A friend shared a beautiful teaching from Adyashanti, and it touched me deeply.

"She doesn't teach anymore. She stopped teaching a few months after she asked me to teach. She didn't know she was going to stop teaching. It just sort of....stopped.

About a year after she asked me to teach and she stopped teaching, quite a large tumor about the size of a golf ball was discovered behind her eye. about the size of a golf ball. And in the surgery to remove the tumor - you know those are very dicey surgeries - she lost some of the use of one side of her body for awhile, and it played havoc with her memory and some of her cognitive functions. It took her awhile to really recover from that - to where she could drive a car again and get around. And she still has problems with her memory. But I always tell her that her memory is about like mine, so there isn't much to complain about. She's been in this process of recovery for about eight years, and it has been a real teaching for me - to see how she dropped the role of teacher when she saw it was time to drop it. It has been a real teaching in humility. Here's someone who spent thirty years being a teacher - granted on a small scale, but nonetheless knowing that role - and now she comes into the office to label tapes because she still wants to serve the dharma. What an amazing example of what it means to truly not be caught in a role, or to be concerned with how you're viewed or looked at. To this day she still teaches me. She's teaching me by showing something I find very few people can do. She is someone who can actually drop her role and just do the next thing that's called for, whether it's known or unknown, hidden or obvious. It's been a real teaching for me."