How To Find The Right Spiritual Teacher/Mentor

This talk will go over what factors you can take into consideration in finding a spiritual mentor/teacher for yourself including examining the spiritual discipline's methodologies, the teacher's personality and more.

Transcript

Hey this is Ish and today I wanted to talk to you about how to find the right spiritual mentor for yourself.

So find the art of finding a mentor is a lost practice nowadays just because there's been a lot of scandals and certain lineages and abuses of power.

I'm sure you've heard of many different cases of that.

So people nowadays are very skeptical of finding a mentor to learn and study from but however if you do find the right mentor for yourself it can actually be an immense learning experience for yourself and your spiritual practice will really grow as a result.

So I encourage you to go out there and find the right mentor for yourself.

So when you're looking for a perfect mentor to study under you want to look at both on a macro level and a micro level of the particular style that you're studying from and then the teacher that you might potentially be learning with as well.

So you might notice that certain meditation styles or spiritual disciplines have different outlooks on things and certain views.

For example a power yoga lineage will have certain attitudes such as you know growth mindset really pushing yourself being very energetic as if you know you've gone to those classes you can see that in those teachers and the kind of body.

Body is a vibe in the room.

It's very results focused and asana based.

Meanwhile if you take a yidna yoga class it's more of an emphasis on the inner body so you'll find more teachings of the traditional Chinese medicine system,

More about chakras,

Joint health.

So that conversely will have a different approach.

Likewise the teachers themselves within those traditions tend to have different personality types that resonate with those teachings.

You might notice that power yoga teacher for example will be very energetic and upbeat and a yin yoga teacher will be tends to be a little bit more calm if that's their main practice that they fall under.

And obviously there's exceptions to rules and different variations but you want to look at it more of a you know macro level big picture what is the style that you're learning from and then the teachers themselves.

And I just want to tell you a little bit more about my background.

So I am currently a yoga teacher and when I had first started to learn about yoga I started taking a lot of power yoga classes.

I resonated with the whole you know push yourself and work hard and that kind of mentality.

I was 19 at the time I was you know lifting weights and doing power yoga and I was very much focused on the physical body.

And at the time I needed some guidance because you know I was kind of new and learning different things and I wanted to take on a yoga teaching training.

And my teacher that I had taken this teaching training under he was offering some introduction classes and I think at this point I actually haven't met him before so I was going to go to the introduction class and I ended up missing I ended up missing the almost 55 minutes of the one hour introduction session.

I was very responsible back then and you know coming from this background like I mentioned where I was very you know flexible and focused on my body I was kind of shocked that my teacher could barely touch his toes right here I was a flexible yogi but he had this certain energy and presence about him.

He was very peaceful and very calm and he just exuded this loving energy out to everyone.

I was kind of interested I was I was just thinking hey maybe I should learn from him but you know I ended up missing that class.

But what was great was after the introduction session that we we went outside and he was just I found him meditating by the hill this hill next to our our center and I went to go meditate with him and we actually didn't exchange any words I just sat with him while he meditated and we had this really great experience of you know meditating under this tree and afterwards I kind of just had this feeling I was like hey maybe I should learn from him and honestly it was the best experience and I learned so much because his style was the opposite of what I learned at the time and what I specifically liked about this teacher was he embodied the qualities that I wanted to learn in this particular style because at the time was very skeptical but he seemed to exude this energy of peace calm this loving energy that was unconditional and I really resonated with that and I knew that if I had practiced under him I could hopefully embody some of those qualities and that's something you want to look at at any any style or practice you want to look at the teachers because they exemplify what a practice will look like at its peak performance or at least at a high level if you're studying from you know an experienced teacher so for example um on my for my second teacher he was very much focused on you know the asanas and the physical style of the practice and he's also very you know aggressive and you know outspoken and I wanted to kind of get that energy because I was I kind of went the other way and I was very you know soft I need to work on things like setting boundaries you know third chakra energy so I started under him and I kind of got some of that too and then when I wanted to study zen I had no clue what zen was all about but I went to a zen monastery and I saw my next teacher who I studied under and I just noticed his energy was very peaceful very calm very you know undisturbed and that's something I really liked about this coming from a yoga background where it's all about chakras and energy and learning about you know flow and it's very expressive yoga tends to be very expressive and I found this new practice of zen very intriguing because it was stoic in a sense people are very calm very peaceful and I really liked the energy of of the zen teachers and my teacher in particular was very calm very open-minded just really relaxed and I wanted to get some of that energy and learn from him and get those qualities myself so I started practicing under him and that was all again very life changing so life changing in different ways and I really got to experience well you know what calm feels like how to practice in the zen you know setting and I learned you know very different things and that was really great for me to expand my practice and I would say that you want to learn from specific mentors and really understand and you know get to know their practice and then after you feel like that you're ready to move on then you can do so but don't do too quick where you're kind of just flitting from side to from one discipline to the next you want to basically understand what you need to learn from a specific practice and then you can move on or continue with the same teacher but you want to have that exposure at least some kind of immersion period with the teacher so with my first yoga teacher we had this practice for about nine months so it was intensive I saw him every month and I really had that time to immerse myself in that energy and then for the zen teacher we had you know a lot of retreats where I sat with them for you know 10 hours a day and just sat with him and learned from his energy and specific things as well so you know overall mentors you know are great because they can help you in every stage of your practice so if you're a beginner they'll always give you tips you know how to do that particular practice and then if you're in middle stages they can help you push past your ruts because in the middle stages you tend to stagnate or hit a lot of sticking points where you feel like you're not really growing your flat lining you're not getting those beginner gains anymore and if you're a little bit more advanced they'll give you those slight tweaks that can really help your practice and it's actually kind of cool and interesting because I was on youtube the other day and I was looking up zen monasteries and you know the practice is there and you see these expert monks who are just sitting like a rock for five hours and their teachers are just walking past the room and they can just see out of the corner of the eye that I couldn't notice that their student was dropping their shoulder a centimeter down or he wasn't focused and was able to give that feedback to him so at every stage a mentor can help you grow so that's something to keep in mind so just you know so just you know to wrap things up you want to look at the particular style of spiritual discipline that you want to practice and you'll notice that each practice has their own kind of perspective life views how different ethics different things that how they operate and then within that you want to look at the teacher so you'll think that hey if I followed this person's path and practices I might end up like him or her and that could be a good thing if they have really great qualities so if they have good qualities such as love and kindness and warmth or whatever you're looking for you can hope that if you practice the same way that they do and really take that in and absorb their energy and teachings you can then achieve those certain states and qualities from them so I hope this helps and hope that you find your mentor