Adyashanti shares a discussion with Raghu about facing challenges along the spiritual path and finding a balance between effort and grace.
Adyashanti, author of The Way of Liberation, Falling into Grace, True Meditation, and The End of Your World, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence. Learn more at Adyashanti.org
Show Notes
Falling into Grace (Opening) – Adyashanti talks about his childhood and the realization that the adults around him were not making the best decisions in their lives. He shares the early years of his spiritual awakening and the journey to understand his experiences.
“My path was a little unusual, in the sense that in my late teens I was reading a book by Alan Watts on Zen and when I read the word enlightenment it was like a nuclear explosion had gone off in my mind and even in my body. I didn’t know why. What’s this enlightenment thing? Why did I just have such an overwhelming response to a mere word? It was so powerful that I somehow knew, even though I didn’t understand it, that I had just taken a fork in my life and that it was never going to be the same. ” – Adyashanti
The Line Between Effort and Grace (21:20) Like Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass, Adyashanti has embraced and incorporated both dual and non-dual traditions into his practice. He and Raghu talk about the role of grace in their lives and balancing the forces of effort and grace.
Listen to Melanie Moser’s conversation about navigating the journey of awakening with Adyashanit’s partner, Mukti, on Ep. 15 of the Shakti Hour Podcast
Getting Our Story Straight (29:00) – Raghu and Adyashanti discuss the egoic stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world. They talk about the difficulty of finding harmony between a healthy ego and our true nature.
“We are oriented by our culture and our family to establish a self. That’s fine, there is nothing wrong with that, in fact, the more whole and healthy that ego is the better. Yet we are not told about the ego’s profound limitations. We are not told that this thing we are creating is not actually you, it is more like a useful vehicle.” – Adyashanti
Waking Up Together (39:25) – An important part of our spiritual journey is finding a community where we are able, to be honest with ourselves and one another. Adyashanti talks about what it means to wake up together and find the strength to let go of our attachment to identity and preconception.
“This is where this paradoxical thing starts to happen where grace and our willingness start to merge, because we are not pushing for a result – we are actually looking into the nature of our immediate experience of being.” – Adyashanti
Love’s Fierce Embrace (51:35) – Raghu and Adyashanti close with a conversation about the relentless aspect of love that is fierce and gives us what we need, but often not in the way we would like it.
