Dear Adya,
One day about 15 years ago, around the age of 24, I was on my computer at work, taking a break and surfing around on Alanis Morissette’s website, of whom I’d been a huge fan for many years. Up in the corner of her home page was a quote from someone I’d never heard of before named Adyashanti. The quote read, “Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing.” This quote stirred something deep in me, and so I looked you up. I could tell pretty quickly like, “oh, this guy’s been aaaaaalll the way down the rabbit hole…” and to be honest, your teachings both unsettled me, and drew me in quite strongly at the same time.
About a year and half or so prior to finding your teachings I had experienced some kind of awakening, or “shift in perception,” while reading the book “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. I went through a few weeks of feeling kind of blissed-out, mixed with some confusion/disorientation and an undeniable knowing that I had just barely scratched the surface of something much more immense than I could possibly fathom. I remember a moment in my car when a prayer arose from deep within me, “Teach me, I’m ready for my lessons, please give me what I need to learn what this is.” I knew at the time that I was inviting in difficulty, but I felt truly ready to receive it.
I was also experiencing occasional unsettling surges of energy in my body, along with a very disorienting and anxious feeling regarding my identity. “If I’m not my thoughts, who am I?” Deep fears began to arise during this time and before I knew it, I was fully immersed in a completely debilitating anxiety disorder. Forget spirituality…I thought my life was over. I dropped out of school, lost 15 pounds due to no appetite from deep depression, and was consumed every moment of my waking hours with intrusive fears and thoughts surrounding my identity, unable to hold appropriate spiritual/psychological boundaries between myself and things around me or things I heard about in the news. Clinically this was diagnosed as intrusive thoughts and OCD. I started seeing a therapist who thankfully treated me very holistically, with medication, cognitive behavior therapy, anxiety education, and instructions to begin a yoga practice and a meditation practice.
I fell in love with Ashtanga yoga, and Jon Kabat-Zinn and his guided meditations became a very subtle, but crucial, lifeline for me. Once I was well enough to see it, I started to think…hmmm…perhaps this is the lesson I asked for….but it would still be years before I actually owned that and believed it and knew it to be true.
My anxiety disorder and intrusive thoughts have been the darkest, most difficult challenge of my life by a long shot, and also, my greatest teacher. This great challenge forced me to see the nature of mind. The choice was to see it and understand how it functions, or suffer immensely. Those are the options. Over the years, though I’m by and large “in remission” from this, it occasionally rears its head again and I am reminded: What you resist in the mind persists. Anything you put your attention on, you feed, and it grows. Whether it is positive or negative does not matter. Do not push away disturbing thoughts, or attach to peace and clarity…because attachment is still a pushing away of its polar and equal opposite. Allow everything to be. Give it space to arise and be, and yet, do not identify, do not engage. This has been the groundwork for me, in order to go deeper in my practice and recognition of True Nature.
When I happened upon your teachings, I was just barely coming out from one of the darkest periods of this debilitating anxiety, and still had much much more work to do. I also still had this nagging unsettled feeling about not really knowing who I am, not having a ground of identity that I trusted. It was then that I ordered your book “The End of Your World,” and it was an immense comfort. I had no one around me who was into any of this stuff and for a long time part of me thought maybe I was just making it all up in my head and it wasn’t really real. But that book offered such validation and incredibly valuable teachings. Another lifeline.
Not too long after that, in 2011, I attended my first in-person retreat with you at the Omega Center. I was still such a baby beginner and spent much of the retreat feeling confused and like I had no idea what I was doing. Meditation was often a real struggle for me. I’m surprised sometimes in hindsight that I even kept coming back to it when it was so difficult.
Shortly after that retreat in 2011 I unexpectedly got pregnant with my first child. It was a happy surprise for me and my husband, and baby #2 followed soon after baby #1. But because of motherhood, I was not able to return to retreat with you again until 2018.
During those years when my babies were little, I still consumed your teachings, read your books, took your online courses, and tried to meditate, though meditation often felt like a failure. During that time I started to feel in my heart that you were my teacher. I began calling you my teacher. I went through yoga teacher training and began doing my own teaching in the realm of yoga, meditation, and chanting practice (I am a singer and musician, which is a very strong aspect of my personal dharma). I started to build and connect with sangha - also an undeniable lifeline. At some point, meditation started to become easier, due to an experience I had while listening to one of your guided meditations. “Is stillness not here already?” you asked. I listened and sensed for it, and BAM, there it was. Whoa. It’s here already, all the time. The practice and experience of meditation started to transform for me after that.
In 2018 I sensed that it was time to retreat with you again. My babies were 4 and 6 years old, and I felt they were old enough for me to leave them for nine days. I drove up by myself from my home in Kentucky to the Omega Center in New York. This retreat with you was a total turning point for me on my own journey.
I had the great privilege of getting to speak to you for the first time on this retreat. It was day two, and I shot my hand up and you called on me. I proceeded to weep and try to condense my story to you in about 5 minutes or so. My burning and lingering question had to do with this question of identity (as it should, I suppose.) It had been about 10 years since my initial awakening experience, and yet I still had this unsettled feeling about not knowing who I was. You said that you sensed my awakening experience was not quite complete, that it didn’t go all the way through, because when it goes all the way though, you can feel who and what you are. You suggested that I lean into that feeling of not knowing who I was, that there wasn’t anything to fear. I remember you saying, “I mean look at me, I’m doing just fine!”
So for the remaining five days of the retreat, that became my inquiry. I asked the question “who am I” into the stillness, gently, but repeatedly, throughout my practice and my days, leaning into the unknown felt-sense of “I don’t know who I am.”. Much began to open for me. Energetically, emotionally, so much was stirring and moving through. And, actually, it re-triggered some of my intrusive thoughts and anxiety, which I have come to know can happen to me when I open a bit quickly. But, it was teaching me! Oh my how it was teaching me. My thoughts became so clear…the way I could observe their arising due to my resistance of them. I started to experience my attention like a light shining into the void of the pure potentiality of my mind. In one sense, all thoughts were actually there already, they just needed the light of attention to light them up. I could feel my presence energetically get contracted and sucked in by tending to a thought and then it would pop and release outward when the thought was released.
On about day 5 or 6 I was feeling a great deal of anxiety in the body/mind. I was feeling so bad I almost skipped the afternoon meditation sessions and thought about taking a nap instead. But something inside told me to go and sit. And so I did. And what occurred next was extraordinary and resulted in the dropping away of a great deal of seeking.
As I was sitting, I was tending to the silence that was “already here,” and was simultaneously experiencing an immense amount of dread and anxiety in the body/mind. But at some point, the experience of silence and stillness grew until it felt like it was viscerally surrounding my body. Not only was it surrounding my body but it was also that which contained the entire experience of having a body and being a body/mind/human. The body/mind was still experiencing sensations of intense dread, but the greater presence holding it all was a space of peaceful, blissful presence and well-being. And the thought occurred, “Nothing can get here, nothing can touch this.” What a revelation for me, what a gift, to experience intense dread coursing through my body, along with the experience of the True Nature that contains all of it, being completely unhurt by it.
From then on, meditation ceased being a seeking experience and simply became a practice of devotion. It simply became a tending to of the always and already silent, aware, heartfelt presence of True Nature, simply because of it’s love for itself. Simply because it wants to be conscious of itself and be with itself, awake to itself, through this human form.
And of course, the journey is ever unfolding. Every moment offers the next opportunity to embody further, with many many moments of forgetting and remembering and “getting hooked” and “unhooked” and getting more and more acquainted with the tools and practice and journey along the way. As Rupert Spira says, when the journey “to God” ends then the journey “in God” begins. (Of course we can’t actually arrive somewhere we never actually left, because it is what we are and have always been, but once the realization happens, then the journey “in God” begins). I’ve come to see that this journey “in God” is truly about continually turning truth over in my hands, looking at it from an endless number of angles, exploring the infinite ways this Truth can be recognized and embodied. And I love this journey so much. Truth loving truth, Love loving love, Bliss in Being.
I also retreated with you at the Omega Center in 2019. My plan was to retreat with you every year after that. But then covid came and there were no more in person retreats. And I will admit I’ve been very emotional about realizing that I will not have another chance to retreat with you in that way again; however, that sadness has led to an overwhelming, immense amount of gratitude that I was able to retreat with you when I did. Immense amount of gratitude that you have given so so so much of yourself to me, and to all of us, by way of your being and the teachings that have come through you. I really cannot communicate how much you and these teachings have changed my life, many many times. There was the time I was having trouble in my relationship and your chapter on “coming out of hiding” changed everything for me, as I sat with the inquiry “how does truth want to move?” Or the time you said in an online course to not wait until some huge enlightenment experience to start living from the depth of what you *do* know within yourself right now. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head and I started actually embodying what was most real and true for me, and everything started to open! Or your meditation on “allowing everything to be as it is” that I must have listened to 50 times. Or your teachings on the quietness of being, on tending to that with devotion - tending to what has already been given, what is always and already here. I could go on and on, teaching after teaching, insight after insight.
And now, I have experienced time and time again exactly as you say…that though you are stepping down from active teaching, you aren’t really going anywhere. I can feel your presence and your teachings as such a part of me, living in me. I feel like you are always with me. I have, in the past year or so, stepped into more active teaching myself, and many times in the past year I have listened to talks of yours and spilled into tears because I can feel that what you are saying is working and living in me and coming through in my own life and teaching in it’s own unique way. And honestly, Adya, you making the announcement to step down has made me step even more into my own two shoes, because it made me realize, that though I am not perfect, and though I am still very much a forgetting/remembering human being, often fumbling around the best I can……your presence, and these teachings, and my own experience of the heartfelt quiet of True Nature, are inside of me so deeply, whether you are “actively teaching” or not, and that has been very moving and important for me to realize.
Just listening to you talk now moves me to tears all the time, because I can now actually relate from experience to much of what you say. And it’s not anything grand or fancy…it’s actually the quietest, most intimate, most simple space of my being, simply becoming more conscious of itself, in the quietest of ways. The most sacred, most quiet aliveness. It’s nothing, and it is everything.
How can I thank you adequately, Adya? I do not believe it is possible. I will try anyways. Thank you forever, from the bottom of my heart. And thank you forever to Mukti as well, who also has, at times, provided me with incredible guidance. You are both angels on earth. I am beyond grateful that she will continue bringing forth these teachings through your lineage. I wish you both all of the health and happiness and well-being that is possible. As you said in your October 4 broadcast, this is not goodbye! We will continue to meet in this quiet space of our being that we all share. Endless gratitude, deepest bows, deepest love. Thank you thank you thank you.
Eternal Love and Blessings,
Emily Joan Smith
Louisville, KY