgments about all the good that was left undone and the harsh words and sloth and internet shopping that was done instead.
At first, the prospect of sitting down and being still can be like one of those movies where the hero is injected with a drug that induces her worst nightmares…until she realizes that her fears are just thoughts. As Mark Twain said, “Some of the worst things in my life never happened.” If you sit through this, hero that you were born to be, the fears and nagging or hectoring thoughts will evaporate like mist and you will bloom and come alive.
Yet when we first start to meditate (and for a long time) all you notice is how strong the pull is to not be here. The good news is that this tendency is not just your bad habit. Brain science reveals that when we are not turning towards present time experience we slip into the “default network” – a deep, comfortable groove made up of thoughts, images, memories from the past. We amble through this loop and apply material from the past to everything we meet. Weird but true: the desires that drive us are rooted in past thoughts, memories, impressions—and this is true not just of us but of our whole culture, including our greatest art.
In The Great Gatsby, by some accounts the great American novel, Jay Gatsby is driven his whole life by the dream of attaining Daisy, whom he first glimpsed as a young woman sitting on the porch of her beautiful house. He was young and poor and insecure and he was “overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”
Gatsby struggled his whole life to be someone who could walk up on that porch, “he did not know it was already behind him.” Fitzgerald portrayed a man dauntless and determined and optimistic –“ tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning….” But the great author knew that his Gatsby and all of us can never quite catch the objects of our desire because they are rooted in the past, impressions stored in the default network: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The good news is that we stop and sit down and return our attention to our old friend the body (never above the hot struggles of the poor). We can remember the breath. For moments at a time, we can wake up.
“Therefore, Ananda, Be Islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves. . . .” As he lay dying, the Buddha gave this advice to his beloved cousin and disciple Ananda. I thought of it as I stood in a security line in the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, just after a male security guard gestured for me to move to the line marked “Ladies.”
I knew there were different translations that encouraged people to be “lamps” or “lights” unto themselves. Yet somehow I failed to notice there were separate security lines for “Ladies” and “Gents.” I knew that both “island” and “lamp” were signified by the word dipa in Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, a Sanskrit-derived language that is probably close to what the Buddha spoke. But I didn’t actually speak Pali—or Hindi or Gujurati, the Sanskrit-derived languages spoken in this airport and in the northern Indian city of Ahmedabad, where I was headed.
I was an American woman travelling alone and it suddenly seemed clear that this was what I knew about India—bits of teachings of the Buddha, a bit of history about Gandhi, a few novels and films. Some this material was great, even sacred, but as I passed through a second round of security only to make the same mistake about “Ladies” and “Gents” it seemed to be nothing but a cloud of disembodied facts floating through my head like space junk.
The contrast between this kind of knowledge (a collection of facts and images and dreams) and real knowing, real embodied awareness, felt crucial. I had read the invitation to the Gandhi 3.0 retreat in my living room north of New York City, while sitting in a pool of lamp light, watching snow fill up the pines outside my window. In that snowbound hush, in a house as cocooned from the outside world as a ship at night, I felt sure that I should go. “You will not find these heroes on TV,” the invitation read, referring to the sixty businessmen, spiritual cultivators, social activists, and entrepreneurs who were to take part. “They don’t seek glory, nor do they wear any uniforms. Sometimes they do normal jobs but they are often doing the real work in subtle and invisible ways.”
I was being invited to be a secret agent of change by Nipun Mehta, founder of a community called ServiceSpace and leader of a gentle revolution of values called Gift Economy or “giftivism.” The Indian group hosting the retreat was Moved By Love, connected to Mehta and the California-based ServiceSpace, the way aspen trees can be outcroppings of the same interconnected root system.
I had dreamed of being in India since I was a little girl. I remembered climbing over the furniture of our brick ranch house in northern New York, pretending I was padding through a jungle in India, my black panther consort by my side. Were there black panthers in India? I had no idea. It was as if I had been practicing tracking something—practicing going towards something important. In the hugely self-centered, elaborately daydream-y yet completely innocent way that children have, I had sensed that I could be part of a greater life, a life that involved my whole body, not just my head in school. I had sensed that my small life might be capable of a nobility my parents didn’t suspect.
I typed “yes” to the invitation to the retreat almost as soon as I received it. The phrasing of the invitation touched my childhood sense that there was another way to live. Yet now here I was in the real India, exposed. Faced with the unknown, it seemed clear that my mind’s strong tendency was to seek the known, to plan and picture and think about familiar things rather than to engage in fresh seeing and experiencing. My wish to be here, to experience another, larger way to be in this world, was real. But it seemed such a small soft light inside, like a night light, easy to miss in the glare. It was real, just much weaker than the habit of fear.
Outside the airport in Ahmedabad, Neerad, a volunteer from the retreat, held up a sign with my name on it. He took my bag and ushered me to a car with a quiet dignity that contrasted with a sign that read “We Love You.” As we made our way through the streets of the city—through the indescribable in-rush of Indian traffic and colors and contrasts and cows—I realized how tense I had been, checking and re-checking for my passport and letter with contact information.
At every turn on the trip, people warned me to be careful, to be safe. In the car it dawned on me that help also kept appearing. “Just so you know,” said an Indian woman waiting to board the plane at JFK. “Indian people don’t have the same need for personal space. There will be crowding.” The young Indian woman sitting next to me offered travel tips. In New Delhi, another Indian woman bought me a bottle of water and offered me a mobile phone to call home, and her phone number just in case. I came to India braced for darkness. But in all my planning, I hadn’t anticipated the light. It dawned on me that those women and Neerad were islands, not self-sufficient as my conditioning led me to be, but refuges, offering a bit of shelter.
WE DROVE UP a long road to the retreat center that is part of the Environmental Sanitation Institute. This creation by Ishwar Patel, a beloved man who dedicated his life to bringing sanitation and dignity to the people of India, especially women, is an oasis, a beautiful gated compound with gardens and a pond ringed by palm trees. A posse of smiling people holding smiley-face signs, including Nipun Mehta, met me at the gate. I was surrounded, hugged, sung to. Weeks later, I was told had I looked so ashen with shock that they had decided to tone down the greeting. It had stung like a blast of heat after great cold, and I couldn’t help wondering if it had been sincere.
After accepting the invitation to the retreat, I had received the beguiling response, “Great! We’ll be here to welcome you home.” Over the next few weeks, I learned that this practice of welcoming home (as if they knew about my childhood jungle-girl fantasy games), this giving without restraint or expectation of return, was an aim of the retreat and of Moved By Love. The greeting party at the gate was made up of volunteers from all over India and California, people who had come to practice service, to weave a net of maitrî or lovingkindness, to carry the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi into a new age.
Gandhi’s room at the Sevagram Ashram
I was given dinner and shown to a dorm-like compound and a room that featured narrow little beds with hand-sewn coverings and a single blanket. There were slatted wooden blinds without glass in the windows, a simple bathroom with a bucket and pitcher for a shower. The austerity created a feeling of elegant simplicity, peace, order, of living without wasting, of being mindful of the many without clean water.
Like everything else in the retreat center, my room was simple but beautiful, showing signs of great care, immediately exposing my sprawling American style, suitcase top flipped open, possessions taken out and arranged rather than folded and stowed, taking up space.
Told I would be alone for a few nights, I felt a wave of relief. I wanted to bolt the door, to be alone, to think about all I had been through—all of this in such stark contrast to the river of hospitality I was carried in on, to the little hand-made gifts and offerings on the bed and tables, to the paper flower saying “Be the Change” on the mirror in the bathroom. It was never so clear how much of my life, including my spiritual life, involved isolation— stepping out yes, but always retreating, seeking privacy, locked doors.
I went to sleep to sounds of the music from a riotous Indian wedding blasting over scratchy speakers in a park somewhere, and awoke to the sound of chanted prayers and bells and dogs barking, to the smell of spice and woodsmoke, strange new bird cries, new light.
From the depths of my body, a strange, barely verbal insight dawned, that I had come all this way because we are meant to live in our bodies, not just in our minds. We are meant to give ourselves to life, to take in impressions and receive energies too fine for words. Briefly, it was clear that a single choice exists, moment after moment. We can turn away from life, or be open to receive. I vowed to try to be open.
Yet after my first bucket shower and a strong cup of chai, my head was back to wondering what the heart and aim of this big diffuse movement or organization really were. In the dining hall at breakfast, I confessed this to Guri Mehta, the wife of Nipun, who suggested I try just feeling with my heart instead of thinking. Guri said this with a California warmth and friendly intimacy that made me trust what she said.
After Guri left, I was invited to sit at a table with a smiling man dressed in immaculate white. I was told he was born and raised on the Gandhi Ashram. From his equanimity and quiet presence, I assumed he was a kind of monk, a modern satyagrahi, a renunciate love warrior, dedicated to Truth. Deep in conversation with a group of young men who listened to him closely, like acolytes, he looked at me kindly and said in Hindi (which was translated for me), “Only things that can open can blossom.” I knew this was a conclusion to a long exchange, but it felt uncanny, as if he knew about my waking insight and fleeting vow about opening.
Later I would learn that he was Jayesh Patel, the son of Ishwar Patel, the founder of the Sanitation Institute and the retreat center, and my host. In the coming weeks, I learned that Jayeshbhai (bhai means brother in Hindi and Gujurati, the local language of the district of Gujurat) is incredibly engaged. The founder of Manav Sadhna, an organization that works with ten thousand children, he is the managing trustee of the Sabarmati (Gandhi) Ashram, and the president of the Gujurat Harijan Sevak Sangh, a vast organization founded by Gandhi.
But I experienced him the way a child might, just noticing that his eyes were kind and didn’t look away. He gave his attention in a way that few people ever do, without distraction or calculation. It was a warm embrace of a gaze, a granting of unconditional acceptance. Strangest and rarest of all, there was the feeling that all of this giving was effortless, that we were all on the same level and this love was like sunlight, as much mine as his.
“When we see our role in society as servants, we will light up the sky together like countless stars on a dark night,” read a young woman named Kushmita in the opening circle, quoting Vinoba Bhave, a scholar and close spiritual friend and associate of Gandhi. He is little known today in the West but he is revered in India, not just for his participation in the Indian Independence Movement or his many books on the world’s great religious traditions but for the Bhoodan or Land Gift Movement. Vinoba spent years walking across India on foot, surrounded by friends and followers, persuading land owners to donate a portion of their holdings to the landless. In this extraordinary effort, walking from village to village, talking face to face, Vinoba showed what could follow Gandhi.
“Don’t think of society as the sky on a full moon night. The moon’s harsh light blinds us to the true and humble work of the stars,” he taught. “But on a moonless night, the true servants shine forth, as though they are connected invisibly in this vast and infinite cosmos.”
The intention of the retreat was to explore modern manifestations of Gandhi’s values, but the roots went deep into the past, in Vinoba’s famous walk and long before. The mostly young participants understood that real change must start with inner transformation, that we must be the change we wish to see in the world. It was accepted that real change today cannot be top down, focussed on great leaders or established institutions. It must be “many-to-many,” flowing from small acts of kindness, building on existing relationships and resources, emergent, not forcing pre-determined results. This is the principle–the seeing–that allowed Gandhi to lead India to freedom from the British Empire. Slowly and carefully, this group at the Gandhi Ashram intended to weave a net of maitrî to transform their world.
Lacking Hindi or much else in the way of real knowledge, I had no choice but to keep on observing and living like a child, being cared for, helpless to do much more than be present in the body in the most basic way. At every turn, I was met by small acts of kindness and generosity. I hadn’t brought a towel, and a folded towel appeared on the end of my bed. I lamented that I didn’t have the right clothes, only purple sneakers and Western items, and sandals appeared and a loose, cotton shirt or kurti.
MUCH THAT WAS VALUABLE was said and done during the retreat, but for me it was a teaching in surrender, in receiving gifts as they came, and life as it came. In conditions that gave me almost no control and no opportunity to give back, I had no choice but to receive, and to see that receiving is not separate from giving.
On the anniversary of Gandhi’s death, the whole retreat transferred to his Sabarmati Ashram in the suburbs of Ahmedabad. From this austere place, Gandhi led the Salt March, led the Independence Movement. I sat in Gandhi’s room, not normally open to the public, surrounded by his few possessions, his desk, walking stick, the iconic spinning wheel (or charkha), marveling at what was accomplished here.
The author at the Sevagram Ashram
Days later, some of us returned to the ashram for morning prayers, then went out into the slums to visit schools and a women’s center, to see how Gandhi’s work is being carried on today. Through it all, I watched Jayeshbhai. Often, he moved slowly or sat still, seeming to be empty of agenda or obvious care, yet meeting an endless stream of people, greeting everyone from slum kids to business leaders with the unwavering warmth and attention I experienced on the first day. I began to understand what Buddha meant by being an island. He meant to land, to come down out of the head and enter the body and the present moment, to be in a peaceful, grounded state, non-grasping and non-afraid.
Jayesh Patel
Jayeshbhai reminded me through a translator that Gandhi took his inspiration from the people in the villages he served. One day, a few of us were taken to visit a village where people live as most people have always lived, cooking over fires, working very hard for food and water, dependent on the help of oxen and camels and other animals, dependent on the help of God and of each other. I rode on an ox cart, had tea with a saintly village elder.
After many hours I began to feel weak from the heat and hunger and also from an uneasy sense of being a tourist, as if my Western, thought-filled self trapped me outside the experience, as if my mind was a pesky fly buzzing behind glass. Just then, a woman waved us over, inviting us to sit down and share the bread she was baking over a fire. It was a slow gesture, in the natural order of things, and it reached through the glass.
Give us this day our daily bread. I wondered why it had never dawned on me before that this seemingly ordinary thing, this basic experience of the body, was also an act of faith. It struck me that the people I met in India, Ivy-League educated volunteers and Fulbright scholars and villagers alike, lived as if God were watching, as if everything mattered, and as if their smallest actions were a way of expressing their faith in this Truth.
It touched me to remember that this understanding is in the Western tradition also. In THE COMPLETE MYSTICALWORKS OFMEISTER ECKHART, it is explained that one of the last things the great German mystic said to his students was: “I will give you a rule, which is the keystone of all that I have ever said, which comprises all truth that can be spoken of or lived. It often happens that what seems trivial to us is greater in God’s sight than what looms large in our eyes. Therefore we should accept all things equally from God….”
In the days to come, I travelled more, flying to the heart of India, to stay briefly at an ashram established by Vinoba in Maharastra for the spiritual development of women, rare in India, and also at Gandhi’s Sevagram Ashram. I kept on travelling as a child would, clueless about where I was going, handed a ticket to “Spice Jet” to Nagpur, driven in a car arranged by Jayeshbhai, stopping to walk out into a field of organic cotton to watch the sunset, then stopping again for chai and to visit one of the countless temples we passed in the dark.
Preparing breakfast at the Vinoba Ashram
Along the way, Nipun told me that a Buddhist monk he knows said that probably every inch of India has witnessed a prayer or a bow. Before the New York editor in me could say that I doubted every inch, I realized that in my case this was literally true. Every inch of my trip, I had been carried on a kind of collective prayer, a collective intention to manifest maitrî.
At the Vinoba Ashram, we joined nuns for evening prayers among relics fifteen-hundred years old. Conditions were very austere—my bed was basically a board. Yet there was a feeling of extraordinary safety. As elsewhere, there was very little privacy or private property, but people were eager to share food and prayer and stories.
Everyone was expected to share in the work. In pre-dawn darkness, I slowly chopped vegetables. After the sun rose, I helped harvest turmeric. I was handed big roots to break apart, the easy work, just so I could play a part. At times, I felt as if a door in my heart was beginning to open. I saw that what mattered wasn’t my rather shaky outer performance. The crucial point was opening to receive life and learning to become a vehicle for an energy or light of truth, just as I was.
As we dug turmeric, a nun with an incredible face approached. It was the kind of face that makes you not fear getting old, a safe face, not wanting, not hiding. She told us that she was eighty-five years old. We learned that she had spent twelve years on a walking pilgrimage across India, inspired by her teacher Vinoba, who walked the length and breadth of India over twenty years, persuading wealthy landlords to give their landless neighbors a portion of their land. Ultimately more than four million acres of land were donated, one conversation at a time. The nun told us that while her body wasn’t as strong now, she received energy from us.
Nun in garden at Vinoba Ashram
THE NEXT DAY, we visited Gandhi’s Sevagram Ashram. Gandhi deliberately founded this “village for service” in the heart of India even though it was (and is) very out of the way. After the Salt March, he vowed not to return to Ahmedabad and not to leave the heart of the country until independence was achieved. The atmosphere in Sevagram was quiet and reverent. Signs ask for “Silence.” It was clear that something great happened here.
It also felt strangely modern. Electricity was generated by biofuel from the cows, the dish water funneled into the compost that helped grow the organic vegetables we ate for lunch. Sitting on the ground where Gandhi sat to think and write and serve, physically in touch with the radical simplicity of the conditions of his life, it was easy to see that he was a visionary. Once swaraj or self-rule for India was attained, he knew it was important to continue to evolve (he often said “my quest continues”). That goal was “sarvodaya: the advancement of all.” This meant sustainability–responsibility in every way. Gandhi knew there can be no peace unless we learn to live in a shared world.
After we left Sevagram, four of us headed to the airport in Nagpur: Nipun; Nimesh (or Nimo) Patel, a former rap star and Wharton school graduate who has created a service-based music venture called “Empty Hands Music”; Anne Veh, an artist and curator from California, and myself, all but Anne bound for Mumbai. We hit a massive traffic jam. After nearly an hour, we decided to walk it. “Prepare to be stared at,” said Nipun.
Off we went, two American women and two Indian men trudging down a highway against traffic, carrying luggage. Soon, a policeman stopped us and asked us what we thought we were doing, contributing a drop more disorder to this hopeless-seeming mess. Nipun explained with a smile that we
were late for our flight. He spoke in Hindi so I didn’t understand what was being said, but I saw that he spoke in such a way that the policeman started flagging down vehicles to find us a ride. A bus full of civil servants in uniform stopped and opened their doors, even insisting that Anne and I put down our bags and take seats up front.
As it unfolded, it felt like being in an Indian version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND. But as I sat smiling at a bus full of smiling people in uniform, all of them enjoying this unexpected adventure in generosity, this adventure that started by stopping and opening their doors to the unexpected, it struck me that I hadn’t down a rabbit hole so much as fallen into life, into the dense, complex, in-rushing life of India, life as it can feel without fear.
Gandhi 3.0 retreatants
“Nipun” means “master.” Watching the scene unfold in the traffic jam, I glimpsed a new (although I knew it was also ancient) kind of life mastery, a way of being unguarded and on intimate terms with life. I didn’t think this realization so much as feel the living, embodied truth behind things I had read and heard. I once heard Mozart’s music described as innocent, heedless of the world and heedless of shame. I thought of the Buddha walking through India, teaching people to be islands in the stream of life, to abide, “ardent, clearly knowing, mindful, free from desires and discontent in regard to the world.” I thought of Jayeshbhai, quoting his father Ishwar Patel, telling him to “Create heaven wherever you are.”
As I left to fly home to New York, Jayeshbhai, Nipun, Guri, and others came out to the gates of the retreat center to hug me goodbye. Jayeshbhai presented me with a beautiful scarf woven from organic cotton by women in the slum. “Tell them we are meant to live in a shared world,” he said.
The practice of mindfulness meditation is so simple: coming back to the sensation of being in the present moment, coming back to the breath, letting go of what carries us away. Why yoke the Noble Eight-fold Path to this wordless and elegant vehicle?
Well, you don’t have to. And yet…but still…it turns out that the steps of the path actually aren’t consecutive steps (although we talk about them step by step for simplicity’s sake). They are like the braided strands in a guide rope that can help lead us down into our life. It turns out that the present moment is a portal, not the final stop. It turns out you can find a different way to be in this world.
Last Sunday, we spoke about the strand in the guide rope that is called “Wise Intention.” There are experimental studies that show that many of our reactions occur before we are conscious of them, studies that indicate that free will does not exist. And yet there are new studies that indicate that conscious intentions in realms like mindful eating do make a difference. We can anticipate various possible reactions to a stimulus (say food at a party), and prepare the brain to react in a new way rather than the old automatic way.
This is where conscious intention becomes truly wise intention. Over time, we observe that we can’t instantly set out conscious intentions and voila, we are slimmer, fitter, more pleasant human beings. Change occurs (even in the realm of diet and exercise) as we learn to observe ourselves without judgment. We can observe the constant interplay between conscious intention and our actual reactions to external phenomena. With the support of the guide rope, we see ourselves as we really are—with an opening to how it would feel to be freer.
When we sit down and start meditating, we discover that most of the time we are lost in the past or thinking and dreaming about the possible future. When we remember to come back to the present moment, we come back to a more vibrant, receptive, embodied state of awareness. At moments, we can become so still and so open, that we can really sense and really hear, sensing the vibrations of sounds, of the energy in the people around us.
One night driving while I was driving home from our Tarrytown meditation group, I received a powerful teaching on this power of this vibrancy and the power of the guide rope. It was pouring rain. Almost home, my car hit a flooded patch of road and was overwhelmed by water. Water washed over the windshield and under the wheels. No visibility, no traction. I sat gripping the wheel, sensing my body, imagining what would come next. Visibility cleared, and I began to tell myself a story about the immediate past: Boy, that was close! What a night! This is what we do, make our experience manageable by making it into a self-story. And then the story was cut short because another great wave of water splashed up over the windshield, and then another wave, and then the tires lost traction. When visibility and traction returned, all was still inside. I sensed my body and sensed my breathing, waiting for what came next, clear that it was unknown.
Even as I type this, I can remember the clarity and stillness of that moment. The Buddha spoke of Wise Intention as three-fold: renunciation (or letting go), harmlessness, and good will. We don’t create or set such intentions so much as uncover them at times. That night on the road was one of those times. I discovered that I wanted to live—and not in a selfish way, although I am as automatically selfish as the next person. I wanted to be part of a greater whole.
Last Sunday, we discovered together that the intention to be harmless, to let go, to have good will, is actually a braver, more awake, and vibrant way to live. Wise Intention helps us break away from the same old self-story, literally opening us up to a new vibration. It gives us the courage to risk failure and be creative, to speak the truth when it matters, to let go of stuff and live in a simpler, more responsible way.
“In the gap between two thoughts, thought-free wakefulness manifests unceasingly.” –Milarepa
I arrived at meditation teacher Gina Sharpe’s house prepared to talk about what it means to live a beautiful life for the “Beauty” issue of Parabola. The bare facts of Sharpe’s life were promising. Born in Jamaica, Sharpe moved to New York when she was eleven. She excelled in school and in the world of work, studying philosophy at Barnard College, working in the office of the mayor of New York, in movie production (on the iconic 1970s movies Little Big Man, Paper Lion, and Alice’s Restaurant), and finally becoming a successful corporate lawyer. 
“When we see our role in society as servants, we will light up the sky together like countless stars on a dark night,” read a young woman named Kushmita in the opening circle, quoting Vinoba Bhave, a scholar and close spiritual friend and associate of Gandhi. He is little known today in the West but he is revered in India, not just for his participation in the Indian Independence Movement or his many books on the world’s great religious traditions but for the Bhoodan or Land Gift Movement. Vinoba spent years walking across India on foot, surrounded by friends and followers, persuading land owners to donate a portion of their holdings to the landless. In this extraordinary effort, walking from village to village, talking face to face, Vinoba showed what could follow Gandhi.
Tracy Cochran 