Adyashanti, born Steven Gray, is an American spiritual teacher and author from the San Francisco Bay Area, who offers talks, online courses and retreats in the US and abroad.
He is the founder of Open Gate Sangha, Inc., a nonprofit that supports his teachings. Gray studied Zen Buddhism under Arvis Joen Justi and experienced a series of transformative spiritual awakenings.
He later changed his name to Adyashanti, a Sanskrit term for “primordial peace” and began giving talks that focus on awakening and embodying it.
He emphasizes that the truth he points to is not confined to any religious belief system but is open and found within all.
Adyashanti has authored several books and produced audio and video recordings. He appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday in April 2014.
He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Mukti. Open Gate Sangha, founded by Adyashanti in 1996, refers to the organization and his student community.
It coordinates his teaching and travel schedule, produces material for publication and holds retreats, including a six-day silent meditation retreat.
I have collected the top quotes from Adyashanti.
Best Adyashanti Quotes
There is, quite literally, nothing to understand. ~ Adyashanti.
Take the armor off, so the arrow of the Truth can penetrate you. ~ Adyashanti.
Love moves without an agenda. It just moves because that is its nature to move. ~ Adyashanti.
This awake silence is available to anyone in this moment. ~ Adyashanti.
Space and stillness is the light that illuminates the beauty of our soul’s being. ~ Adyashanti.
The most challenging thing for the spiritual seeker to do is to stop struggling. ~ Adyashanti.
The paradox is that when resistance is fully accepted, the resistance disappears. ~ Adyashanti.
When we really start to take a look at who we think we are, we become very grace prone. ~ Adyashanti.
To be free of fear is to be full of Love. ~ Adyashanti.
True Meditation is the space in which everything gets revealed, everything gets seen, everything gets experienced. And as such, it lets go of itself. We don’t even let go. It lets go of itself. ~ Adyashanti.
The Way of Liberation is not a belief system; it is something to be put into practice. ~ Adyashanti.
Whenever you aren’t manipulating your experience, you’re meditating. As soon as you meditate because you think you should, you’re controlling your experience again, and you’ve squeezed all the value out of your meditation. ~ Adyashanti.
Often life is a frantic avoidance of the truth. ~ Adyashanti.
My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better. ~ Adyashanti.
Thoughts in your head are really no different than the sound of a bird outside. It is just that you decide that they are more or less relevant. ~ Adyashanti.
A meditative mind is at ease because it’s not trying to acquire anything. ~ Adyashanti.
Popular Adyashanti Quotes
Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. ~ Adyashanti.
Be a true representative of the goodness in your heart, and don’t expect it to be easy or even noticed. ~ Adyashanti.
There’s something more to life than what we see on the surface. ~ Adyashanti.
The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are. ~ Adyashanti.
A quiet mind married to integrity of heart is the birth of wisdom. ~ Adyashanti.
If you have any image of what the Truth is, slay it immediately because that’s not it. ~ Adyashanti.
There’s a great silence that is listening to the thoughts. ~ Adyashanti.
You must want to know the truth more than you want to feel secure in order to fully awaken to the fact that you are nothing but Awakeness itself. ~ Adyashanti.
Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself. ~ Adyashanti.
An ordinary man seeks freedom through enlightenment. An enlightened man expresses freedom through being ordinary. ~ Adyashanti.
Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality. Pay attention to what life is trying to reveal to you. Say yes to its fierce, ruthless, and loving grace. ~ Adyashanti.
Whatever you want, be it. If you want connection, it’s because you are connection. Be what you want, and then it happens all around you. If you want love, be it. You’ll have more love than you know what to do with. Whatever you are inside, you receive a thousandfold on the outside. ~ Adyashanti.
Stop all doing and be still. Let the fire of stillness burn everything and reveal That which is Openness. ~ Adyashanti.
Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs your help. Without your resistance misery cannot survive. ~ Adyashanti.
Freedom and love arise when you die into the unknown mystery of being. ~ Adyashanti.
The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief. ~ Adyashanti.
Top Adyashanti Quotes
True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience. ~ Adyashanti.
We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually. ~ Adyashanti.
You think that enlightenment is something other than what is happening right now. This is your primary mistake. ~ Adyashanti.
Faith is a withholding of conclusion so that you allow what is to arise. ~ Adyashanti.
Do not seek after what you yearn for, seek the source of the yearning itself. ~ Adyashanti.
You are the doorway to the infinite. ~ Adyashanti.
A total acceptance of yourself brings about a total transcendence of yourself. ~ Adyashanti.
Silence is the only teaching and the only teacher that is there all the time. ~ Adyashanti.
Love causes us to be deeply connected in an unspoken way. It happens when we’re really available, really open. ~ Adyashanti.
When the eternal and the human meet, that’s where love is born – not through escaping our humanity or trying to disappear into transcendence, but through finding that place where they come into union. ~ Adyashanti.
Gratitude is the appreciation of what is, of life, of existence, of anybody and anything, for just the way it is. ~ Adyashanti.
Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being. ~ Adyashanti.
The intricacies of spiritual philosophy and theologies are just a thought within Emptiness. ~ Adyashanti.
Famous Adyashanti Quotes
What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation. ~ Adyashanti.
Imagine trusting silence more than any thought you can come up with. ~ Adyashanti.
Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, the innocent state of consciousness, that state which is uncontaminated by the movement of thought, uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind. ~ Adyashanti.
We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them. ~ Adyashanti.
The silence inside of you is the sound of your knowledge collapsing. Remember, it is you who said, ‘I want to be free.’ ~ Adyashanti.
Wisdom without love is like having lungs but no air to breathe. Do not seek wisdom in order to acquire knowledge but in order to live and love more fully. ~ Adyashanti.
The process of finding the truth may not be a process by which we feel increasingly better and better. It may be a process by which we look at things honestly, sincerely, truthfully, and that may or may not be an easy thing to do. ~ Adyashanti.
When emptiness is still, that is eternity. When it moves, that is love. ~ Adyashanti.
In silence, a question has great power, because in silence a question will always lead you deeper into your experience. ~ Adyashanti.
Thoughts are just moving through consciousness. They have no power. Nothing has reality until you reach it, grab it, and somehow impregnate it with the power of belief. ~ Adyashanti.
Ultimate Adyashanti Quotes
No matter what identity we cling to, it takes great courage to step out of the old masks we wear and the old scripts that we live by, and open ourselves to the mysterious inner core of our being. ~ Adyashanti.
The true heart of all human beings is the lover of what is. ~ Adyashanti.
Take one step backward into the unknown. ~ Adyashanti.
Meditation is a dress rehearsal for death. ~ Adyashanti.
Refuse to disconnect from love and every relationship will be totally transformed; even the relationship with yourself. ~ Adyashanti.
Awakening to the truth is a deep realization of what you are as an experience. What is it that is listening? What is it that is feeling? Feel it. Sense it. Welcome it. ~ Adyashanti.
The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes. ~ Adyashanti.
What the universe will manifest when you are in alignment with it is a lot more interesting than what you try to manifest. ~ Adyashanti.
Fear is very often a part of the spiritual path. When people sit down and meditate it’s not at all uncommon for fear to arise at some point. ~ Adyashanti.
Suffering is how Life tells you that you are resisting or misperceiving what is real and true. It is the way Life suggests that you are not in harmony with what is. ~ Adyashanti.
If there is no grounding in silence, a spiritual question is going to lead you into your mind. ~ Adyashanti.
What will carry us into living freedom is not the holding of attention so much as the holding of appreciation. ~ Adyashanti.
Wise Adyashanti Quotes
Nothing appears to be something. The human experience is a sensory organ for the divine self. Through these eyes, the divine gets to see itself in form. ~ Adyashanti.
True intelligence does not derive from thought. True intelligence uses thought. ~ Adyashanti.
If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life. ~ Adyashanti.
You must choose between your attachments and happiness. ~ Adyashanti.
You can’t lose what you serve. That’s the secret. What you serve, you can’t lose. What you don’t serve and what you try to hold onto, you can’t hold onto. It’s always slipping out of your fingers. ~ Adyashanti.
The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that uncertainty and all wisdom will be yours. ~ Adyashanti.
Nothingness is an absolute infinite potential, not an empty box. ~ Adyashanti.
The goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. ~ Adyashanti.
The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda. ~ Adyashanti.
The biggest barrier to awakening is the belief that it is something rare. ~ Adyashanti.
My experience of fundamental Truth is that it’s a place of extraordinary intelligence. It’s a place from which great intelligence arises. I call it a place of absolute infinite potential. ~ Adyashanti.
The truth is you can’t try to let go. Trying is the opposite of letting go. To let go is to relinquish trying. To let go is much more like to let be. ~ Adyashanti.
Inspiring Adyashanti Quotes
Only when the pursuit ceases, is it possible to recognize what comprises you: pure being. ~ Adyashanti.
If we would only see that all limitations are self imposed and chosen out of fear, we would leap at once. ~ Adyashanti.
Reality is always true to itself. When you’re in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law. ~ Adyashanti.
The perspective of Love doesn’t leave anybody out. Until your vision and compassion is big enough to include those who oppose you, you are simply contributing to the continuation of destructiveness. The end of separation is the salvation for all. ~ Adyashanti.
Whatever you resist you become. ~ Adyashanti.
There is only consciousness. There is no individual apart from consciousness who is conscious. ~ Adyashanti.
In the end, it’s all very simple. Either we give ourselves to silence or we don’t. ~ Adyashanti.
When we start to suffer, it tells us something very valuable. It means that we are not seeing the truth, and we are not relating from the truth. It’s a beautiful pointer. It never fails. ~ Adyashanti.
Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. That’s the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart. ~ Adyashanti.
If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind’s clothing with more sooty knowledge. ~ Adyashanti.
Short Adyashanti Quotes
Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top of the highest stakes table. Place yourself as the bet. Look God in the eyes and finally, for once in your life, lose. ~ Adyashanti.
Now don’t think that awakening is the end. Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature. ~ Adyashanti.
The truth is that you already are what you are seeking. ~ Adyashanti.
All is always well even when it seems unbelievably unwell. ~ Adyashanti.
When you let go of the egoic self what you’re getting in exchange is the whole universe. ~ Adyashanti.
Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true. ~ Adyashanti.
At any moment, we are either giving humanity the gift of our clarity or our confusion. And that clarity or confusion is affecting the humanity around us, the world around us. It is manifesting. It is taking form. ~ Adyashanti.
Cessation of struggle is like free falling through space without a care in the world. ~ Adyashanti.
So these were 97 top Adyashanti quotes and sayings on love.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Jack Donovan quotes and John Donne quotes.
