Kelly Loves Adyashanti

Last week I attended my second five-day silent retreat with Adyashanti, a.k.a. the free-est human being I have ever met.

The freedom I'm talking about is freedom from ego attachment. The freedom to experience--and to be--naked awareness, unguarded and completely vulnerable to the universe.

If I learned one thing on this retreat, it's that I love Adya. I love him spontaneously, genuinely, and with a devotion I have never yet encountered.

But in truth it's not Adya that I love--though I have had some level of exposure to his personality and find him suitably charming, disarming, and real. It's actually the wind that blows through him, which mirrors the wind that blows through me. I somehow have a better sense of the Kelly version of this wind when he and I are in a room together--when I'm sitting in silence and feeling its warmth and energy; when I have the space to tenderly explore what it might mean to be instead of do all the time; when I'm not robotically chasing the unmet needs of my childhood.

(Not that I didn't do some Olympic-style unmet-need chasing while on retreat. Sheesh. In a sea of middle-aged seekers of enlightenment, leave it to me to find and fixate upon on the one hot Boulder dude. Let's just say that when Adya started talking about being a "junkie for validation," I had to wonder if he'd been reading my journal.)