Falling Into Grace – Adyashanti

Adyashanti asks us to let go of our struggles with life and open to the full promise of spiritual awakening: the end of delusion and the discovery of our essential being. After decades as a spiritual teacher, he has found that the simpler the teaching, the greater its power to change our lives. In Falling into Grace, Adyashanti shares what he considers fundamental insights that will “spark a revolution in the way we perceive life,” through a progressive inquiry exploring:

• The human dilemma — the concept of a separate self and the choice to stop believing the thoughts that perpetuate suffering
• “Taking the backward step” into the pure potential of the present moment
• Why spiritual awakening can be a disturbing process
• Intimacy and availability — feeling absolute union with every part of our experience
• True autonomy — the unique expression of our own sense of freedom

In the same way that we fall into the arms of a loved one or drop our heads on the pillow at night, we can surrender into the beauty and truth of who and what we really are. Falling into Grace is a book that gets to the core of why we suffer. It is Adyashanti’s invitation “to be taken by a moment of grace and fall into a sense of life when it is not separate from you, when life is actually an expression of something indefinable, mysterious, and immense.”

From the Editor’s Preface:

In the spring of 2009, I was talking on the phone with Adyashanti about potential ideas for a new book and audio series with Sounds True. I mentioned that I wanted to publish a book of his teachings that would be welcoming to people who are new to the spiritual path, a book that would have reach as well as depth. Adya (as students and friends call him) surprised me and said, “The more I teach, the more I discover that the fundamentals are the most important part of any teaching. I notice that when I talk in a very clear way about essential spiritual insights, people who are newcomers as well as people who have been on the path for decades derive tremendous benefit.”

This idea of a book on the “fundamentals of spiritual discovery” became the organizing principle for a series of talks given over five days in the fall of 2009, in Los Gatos, California. These talks were then transcribed and edited into Falling into Grace.