Silent Retreat Vol. 66

This 7-download set includes all of the Q&A sessions with Adyashanti and retreat attendees during the August 2018 Woldingham silent retreat in Surrey, U.K.

Please Note: The Talks and Guided Meditations from this retreat are available for purchase separately.

Q&A Session Topics Include:

• Grounding Disorientation 
• Deeply Investigating Doubt
• The Love within Sorrow
• Relinquishing the Illusion of Control 
• Redeeming Generations of Identity
• Applying Dharma to Everyday Life
• Facing the Existential Fear of Non-existence
• The Infinite Nature of Enlightenment
• How We Turn Away from Essence 
• Losing All Motivation in Life
• The Balance of Listening to Inner and Outer Teaching
• What Is the Deep Instinct for Enlightenment?
• Unpacking the Energy of Disconnection
• Dealing with Energetic Reactions during Meditation
• The Jewel in Unresolved Conflict
• Differentiation vs. Mergence
• Masculine & Feminine Forms of Emptiness
• The Conjoining of Opposites
• Working with the Mind’s Controller Voice
• Inquiry as a Full Life Engagement

Quotes from this Download Set:

“There’s almost always an element of truth in a really deluded mind state.  When you pluck the truth out of the delusion, the delusion lets go of you.”

“You can’t simply impose a spiritual teaching upon yourself and think that that’s going to do it. The teaching is there to help us listen, not to be a replacement for a deep connected way of being.”

“If we want to feel free, we have to grant the world its freedom to be. If freedom is only 'my' freedom, it’s not going to be very free.”

“All of spirituality is really letting go over and over of the ego-centric orientation.”

“Applied dharma is a challenge; it's taking the same kind of relinquishing that happens at retreat into practice, into activity. The challenge is can we still be in a surrendered, open, authentic space while we’re ‘doing’?”

“What would this next activity be if it was an expression of this quiet centered place? Sometimes just asking the question evokes a different kind of response.”

“What is it that is noticing fear arising within you? There's fear and then there's awareness of fear. Then you might notice ‘Oh, the awareness isn't itself afraid.’”  

“The nature of realization is infinite. There's no end.”

“You can use all of spirituality to hide from the truth. Even in the name of truth, it's very easy to do. It happens all the time.”

“Let it all go. Let the teaching go. Let yourself enter in the integrity and the authority of your own experience, and let your own experience guide itself and explore itself silently and quietly.”

“Realization realizes itself and discovers itself endlessly.”  

“The most important part of anything that arises into our experience is just have a willingness to show up for it when it’s there.”

“Spiritual opening that is fundamental is an opening beyond ego. It can feel like you are really vulnerable, but the ego is not there to get hurt. There is nothing there to get hurt. It won’t feel pleasant, but you won’t be psychologically injured because there is no ego in the center.”

“Self is a movement of consciousness turning back at itself, that is self-consciousness. Self at its most rudimentary form is that U-turn. As soon as this U-turn is made, there is some level of fixedness that comes into view.” 

“‘I don’t know’ is the doorway to the everything.”

“At some point, inquiry become just a curiosity about the direct experience of being. It becomes more of an open-ended attitude, a way that you move through the world, rather than trying to resolve a laundry list of questions.” 

“Those who seem to really live spiritual awakening are those people inevitably whose inner commitment is the love and devotion of what spirituality is. When that commitment is boundless, then there’s no separation between spirituality and life. Life is spirituality, or spirituality is life.”

“Contemplate whether the essence of retreat really has to end ever.”

Recorded at Woldingham School in Woldingham, Surrey, U.K. on August 11-18, 2018
© 2018 by Adyashanti. All rights reserved.