Adyashanti: What surrender really means and open to Love

"...trying to get it right and that's probably one of the greatest inhibitors of redemptive love being experienced within yourself ... It's something that you let happen. It's something where you have to let go of trying to make something happen. That's what surrender is...To surrender is to kind of realize your limitation, and to recognize something beyond your limited view is going to have to come into your consciousness, so something that you don't know, something you can't make happen, you can't understand, something will have to come into your consciousness to help you. That's what surrender really means..."

"...before your ego tries to become loving and tries to wear that old spiritual persona of trying to be a particular kind of person, it could even be a loving compassionate person, but far beyond before your mind tries to assume that persona, that new identity, something much more essential and fundamental needs to occur, which is to begin to open to and to receive, to allow that quality of love to reveal itself to you, and within you. Because this isn't about trying to be a particular kind of person, trying to conform ourselves to an idea or a model of a certain kind of virtuous being. All those ideas about the kind of person we think we want to be or need to be or should be, these just get in the way, do they not? They just cloud up space in our mind, in our consciousness, in our emotional life as we're trying to be something trying to present ourselves in some particular way. One of the most fundamental aspects of surrender is we surrender trying to be a particular way, trying to appear to be other than we actually are, to just start to be as we are. Strangely enough, when we can finally begin to be as we are, that's the transformative avenue. That's the transformative attitude, the stance, is to allow yourself to be as you are..."

~ Adyashanti
excerpted from "Redemptive Love: The Healing Power of Descending Grace" Online Course
------------------------------
SESSION 4 Topics: Being a Loving Presence in the World / The Transformative Attitude / Relating from Our Shared Presence / The Happiness That Comes from Contributing / Ego's Engagement Strategies / Love's Engagement Strategies / Moment-to-Moment Honesty / Redemptive Love Takes Courage / Being Free of Freedom States / Operating from Love vs. Ego Patterns / Caller 1: Bringing Redemptive Love to Inner Contraction / Caller 2: The Love That You Are / Caller 3: Agape vs. Redemptive Love / Caller 4: Enlightenment in the Small Moments
-----------------------------
About the course:
“Redemptive love is the means through which we embody and express the transcendent wisdom of spiritual awakening.” ~ Adyashanti

What is it to fully pour ourselves into life as an act of love? What is it to fully receive this love that redeems all confusion and heals all wounds? In this five-part audio course, Adyashanti leads a transformational journey into the depths of redemptive love and grace -- that innate quality of freedom that opens us to the fullness of incarnate existence. While transcendent wisdom is realized by dropping one's attachment to body and mind, it is redemptive love that opens our hearts in an honest and intimate way to the hidden love flowing through all of creation.

This study course includes a series of talks and dialogues, weekly exercises, and a 58-page study guide (printable PDF) with written Q&A between Adyashanti and the original course participants.
------------------------------
Adyashanti, author of The Direct Way, Sacred Inquiry, Emptiness Dancing, 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.

Adyashanti (whose name means “primordial peace”) is an American-born spiritual teacher. Asked to teach in 1996 by his Zen teacher of 14 years, Adyashanti offers teachings that are free of any tradition or ideology. "The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine, but is open to all and found within all."

Free teaching materials, including videos, audios, articles, and free PDF of The Way of Liberation:

---------------------------