Some of you arrive at this practice already exhausted. You did everything right: the degree, the job, the relationship, the house — and you still feel empty. Then you find a teacher who seems to have found what you're looking for: who speaks without confusion, who carries certainty in their body. It draws you in.
The practice opens you up. That's not a flaw — that's how it works. But it also means you'll be vulnerable. People will use that opening. Financially, sexually, emotionally. It's easy to lose yourself in someone who says they have the answer.
Be careful of teachers who build an identity around a genuine but incomplete insight. They still act from a self, convinced they've moved beyond it — teaching from a place they haven't reached. The blind spot is invisible to both of you. The teaching is a performance. They can only point within the performance, not out.
Some teachers make themselves the destination — the practice becomes one of reverence and unquestionable authority. While certain traditions use devotion to the teacher as the path, it requires a cultural structure the West doesn't have. Without that container, devotion becomes blind faith. The teacher has one role: point where you're still holding.
Be wary when harmful conduct is explained as teaching — a test, something beyond your understanding, or proof that they've moved beyond morality. The bad conduct survives by turning your concern back onto you. You sense something is wrong and say so, but that concern gets reframed as your obstacle. Your doubt is proof you haven't understood — that your ego is resisting — you're not ready for the truth. You end up doubting your own discernment rather than the teacher. Trust what you see.
The teacher doesn't operate alone. The community protects its investment. People sense something is wrong — but leaving means losing years, identity, relationships, money, all at once. So they don't leave. They defend. The teacher abuses, and the students respond: enforce, accept, or simply look away. A healthy community exists to support the practice, not to protect itself.
The teacher isn't the only one to watch. Watch your mind. It's always making identities. Join a community, you are now a member. Engage a teacher, you become a student. The spiritual self, the seeking self, no-self. Watch what your mind does: it builds an identity whose only purpose is to see through itself.
Find someone with an honest practice: they know what they know, and know what they don't. Someone who can see where you're still holding, because they've been held there too.
If you find someone who has genuinely seen through the self: sit with them. When you meet, tell them where you're stuck. Their response can come as words, silence, a gesture, laughter. Whatever form it takes, it points at where you're still holding. That's their only role. A true teacher works toward their own disappearance.
The only authority here is your own seeing — you're the only one who can free yourself, from yourself.