Many individuals enquire about having a teacher on one’s spiritual path. Well, what’s a spiritual teacher? What might this relationship appear to be? Will it be the best option for you?
Many people have asked me my estimation on having a teacher on a spiritual path. Like everything else in life, there are only points of view as to whether this choice is the better one for you. All I can perform is reflect my personal experience regarding having a teacher and what Personally i think the benefits and problems are of doing this sort of relationship.
First and foremost, a teacher is someone who has been down the same road that you are traveling – albeit at the very least a few miles ahead of you a course in miracles podcast. They understand the pitfalls and the roadblocks, and can assist you for making your path easier and less painful. They are able to comfort you with the information that numerous people have walked this road before and survived, regardless of how difficult the path may appear to you in the moment.
Second, a teacher can reflect things to you that you would never see in yourself – at the very least not without lots of self-honesty, that is hard to find when we are first on our spiritual path. Denial is most often our companion and we avoid what we fear is painful, even though we’re doing it subconsciously. The idea is that the teacher has more awareness and can predict the mental and egoic strategies that we eagerly justify and defend.
Third, a teacher creates a safe and supportive environment to permit us to open our hearts and minds in, giving us the chance to explore areas of ourselves we would normally avoid. A good teacher won’t use anything we have shared against us or even to hurt us, and especially won’t manipulate us with this information. This is simply not unlike the connection we have with this doctor – what’s discussed in the treatment room stays in the treatment room.
The dangers of this type of relationship are located when a teacher hasn’t totally cleaned their ego-mind and really has the tendency to want to utilize people and situations because of their personal benefit. The flip side of this issue is that numerous times the student doesn’t understand the teacher’s perspective because they can only see from their limited point of view. They then judge the teacher, not totally understanding their intent or the bigger picture. In these moments it helps you to talk with other students who’ve been in the future before for clarity – one way or another. The purpose of your spiritual path is to increase your individual power, self-love and self-worth, not to offer it away to others.
Other dangers involve becoming mounted on a teacher feeling when these were to make you that you would never achieve enlightenment. This is yet another appearance of “I am bad enough” manifesting itself in another guise. There’s an old Chinese proverb that says: Teachers open the entranceway, but you must enter by yourself. A teacher can be a mirror for you, they can reveal many hidden areas of the mind, and they can explain many of one’s habit behaviors which are causing you pain in your life. But in the long run they cannot do anything for you. You must get it done for yourself. Anybody who promises otherwise is a danger to you.
For me personally, having a teacher has been an unbelievable blessing in my own life. He taught me what unconditional love was through action – not through words. He reflected in my experience the love and blessing that I am, revealing the lies that I am not. He gave me words of support when the path was dark and encouraged me when I believed I would not make it. He was brutally honest with me, since there was benefit or investment in lying to me. He lent me his eyes to see the entire world through so that I could experience that life may be heaven on earth. And most of all, he loved me just the way I was, with all my bad habits until I finally could express the light that I am.