Andamayi would shed profuse tears, laugh for hours, and talk at tremendous speed in a Sanskrit-like language. Other unusual actions included rolling in the dust and dancing for long periods whirling like a leaf in the wind.

She would also fast for long periods and at other times consume enough food for eight or nine people. Anandamayi was sensitive to environmental influences as was demonstrated when she once passed a Muslim tomb. She immediately began to recite portions of the Quran, and to perform the Namaj ritual (Muslim prayers).

These and other similar acts showed Anandamayi to be someone always moving through a wide variety of psychic and religious states, each one expressing itself through her. She often objectified her body by describing her actions in phases like "this body did this" or "this body went there". She believed her chaotic actions were expressions of the divine will.

She sometimes ascribed her actions to a personal though unnamed god: "I have no sense of pleasure or pain, and I stay as I have always been. Sometimes He draws me outside, and sometimes He takes me inside and I am completely withdrawn. I am nobody, all of my actions are done by him and not by me." --Gopinath Kaviraj, Sri Sri Ma Anandamayi: Upadesa O Prasnottara. Anandamayi considered individual identity to be a kind of spiritual disease.

She called it bhava roga, or the disease of feeling where every person looks at him or herself as a separate individual. When some of her disciples complained about the large crowds of people that would sometimes follow her, she responded, "As you do not feel the weight of your head, of hands, and of feet ... so do I feel that these persons are all organic members of this body; so I don't feel their pressure or find their worries weighing on me.

Their joys and sorrows, problems and their solutions, I feel to be vitally mine ... I have no ego sense nor conception of separateness." - Gopinath Kaviraj, ed., Mother as Seen by Her Devotees. Though she was never formally initiated by a guru, one evening she spontaneously performed her own initiation, visualizing both the ritual scene and movements. Simultaneously, she heard the chanting of initiatory sacred words (mantras) inwardly.

She explained that there were four stages in her spiritual evolution. In the first, the mind was "dried" of desire and passion so it could catch the fire of spiritual knowledge easily. Next the body became still and the mind was drawn inward, as religious emotion flowed in the heart like a stream. Thirdly, her personal identity was absorbed by an individual deity, but some distinction between form and formlessness still remained. Lastly, there was a melting away of all duality.

Here the mind was completely free from the movement of thought. There was also full consciousness even in what is normally characterized as the dream state. When Paramahansa Yogananda met Anandamayi Ma and asked her about her life, she answered: "Father, there is little to tell." She spread her graceful hands in a deprecatory gesture.

"My consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father, 'I was the same.' As a little girl, 'I was the same.' I grew into womanhood, but still 'I was the same.' When the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married, 'I was the same.' ... And, Father, in front of you now, 'I am the same.' Ever afterward, though the dance of creation change[s] around me in the hall of eternity, 'I shall be the same.'" - Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi Anandamayi was a holy woman without formal religious training or initiation whose status was based entirely on her ecstatic states.

She did not have an outer guru, though she did hear voices that told her what religious and meditative practices to perform. She emphasized the importance of detachment from the world and religious devotion. She also encouraged her devotees to serve others. She did much traveling and wandering, at times refusing to stay at the ashrams her devotees provided for her.