ABC Guide to Finding Your Spiritual Teacher

In the esoteric and alternative world, there is a jungle of offerings and teachers. As a seeker, you may find it hard to get your bearings among everything on offer. Here you will find tips on how to find your way through this often bewildering terrain, how to analyze your needs, and how to find a suitable spiritual teacher who is right for you, while avoiding the biggest traps.

I write as a civil engineer and a pragmatist. Even though I have worked professionally as a spiritual teacher and mentor for many years, I rarely lose the academic’s perspective on things.

We live in a time when alternative medicine, holistic thinking, and healing are more or less accepted, and when these skills can be practiced without fear of being persecuted, tortured, and burned at the stake.

Since the 1990s, the range of offerings has exploded. In the 1990s, it was still hard to get hold of books on meditation, shamanism, healing, and the like. Today, a well-stocked bookstore has shelf after shelf of material on alternative medicine, and the internet holds endless amounts of information. A search for “healing” brings up millions of results.

On the one hand, it is a good thing that we have access to so much information and so many offerings. It means there is bound to be something out there for every one of us with an interest in the alternative.

A jungle of offerings

On the other hand, it is easy to get lost in such a vast and bewildering jungle, and easy to become confused. Most subjects have teachers and books with completely different views of what is right, and all of them claim to be conveying the truth. What should a seeker do who wants to learn more about what a chakra is, for example? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff among the offerings and the teachers?

The subject is a sensitive one, of course, but it is a big problem in the alternative industry that much of it is dubious. There are few if any mechanisms for checking how qualified a provider is, and anyone can claim to offer the truth, since it is nearly impossible for a layperson to expose charlatans.

Since 2004, several associations for alternative practitioners in Norway have been approved by the authorities. This is a good development. Members must meet certain criteria and have a certain level of competence, and that increases the likelihood that a seeker will find a reputable offering that fits. But you still cannot be completely sure of the quality of what you are offered.

Two types of development must be distinguished from each other. In esoteric development, you want to learn techniques and methods to develop your abilities, such as healing, channeling, and aura reading. The range of offerings is extensive, and little can go wrong in your choice of teacher.

Spiritual development means activities and personality development aimed at coming closer to your essence and your soul. The range on offer in the market is limited, and it is harder to find good, qualified offerings. The main focus from here on is how to find the right spiritual teacher for you.

Consciousness and self-responsibility

In the end, we ourselves are the ones who must bear the consequences of the choices we have made. An important concern in my practice is helping my clients and students become more conscious of their lives and their choices. With information and knowledge, our consciousness of a subject can be expanded. The aim is to help you toward greater consciousness in choosing a spiritual teacher.

Then it is up to you to take self-responsibility for your own life by acting from your expanded consciousness, where the motivation behind it is, hopefully, the qualities of the heart and not anxiety.

I am a believer in being able to find your own way in a market. Then you are not dependent on what others claim and believe, but can use your own common sense to make choices based on relevant consciousness and knowledge.

My own experience

Since 2004, I have been a professional teacher of shamanism, meditation, reiki, and other areas of alternative medicine and spiritual development. Over these years, I have met many students and clients in several countries who suffered from having been in contact with dubious spiritual teachers and healers. The consequences ranged from being misinformed to being brainwashed by cult leaders and no longer able to live a normal life.

To analyze whether what you have learned and done in spiritual development works, there is one main criterion: Has my life changed for the better in a practical and concrete way? Has my health improved? Have my relationship and family life improved? Do I enjoy my work more? Do I have more meaning in my life? Do I fundamentally feel more joy and happiness from day to day? Has my mental and emotional health improved? Do I have more genuinely good friends?

I often have clients who come to me as a “last” resort. Several have attended alternative courses and training programs in “spiritual development” for many years. The first thing I ask is: What has changed in practical terms in your life since you began your development? I am often met with incredulous eyes, and the look in them says more than a thousand words. It does little good to sit and “run energy” for several hours a day if you are not creating a better, more meaningful, and happier life for yourself.

In recent years, I have put together a simple approach that helps seekers analyze the offerings on the market in a constructive way. A condensed version of it follows below. In the esoteric market, there is a good selection of reputable and highly qualified spiritual teachers in most traditions. The art is finding them, and the best ones often do not shout the loudest.

It does little good to sit and “run energy” for several hours a day if you are not creating a better, more meaningful, and happier life for yourself.

Pål-Esben Wanvig

Analyze your needs

The first step is to analyze your needs. Take plenty of time for this, since the rest of your search depends on a good needs analysis. Some points you can take into account:

• What are your needs? Do you want an introduction to techniques and methods for developing your skills, or do you want a fundamental change in your life? In other words: do you want esoteric or spiritual development?
• If you have no idea what spirituality and spiritual development are, it may be wise to read a little about the different paths, such as meditation, shamanism, tantra, reiki, yoga, esoteric Hinduism, esoteric Buddhism, esoteric Taoism, Sufism, Wicca, Kabbalah, and more. What attracts you most? What do you think can fulfill your wishes and solve your problems or challenges in a practical way within a measurable period of time?
• What resources do you have available, such as time, money, and energy?
• Do you have support at home for development crises that may arise? Issues that come up can make you emotionally unstable for a while, so that you need support from those closest to you. This is especially relevant if you are seeking spiritual development, since, among other things, it aims to set your heart free by healing what blocks it. The blocks can be, for example, anxiety, fear, trauma, addictions, and compensatory mechanisms that have arisen after trauma.
• Is your health good enough if the teacher is in India or Japan?

A good needs analysis can save you a great deal of time, energy, frustration, and, not least, money.

Esoteric or spiritual development

In the alternative market, most things are marketed as “spiritual development.” The terms esoteric development and spiritual development must be kept apart. That makes it easier to find your way among all the offerings based on your needs.

The murkier the soup, the harder it is to tell what is in it. The vast majority of offerings in the alternative world have to do with developing skills, and are therefore esoteric development.

The next step is to determine whether you need esoteric or spiritual development.

Esoteric development is right for you if you are mostly interested in developing your abilities and talents. Mainly, you learn methods and techniques such as healing, laying on of hands, channeling, readings, aura reading, ESP (extrasensory perception), mind reading, telepathy, clairvoyance, mediumship, and more.

This suits you well if you are a therapist and want to learn new methods to help your clients, or if you are curious about your own abilities. Most parapsychological abilities (perception beyond our everyday senses), also called “siddhis” in Sanskrit, are fairly easy to train, since the abilities are already present in a dormant state in most people. A weekend seminar together with a little practice is often enough. If you want to learn more complicated siddhis, such as projecting ash into the palms of the hands or creating ectoplasm, you need intensive practice over many years. If you want to develop your abilities and talents, you need an esoteric teacher who can teach you techniques and methods. Here the selection and the offerings are extensive.

Once you have worked out what you want to learn, it is a good idea to contact two or three different teachers who teach it and ask them what you will learn in the course and what you will be able to do afterward. Also ask how long and how intensive the practice must be for you to achieve concrete, objectively measurable results. My advice is to keep your eyes on the practical, concrete results you can expect after the course.

Escape or presence

If you have a difficult life full of problems, it is easy to seek out solutions that let you flee the life you have. Through escape, you no longer feel your pain as clearly, but escape will never solve the problems. Painkillers can help neutralize the pain of the weekly weekend migraine for a while, but they will not resolve the cause of the pain. As you become dependent, the pain relief works less and less.

Some esoteric methods that can be used or misused as tools of escape: astral journeys, dream journeys, wandering in other dimensions, meditation (several hours a day), a hermit’s life, most forms of protection against “black energies,” wrapping yourself in violet clouds of light, and the like. These methods can, of course, also be used for constructive development. All methods that aim to divert us from living and feeling our daily lives in a practical and concrete way count as methods of escape. In other words, most methods can be misused if you so choose. The yardstick is always whether the method gives practical and lasting results in your daily life.

Through escape, you no longer feel your pain as clearly, but escape will never solve the problems.

Pål-Esben Wanvig

If the goal is to be free of pain without painkillers, it does not help to run from the problem. What helps then is calling a spade a spade while observing your problems here and now. Then you can take practical action to start solving the problem. In many cases, a fundamental change of life or lifestyle is needed.

Spiritual development

If you want to come closer to your essence and your soul, you need to walk a path of true spiritual development. Our soul is our essence, the part of us that incarnates again and again. It can give the answer to who we really are, what our real needs are, what can make us fundamentally glad and happy, and what gives life meaning.

A path of spiritual development is well suited to those who are searching for a greater meaning in life. Spiritual development centers on personality development and on healing the issues and problems that prevent you from living a healthy, happy, and meaningful life. Spiritual enlightenment and self-realization are the ultimate goal. You also learn esoteric methods and techniques that help you with the tasks above, but they are seen only as tools.

Some examples of paths that can offer spiritual development: meditation (in the true sense, with an emphasis on stillness of the mind, that is, not guided meditations and dream journeys), shamanism, tantra, reiki, yoga, esoteric Hinduism, esoteric Buddhism, esoteric Taoism, Sufism, Wicca, and more.

What characterizes most paths of true spiritual development is that you need to enter a longer training program together with your teacher. Unfortunately, true spiritual development cannot be achieved by taking a weekend seminar every now and then.

If this is what you want, you need a qualified spiritual teacher who can show you the way toward spiritual enlightenment.

A spiritual teacher is there to help you expand your consciousness. What you think you want to learn covers only the first steps.

How do you analyze a potential spiritual teacher?

You can use the following four pointers to analyze a spiritual teacher:

• Is the teacher focused on making you dependent or independent?
• Is the teacher rhetorically manipulative, or does the teacher speak in language you understand?
• Is the teacher’s motivation fear-based or heart-based?
• Does the teacher use statements such as: I have all the answers, I know everything, I am the only one who has the solution, and you are stupid if you don’t follow me, you don’t need to learn from or listen to anyone but me, I am enlightened and therefore don’t need to learn anything more myself, I am perfect and without faults, all you need to do is be near me, then everything will work out?

My advice is to stay well away from those who use fear or who are manipulative in their marketing and their teachings. Fear is every form of fear orientation, jealousy, envy, greed, hatred, egocentrism, xenophobia, intolerance, lack of acceptance of other people, fear of competition, fear of other belief systems, and so on.

The more fear-oriented a teacher is, the further that person is from their own soul and from spiritual enlightenment and self-realization. This makes such a teacher unfit to help others come closer to their essence and their soul, which is, after all, the main goal of all true spiritual development.

A good spiritual teacher will always respect your free will and will not try to “keep” you if you want to go in a different direction. Such a teacher has no need to be elevated to an icon or a guru, where you are not free to voice your critical opinions.

The more fear-oriented a teacher is, the further that person is from their own soul and from spiritual enlightenment and self-realization.

Pål-Esben Wanvig

Six concrete tips

Judging the teacher’s competence is much harder, since most seekers have neither the competence, the experience, nor the knowledge to say anything about the level of knowledge in a field they are unfamiliar with. I recommend doing the following:

1. Check books and articles the teacher has written. Does the teacher write in language you understand and give you knowledge you can put to practical use in everyday life, or in a foggy trance language that gives you little concrete benefit?
2. Search the internet. What does the teacher write about themselves, and what do others write? Remember that the internet is a medium where anyone can write anything.
3. Go to a talk or seminar the teacher is giving, if possible. Ask questions about what you do not understand. How does the teacher react to your questions? Is the teacher positive and trying to explain until you understand, or arrogant, rhetorical, and quick to interrupt? That says a lot about how the teacher treats students. What is the chemistry like between you and the teacher? Does the teaching style suit you?
4. Check out the results of the teacher’s students. In my eyes, this is the ultimate factor in analyzing a teacher. Search the internet to see whether you can find the students’ stories, or talk to them if you attend a seminar with the teacher. It is smart to question them when the teacher is not present. Ask how their lives have improved in practice during their studies. Be wary of dream language such as “Yes, I feel so much better.” Your task is to get past the dream language by asking direct questions about what has concretely happened in their lives, in areas such as health, relationships, work, friends, happiness, meaning, and the like. If you do thorough work here by talking to perhaps three to five students, you will have a good basis for saying something about the teacher’s competence and whether this teacher may be right for you and your goals. If you are dealing with a cult-like organization, asking the students does not help much, since they are most likely brainwashed. Cults get a section of their own below.
5. How are you received by the teacher and the teacher’s senior students? The students’ reaction to you as a newcomer, inclusive or dismissive, says a lot about how the teacher relates to others.
6. All that glitters is not gold. Celebrity status need not say anything about a teacher’s quality. That a teacher has been featured in magazines, written articles, appeared on TV, written books, and so on is no guarantee of quality in itself.

Cults: a dangerous pitfall

Religious cults are a familiar phenomenon to most people. In the esoteric and alternative market, there are also a number of cults. It is not easy to determine what is a cult, since most of them present a carefully polished, glossy image of themselves to the outside world.

Defining what a cult is can be difficult. There are as many definitions of cults as there are experts on them. Dag Hareide, who has worked for several years with children and young people in cults, presented a ten-point checklist for cults in the Norwegian newspaper VG on February 2, 2004. If a group or congregation meets several points on the list, there is reason to be on your guard.

Dag Hareide’s cult checklist

1. The cult has the truth.
2. The cult leader has the power.
3. The cult has strong and simple images of the enemy.
4. Members change identity on joining.
5. The cult exercises social control.
6. The cult keeps an inner enemy alive.
7. The end takes precedence over the means.
8. The cult develops its own language, which becomes a closed universe.
9. Knowledge in the cult is hierarchical and esoteric (secret or hidden).
10. Leaving the cult is met with sanctions.

The consequences of being drawn into a manipulative and destructive cult can be serious, and in the worst case they can destroy a person’s life. I have experienced firsthand what it feels like to be cast out by a cult. When I was young, my father chose to leave a well-known religious cult in Norway, with the consequences that this entailed.

In my practice as a spiritual teacher, I have met quite a few people who have come out of esoteric cults. The problems can range from mild fear of persecution, depression, and damage to the energy system to serious physical and emotional problems that leave a person no longer able to live a normal life.

Consequences

Finding a competent spiritual teacher is of the utmost importance in the search for a better and more meaningful life. Some of the consequences that can occur when you are trained by an unsuitable spiritual teacher, as I have encountered them in my own practice:

1. You learn little that can be used in a practical way in your life and everyday routine. The result is a waste of your time, your resources, and your money.
2. You can be imprinted with ideas and philosophy that do not match reality, which leads to a false understanding.
3. You will not develop, that is, come closer to your essence and your soul.
4. You cannot set your potential free and therefore cannot pass your gifts on to others.
5. It becomes harder for you to follow your own spiritual path in life.
6. It becomes harder for you to fulfill your spiritual learning tasks and the reasons you reincarnated this time.
7. Your fear can grow stronger. The degree of paranoia can increase. This applies especially if you have a teacher who talks about the need for protection against evil spirits, negative energies, and so on.
8. You can become isolated from family, friends, and your social circle. Everyone outside the teacher’s group is seen as inferior, harmful, or insignificant.
9. It will be harder to create a fundamentally happy and meaningful life.
10. In the worst case: you become ill, mentally, physically, or both.

Your choice

I hope you have gained some pointers to help you in your search for better health, joy, happiness, and a more meaningful life.

The art of finding your way in the esoteric jungle is not easy, but it is entirely possible if you keep your wits about you. Since we are all equipped with a gift called free will, we can make whatever choices we wish, and we are the only ones who have to live with the consequences.

Good luck in your search for the right spiritual teacher.

Since we are all equipped with a gift called free will, we can make whatever choices we wish, and we are the only ones who have to live with the consequences.

Pål-Esben Wanvig

Do you want to go deeper? On my blog and in the podcast The Journey to Self-Realization, we explore the topics in this text in more depth. If you want to walk the path yourself, it begins at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School with our free online course on primordial shamanism: Nature’s Path to Freedom and Self-Realization. No path could begin more simply. How far it reaches is up to you.

This content does not replace professional medical help from a doctor or other health professional, and it is not intended as medical treatment. If you are ill, always see a doctor first.