Meditation Teachers
I didn’t realise the true power of meditation until I sat with truly enlightened teachers. I had read books, listened to guided meditations and had some guided meditation experiences with different people. Certainly I gained enough benefit to keep meditating and keep listening to recordings and reading books, but something hadn’t yet clicked for me. For me, like a lot of people I think meditation and mindfulness were helping me to have a better functioning ego, rather than really helping me awaken from ego.
My interest in spiritual matters however eventually led me to some very powerful teachers who because of their own awakening and were able to point out to me and others what they have realised. When they spoke about meditation and awakening, they spoke from their own direct experience. Their descriptions together with their presence that embodied what they were talking about touched that same essence in me.
Since our true nature is what is what is essentially true, it therefore cannot be manufactured. It can only be realised. And it is realised when all of our attempts to make ourselves enlightened, good, spiritual, perfect or whatever relax for long enough, that we can appreciate what is always there at the ground of our being.
How Important is a teacher?
A true spiritual teacher embodies absolute truth so fully that our egoic illusions and delusions become more agonizingly and/or ridiculously apparent, while showing us how true lasting freedom, peace and unconditional love are possible. A good teacher also helps guide you out of mental dead ends and distractions.
Meditation and mindfulness are how we practice trusting in the peaceful loving freedom of our essential Being, while observing how ridiculous it is to give our power away to the agonizing habits of our ego defences. Although I have had many amazing teachers that have helped me along my way I want to
especially express my gratitude to Adyashanti, Lama Ole Nydahl and Eli Jaxon-Bear.
Eli teaches the Enneagram and along with his wife Gangaji pass on the blessings he received from his teacher Papaji (student of Ramana Maharshi). I’m so grateful for him helping me see so clearly the futility of clinging to my spiritual ego, while helping me surrender to the diamond in my pocket of silent emptiness.
Lama Ole has been my guide on the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana path. The key message he passes on from his teacher the 16th Karmapa is that we are all Buddhas whether we know it or not. His embodiment and transmission of Mahamudra teachings and meditation helped strip away the mental constructs that obscured my perception of the deepest truth. His casual remark that I had the potential to be enlightened in this life helped me to deeply trust in my innate Buddha-nature.
Adyashanti , who was a Zen Buddhist who claims he woke up from Zen, helped me realise how simple what Eli and Lama Ole had awakened in me could be more fully realised and embodied more whole-heartedly in daily life. He also helped me realise the importance of all of us being our own authorities unto ourselves as we listen to our own wisdom, rather than taking the word of experts and teachers.
I would also like to acknowledge my friends, teachers and fellow psychologists Rick Hanson, PhD, Dan Brown, PhD, Stephen Gilligan, PhD and Richard Chambers, PhD for helping me realise how these timeless spiritual teaching could be integrated with modern psychology and psychotherapy.
