What Do SSRIs and Heady Zen Have in Common?

Legendary teacher, Adyashanti, calls it a day

Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth by J. M. W. Turner, 1842

Years ago, my friend lent me his copy of The End of Your World by Adyashanti. If you’re the type of person who can’t help but feel a little skepticism when you see a dude with the complexion of Archie Bunker rocking a Sanskrit name, I can relate.

Enter Adya, and one’s skepticism quickly quiets.

He is considered by many to be one of the greatest living spiritual teachers—for good reason. His words possess an undeniable clarity, his bearing an indefatigable calm. His whole vibe radiates the primordial peace (“adyashanti”) for which he has been renamed.

When I first discovered him, I dove obsessively into his talks. Scanning the contemporary spiritual landscape—self-proclaimed “soul-manifesters,” Buddhist brainiac brawlers, quantum back-crackers, a smorgasbord of folks in oversized hats—it feels like they’re mostly just trying to help us dream better in the Matrix.

Adya seeks to shake us awake. He wants you to get a direct, personal, and experiential understanding of spiritual truth rather than relying solely on intellectual or conceptual knowledge.

And what is such spiritual truth, according to Adya? That you already are what you are seeking. Enlightenment is not a future achievement but a present reality. All you need to do is stop resisting it. In this sense, Adya shares the essence of classic non-duality: the paradoxical idea that there is no fundamental separation between Self and the Universe. There are no subjects and objects, only the all-encompassing and dancing Void.

Anyways, years back, after binging myself on Adya’s teachings, I eventually needed to take a step back from him, as these things go with me. Over several years, I moved on to other sages and modalities, though some of his words continued to reverberate within me—such as “Whatever you think you are—that’s not it.”

Then, earlier this year, during our Natura Care retreat in Costa Rica, a participant recommended I listen to Adya’s audiobook, Spontaneous Awakening. This time, his words hit me and held me. I proceeded to devour everything by him I could find. How or why the sudden shift? Why was I now able to truly appreciate Adya’s message in a way I had previously only respected?

Well, I’ll do my best to write this next part with as little douchebaggery as possible. (A friend reminds me often of one of his favorite quotes from André Gide, a Nobel laureate in literature: “It is not possible for you to be sincere and at the same seem to be so.”) At the start of the year, I had a breakthrough in my meditation practice. It was not a Big Bang moment to permanent enlightenment like some describe, but it was something that seems to have produced a stark before-and-after state of mind. Rather than an isolated event, it’s probably more accurate to describe this as an ongoing and gradual acknowledgment of the truths I had been dancing around for a decade of devoted spiritual practice. I’ve now, at long last, started enjoying the fruits of my practice. Which is a mindfuck, because I’d been under the impression I already was.

To make sense of what I was experiencing, I went deep down the rabbit hole of what can be described as the “perennial non-dual teachings”—namely, that underneath the multiplicity of experience, there exists a singular, infinite, and undivided reality, whose essence is pure consciousness, the source from which all objects and individual selves appear to derive their independent existence. One giant honeypot, where everything is honey and bee.

Over the course of these past months, there’s been no one else I’ve looked to more than Adyshanti to help me see this clearly. Except of course the undying truths that Taylor Swifticus Maximus drops on the daily.

This is all an extremely long way of saying that when Adyashanti announced his sudden retirement from teaching a few weeks ago, I was moved to tears.

In his retirement announcement, Adya explains that he’s stepping back because he’s received a clear message of mind, body, and spirit that: “It is done.” While it’s obviously dope to be able to listen to your intuition in that manner, he also alludes to needing to step away from teaching due to suffering from intense PTSD caused by episodes of debilitating pain earlier in his career. While he does not explicitly say what caused this, I happen to know, not just because I’m dope, but because I’ve binged all his shit, including random interviews. Adya had a debilitating and rare condition in his bladder that brought him mind-splitting pain. Fifteen years later, after almost two decades of brutal pain, he discovered the cause of this condition—an allergic reaction to the aluminum in his deodorant.

With that deodorant in the dustbin, his condition was immediately resolved. Pretty neat. Yet the intense trauma from those years stayed with him and lingered as PTSD. In his retirement letter he describes:

“The effects of such a long and exhausting ordeal, however, have been significant on both my body and mind. While the core of consciousness (awareness) is forever free and untouched, the body-mind has its own reality as well. And this reality contains, in potential, all the body-mind’s strengths and vulnerabilities.”

But his farewell message goes further. In his retirement dharma talk, which you can download here, he reveals that, after years of considered support, he recently started taking SSRIs to help him cope with the anxiety from the PTSD. That is a startling revelation for a spiritual master. It’d be like Superman wearing a neck-brace. Just doesn’t compute.

In typical Adya fashion, he explains that he is only sharing this information for the sake of those who might benefit from the knowledge that he, too, is human. He delivers it with the crisp friendliness of a winter sunshine: to all those who’ve come to me, anxious that medication might stand in the way of uncovering your True Nature, let me make it crystal clear—it’s no hindrance. Your True Nature remains completely unobstructed.

Now, for those who might say, how can a guy who is supposedly enlightened need antidepressants? I will again encourage you to consume his teachings before jumping to conclusions. In the spiritual field, Adyashanti is considered by pretty much everyone—his contemporary teachers, students, probably Taylor—to be the real deal. He is quite literally enlightened. In case you thought that word was ever-just-a-metaphor, it isn’t—it is a reality a human can achieve. (Remarkably, and this is a fact, that human could also be you.)

Part of why this is fascinating to me is because Adya’s revelation (Enlightened Dude Takes Anti-Depressants) is a perfect embodiment of non-duality, which is paradoxical by nature. It also hits close to home, obviously, the drugs part more than the enlightenment part.

Big Pharma bent me over the barrel and had its way with me for nearly a decade. I still receive letters that tell me I’m eligible for lawsuits. My addiction spanned pretty much all illicit narcotics, but it was “above board” pharmaceuticals like OxyContin, Xanax, and Adderall that were the end of me. I underwent multiple rounds of Suboxone treatment, an opiate antagonist medication that provides a safe path for severe opiate users to gradually wean off their dependency. To label it a miracle drug wouldn’t be an overstatement—the data strongly supports the idea that Suboxone, in conjunction with medical treatment, is by far the most effective approach for aiding addicts in their recovery from opiates.

But isn’t it also interesting that, after a decade of abusing drugs and pills, my “salvation” lay in yet another pharmaceutical drug? In my early days of AA, once I had finally quit the drugs for good, I hid the fact that I was on “subs” from my community because a number of the men in the group, at that point, were unequivocal in their belief: if you’re still using Suboxone, you haven’t achieved sobriety yet. It is for this stigmatizing reason, among many others, that I have never identified as “sober”—and never will. It took me a year to finally wean off Suboxone without relying on any other substances. It was the hardest year of my life. 

As of today, around 300 million people globally depend on antidepressants—a staggering number. It’s a remarkable paradox of our modern age that, despite our technological prowess and innovation, mental health issues are at an all-time high. I believe it to be essential that we challenge the complex incentive structures in the pharmaceutical industry that keep us hooked on and off more pills to just be, or at least feel, “okay.” We find ourselves in a real-life game of pharmaceutical whack-a-mole, where we’re using quick-fix Band-Aids in the hope of stopping the gushing soul-wound, and frankly, that’s just not acceptable.

While I operate as a holistic and somatic practitioner today, dedicating a significant portion of time to “undoing” the damage of modern living, it’s also essential to acknowledge that a novel medication saved my life. In fact, in my early recovery, I had to use all sorts of medication, including anti-psychotics to sleep at night, as a bridge through dark days. There’s nothing “bad” about any of that, and I was fortunate to have an iconoclast doctor who was committed to helping me get off medication for good. In my work, whether through supporting individuals through Natura Care, an addiction and psychedelic nonprofit program, or in my private practice, I’ve seen many of them view SSRIs as a last-ditch option. And, in specific cases, for those who gather the courage to set aside social stigma and start taking meds, the outcomes can be truly life-transforming.

Even more interesting to consider from a paradoxically non-dual perspective: Adya’s bladder issue initially stemmed from the aluminum content in his deodorant. Aluminum is a toxin, and our underarms are one of the most porous parts of our bodies. Though for some, this subject is comparable to suggesting that tap water is unsafe for consumption, given the known presence of various chemicals, including pharmaceuticals, in the water supply. You either view this as far-fetched “red pill” conspiracy talk, or you may have valid concerns about the potentially toxic aspects of nearly every aspect of contemporary living.

However, the beauty in Adya’s final teaching is that, in true non-dual fashion, he proves that there need be no antagonism between seemingly opposing forces or objects:

“With such easy access to an endless array of spiritual teachings these days it is easy for our spirituality to become a head trip of abstractions… I have met just as many nondual fundamentalists as any other type of fundamentalist, and always with the same close-minded certainty and underlying fear that all fundamentalists share. A totally certain mind is a closed and protected mind; a mind that is essentially afraid of the immensity of the reality it claims to know. It is vital to understand that deep spiritual practice has a lot more to do with conceptual unknowing than knowing.”

In other words, heady Zen can hold hands with SSRIs. A desire for change can coexist with a desire to maintain. That’s an acceptable non-dual position in the fact that it acknowledges reality for what is—in its entirety—while still permitting equilibrium to be a preferred state. And there’s a paradox in that. What Adya seems to allow for, is the ability to be perfect as we are and a body in pain who needs some worldly help. He reminds us that we are all homo sapiens, and that awareness is fastened to the back of this animal.

If you’re new to Adya and want to dive into his work, I recommend reading these tips first. 🖤