Finding a Teacher

When I post something like this, I often get some responses asking, “How do I find a teacher?” Almost always, though, the question they’re really trying to ask is, “How do I overcome my resistance to finding a teacher?”, which is an incredibly different problem.

Frankly, that question is of psychological depth that is beyond my purview as your internet tiger dad, save for one piece of advice, which is to just do the easy searching part anyway, even though you don’t want to, because when you find your teacher, the pull becomes inexorable.

People online treat finding a lineage — or even creating one out of whole cloth — as casually as they treat anything else online, but the truth is that Spirit doesn’t care what medium you find your lineage in; it will strike you in the heart, and you have to allow that to happen.

People ask me how I found my Zen teacher, and I say “I googled ‘[region] soto zen,’ found a center, and emailed the abbot.”

People ask me how I found my astrology teacher, and I say, “Uh, I tweeted ‘I want an astrology teacher.’”

And they seem DISAPPOINTED sometimes!!

And frankly, a lot of the time, I feel like they’re disappointed that there’s this little stopping them.