You sit down. The chair is ordinary, the room is quiet, and within a minute your shoulders have crept toward your ears and your jaw has set like a clamp on a hinge. Nothing is wrong. You have simply been holding on, and most of us never notice it until someone points it out. That small, almost invisible act of holding is the subject of a short excerpt from Adyashanti, drawn from a November 13, 2019 broadcast called "Meditative Self-Inquiry." In roughly six and a half minutes he makes a case that meditation is less about getting the mind to behave than about dropping the resistance we bring to whatever is already happening, and that this resistance lives as much in the body as in thought. The practice he describes starts with the physical, moves into the psychological, and asks the meditator to relax the grip on experience rather than fight it.
Adyashanti opens by describing meditation as an art more than a science, "the art of turning attention back to its source" (0:05). The difficulty, he says, is that the mind is often noisy at the start. Feelings arise, the body feels uncomfortable, and there is a restlessness that many people encounter as they first learn to sit. There is also, he notes, "some element of resistance inside actually to turning towards the source" (0:49). The meditator is not simply watching the mind; part of them is pushing against the very act of watching.
His instruction for working with this is to leave the content of experience alone. Thoughts, feelings and sensations are allowed to arise and pass away without being indulged and without being fought. He is precise about the distinction. Leaving something alone does not mean suppressing it, and he warns that real meditation is not repression, though he acknowledges that people often mistake one for the other. As he puts it in the excerpt, "Basically it means to just accept it as it is. Just drop your resistance to what is" (2:29).
The phrase that carries the most weight may be the qualifier that follows. Accepting what is, he says, "doesn't mean you have to like your experience or be happy that there's thoughts or whatever." The aim is not a pleasant inner state. It is the willingness to let everything be as it is, and that includes letting go of the search for a different experience, which he identifies as something that "keeps you in the surface domain of consciousness" (2:40 to 3:00 in the excerpt).
Many people who start meditating are surprised, even alarmed, that their thinking seems to intensify once they try to be still. Adyashanti treats this as predictable rather than as failure. When attention is pulled back from the stream of experience, it is being asked to leave the familiar territory it knows best. The mind responds by generating more material, "more thoughts will proliferate for a while" (1:05), because thinking is how attention usually stays anchored to the known. The increase in noise is a sign that the turning-back has begun, not that it has gone wrong.
He also points to a subtle trap in the way we relate to thoughts. A thought, he says, does not need to resist another thought, and "only a thought has an idea that it needs to resist a thought" (1:46). The attempt to beat down a mental chatter is itself more mental chatter. Once you see that, the instruction to leave thoughts alone becomes less a rule and more a relief. You do not have to win an argument with your own mind in order to sit.
Adyashanti is candid that this takes practice. What most of us have practiced, he says, is being "completely absorbed in the content of experience," and he names the endless internal narration, the way "the mind is always talking to itself about nearly everything," along with the images it produces. Undoing that habit is gradual. Attention has to learn, over time, to let go of the content it has been clinging to.
This is where the excerpt turns distinctly somatic. Adyashanti recommends beginning with body relaxation, and he describes it in concrete terms: sit down, take a moment, and start with the most obvious level, the physical feeling of the body. Then release the tension you find there.
"It's often surprising how much unnecessary tension your body is holding, even when you're sitting in a chair. There's something about noticing the tension and not resisting it, just relaxing around it—then the body can start to relax." (Adyashanti, excerpt from the November 13, 2019 broadcast "Meditative Self-Inquiry," around 4:37)
The word "unnecessary" matters. Adyashanti is not asking you to engineer a posture or force a state. He is pointing to tension that is not doing any work at all, held in the shoulders, the belly, the face, and the way we unconsciously brace before we even begin. The method is the same as with thoughts: notice the tension, do not resist it, relax around it. Because the tension is not being fought, it tends to loosen on its own, and the attention that was lodged in the body can then relax too.
There is a reason this approach is practical rather than merely pleasant. The body is always here. It is the most immediate form of experience, and it offers a place to rest attention that does not require solving anything. A meditator who is stuck in a loop of thinking can often find a way out by simply feeling the weight of the body in the chair, which gives attention a concrete object that is not the story.
The second layer Adyashanti describes is less obvious. Beyond physical tension there is what he calls "a more subtle kind of tension," one that runs through the whole psychology: the mind struggling with itself, sometimes overtly and sometimes very subtly, judging itself or tracking whatever the current moment's narrative happens to be (5:07).
His claim here is the most interesting one in the excerpt. The narrative in the mind, he says, "is not disconnected in any way to your body." When you are caught up in the inner story, there is always an accompanying tension throughout the whole body-mind (5:41). Thinking and bodily holding are not two separate phenomena that happen to coincide. They are the same contraction seen from two sides. A worried thought has a clench that goes with it; an argument with oneself has a set jaw.
That connection gives the practice its logic. If the story and the body are linked, then loosening your grip on the story will tend to release tension in the body, and releasing physical tension will make it easier to loosen the story. Adyashanti describes this as the way "as you begin to relax your grasp on the inner narrative, you'll also feel a kind of more subtle tension relaxing" (6:05). The two moves reinforce each other.
The most common misreading of this teaching would be to treat relaxation as a kind of tuning-out, a way of sedating the mind so that it stops producing unwanted material. Adyashanti is careful to rule this out. Real meditation, in his account, is not suppression. Repression pushes experience down, and that pushing is itself a form of resistance, which is exactly what he is asking the meditator to set down.
In practice, that means you let the thought, feeling or sensation be present without feeding it and without trying to banish it. If a sensation is uncomfortable, you let it be uncomfortable. If a thought is judging you, you let the judgment be there and notice the body that goes with it. The release is not in the content changing. It is in the way you hold the content. "It's literally relaxing a sort of inner tension around experience," he says near the close of the excerpt (6:20).
Because the instruction is so simple, it is easy to hear it as effortless. Adyashanti himself says otherwise. For most people it "will require some practice," and the work is patient and repetitive. The gains tend to be small and cumulative: a shoulder that drops a little further each time, a thought that is noticed a half-second sooner, a moment in which the story is seen as a story.
If you want to try what Adyashanti describes, the excerpt suggests a simple place to begin. Sit in a chair, and before you do anything else, scan the body from the obvious places outward. Find the tension that is not doing any useful work. Rather than fixing it, notice it, let it be, and see whether the surrounding body begins to soften. Then, when the mind gets busy, which it will, check whether you are resisting the busyness. If you are, drop the resistance and let the thoughts arise and pass without joining them or pushing them away.
For the full context of the teaching, the complete talk is the best next step. This excerpt is drawn from a November 13, 2019 broadcast titled "Meditative Self-Inquiry," and Adyashanti's own channel notes that the full-length version of the talk is available through its YouTube membership. Reading or listening to the longer treatment will give you more of the surrounding material on self-inquiry, which this clip only touches on at its edges. Approach it the way the excerpt approaches meditation itself: patiently, without expecting a particular result, and with the same willingness to let what is be exactly as it is.
