For years, people have come to me interested in being spiritual leaders and teachers.
My response to them has been consistent:
Do the work.
Then do even more.
As usual, it’s not what most people want to hear.
One common misconception is that doing your own inner work is enough to step into a role of spiritual leadership.
In this role, you’re not just going to be confronted by issues and attachments with which you’re experienced and know about. You’re going to be confronted by a whole bunch of other ego junk with which you’ve never had to face.
If you’ve lived a comfortable life with lots of social support, do you really understand how to help someone letting go of generational prejudice that has made earning livable wages hard?
If you’ve always had a wonderful relationship to your body and sex, do you really understand the pain and shame a childhood incest survivor experiences?
There’s a lot a spiritual leader who guides people to freedom from suffering needs to know.
That’s why I am never in any rush to take on a mentee to teach how to be a spiritual teacher.
However, spiritual leadership and role-modelling can be much simpler. It can be about how you live your life and inspire others without having an official spiritual leadership (teacher, healer, facilitator, etc.) role. Unofficial spiritual leaders are important people in our lives.
And let’s not overlook the important of spiritual leadership as a parent. The way you teach your children and role model living well and confronting fears impacts their whole lives and the whole fabric of our society.
With that said, let’s dive in further.
Spiritual Leadership: Humbled Beyond Humble
The word “leadership” these days evokes a lot of negative connotations for many.
Ego.
Pride.
Arrogance.
So many of our leaders are not careful, compassionate guides and inspirations for our society.
They’re aggressive, angry, and sometimes narcissistic broken souls trying to make themselves feel better. Which, of course, doesn’t work.
It creates MORE SUFFERING.
Some of that shows up in the spiritual world with false spiritual teachers.
7 Signs of a False Spiritual Teacher
Certainly, there are good leaders and average leaders and many people in between.
But even they benefit from the humbling process.
What is the humbling process?
One element of this process is finding out that we don’t know all the things we think we know. It forces us out of the certainty we often have about life. It forces us to engage more deeply and be more curious.
And more compassionate.
Who is this person here?
How do they think?
What do they see?
We ask questions to understand.
We are slow and reluctant to apply labels. This has been one of the more annoying things to my students.
Many students are used to quick answers and labels rather than my humble approach of asking more questions. But that humility bears fruit.
5 Misunderstandings About Humility
Confronting Many Levels of Pride
Leaders are too important to not go through a humbling process. People give us too much power.
And that is the truth:
Power is given.
The insecure leaders in the world can become erratic, unpredictable, or violent because they know that their positions are precarious. And the more they have built up their pride and their control mechanisms through lies, subversion, and even violence, the more they feel how much people want to tear them down and take away that power.
Pride leaves little room for love in leadership.
A humbled leader acts from love, but typically not the kind of love everyone thinks about. The humbling process unlocks love from the conditionality of the ego. It is the love of awareness that sees things as they are, not as we want them to be.
The humbling process is different for everyone leader. The only way it truly works is through sincerity because of the many layers of pride people carry. Some people are very covert with their pride, particularly some spiritual leaders. Their false humility adds further confusion in a modern day spiritual world that has become extremely distorted thanks to the Internet and its copious amounts of opinions.
Opinions aren’t truth. Humble spiritual leaders seek the truth.
Twisted Love Pointed at Leaders
In being humbled and becoming clear through intense inner work, spiritual leaders can endure a lot of things that are projected onto them.
That includes “love.”
The love towards spiritual leaders can be fairly twisted, and so adoration is typically a better word.
That’s not a good thing. It’s not typically a space of empowered gratitude.
Overwhelmed by Gratitude for Your Teacher
No.
It’s more like the student thinks they’re getting something. When they no longer think they’re getting what they want, that adoration vanishes.
This “love” can also be desire. Plenty of people come my way wanting to have a romantic connection with me.
But that’s not what this space is for.
If a spiritual leader hasn’t been humbled and cleaned out of attachments, they can get ensnared by their students, clients, and whoever it is they work with.
Yeah.
It’s not the teacher subverting students.
Many students want to twist the spiritual leader into their romantic ego desires.
When you’ve removed the many layers of pride and pain hiding in you, it doesn’t matter if you have adoration, love, or gratitude pointed at you. You are operating from the space of awareness. That space doesn’t need emotional acknowledgement. Being in this clarity allows a spiritual leader to address the many kinds of adoration, desire, and more that will come your way.
Learning About Other Types of Attachments
In the following little spiritual allegory, I talk about a character who wants to be a spiritual teacher. You can check it out here:
The Many Forms of Rock Climbing
Simply put, you have to learn about other people’s attachments and their suffering. That’s what is going to show up at a spiritual leader’s door.
Suffering is the main driver of people to this path.
It probably brought you to my blog.
It’s only much further along this path when people truly understand how to choose this spiritual freedom path consciously. That comes when a person is not in intense pain and suffering. That means we choose to go deeper even when we feel fantastic.
That doesn’t make sense to the ego. The ego wants to do four things:
- Get rid of what it doesn’t want
- Avoid what it doesn’t want
- Get what it does want
- Keep what it does want
So when you feel good, you’re in the “keep-it” mode.
And how can you be a role-model for spiritual freedom if you haven’t liberated yourself from such a basic ego response?
That may not make sense to you yet, but going deeper when you feel great is something a spiritual leader needs to have done and experienced. And we go deeper because we learn this:
All attachments cause suffering.
Legions of Incomplete Spiritual Practitioners and Leaders
Unfortunately, most people haven’t resolved much of their acute pain much less moved through the deeper levels of core ego issues and root animal instincts. Instead, they have a great yoga class and believe they’re ready to teach the whole world how to free themselves as yogis/yoginis.
Look.
Yoga is great.
I do it every day.
But being a spiritual leader is a tall task. That first yoga high does not qualify you for anything. That big substance-induced oneness experience does not qualify you for anything.
More likely than not, you’re going to lead yourself and others into trouble.
The Problem of Incomplete Spiritual Teachers
I’ve had to do repair work on some of people who suffered from those spiritual leaders, teachers, healers, etc. offering practices that they don’t truly understand.
So if you’re interested in being a spiritual leader, it’s time to slow down and do deeper work/research people who can help you go deeper.
Unofficial Spiritual Leaders and Parents
Let’s also talk about unofficial spiritual leaders. They are far more common.
Unofficial spiritual leadership can be how you are kind to your neighbors. This can be how you work with your coworkers, employees, employers, and others. This can be how you offer an inspiring thought to a fellow rider on the bus when they’re having a bad day.
It’s not telling someone what to believe or reinforcing spiritual nonsense.
Unofficial spiritual leaders absolutely include parents. You’re introducing your children to the whole world around you.
And for those with adult children, you are opening a gateway to wisdom in their adulthood by how you role-model it.
There’s a lot to talk about with spiritual parenting.
How to Become a Better Spiritual Parent
But to briefly touch on the topic, your role-modelling of spiritual freedom changes with different ages.
You can hold your baby and breathe calmly to help your child regulate their emotions when they are upset, and that’s meditation for them.
Your ten year old can sit for 10 minutes for meditation…maybe.
The teenager gets 20 minutes.
Your adult children can come sit with you for the full half hour or longer.
This is only one small application of spirituality in parenting. There are countless others.
The more you understand this path and are free from your attachments, the more you can meet any moment and create something appropriate for your children.
Influencing and Inspiring Those Around You
Honestly, unofficial spiritual leaders may be far more influential. These are the people you are likely to interact with on a daily basis. These are the people who show you different ways of behaving in everyday life.
These behaviors and actions can be learned and copied.
And human being needs to see behavior patterns and copy them to live differently.
Does this mean others will do the deep work you did?
No.
Most people don’t want to dive into five levels of ego attachment.
But it certainly can help inspire calmness, kindness, love, and peace in a turbulent time.
Why the Spiritual Path Is Critical in Turbulent Times
If you’re interested in spiritual leadership, it truly helps to let go of any grandiose ideas.
That brings us back to the humbling process.
Once again, people have so much more pride than they ever realize. It rears its head again and again when suddenly the person shouts, “I’ll go no further!”
This comes out as a thousand different reasonable excuses, but they all say the same thing; the person is scared to look deeper. They want to keep the good feelings they want and not jeopardize losing them.
Spiritual Leadership Asks A Lot
There’s a lot that goes into spiritual leadership before you ever do something officially.
That’s important.
This is not a fun-ride. This is not to validate your ego self-worth issue.
This is about BEING OF SERVICE.
Understanding Selfless Service, Selfishness, and Self-lostness
Again, it starts with your willingness to go into you.
The path out of suffering takes you through all kinds of attachments and illusions. Many of those attachments you’ll want to keep. You won’t want to give up a lot. Most people are just using the spiritual path to feel good.
You have to break through that attachment to feeling good and every other attachment if you want to help anyone else break through their attachments.
It can be done.
I have done it.
Others have done it.
You can be that spiritual leader–that clarity for others in times of great suffering.
The clearer you are, the clearer you see life and others. And the more of a bright light you can be to shine the way forward.
If you want help stepping into spiritual leadership, you can sign up for my newsletter and get in touch with me.