When Your Guru Is Mean

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Excerpt from Chapter 4 of my book: Not Woo-Woo: One Woman’s Journey to Freedom Trying Just about Everything (Coming soon!)

“Who are you?" my new spiritual teacher asked me.

It was our first session. Things started out with the small talk strangers exchange in situations like this. Blah the weather, blah did I find the place okay, blah his dog’s name (Booda, of course)—all of which felt ridiculous, given we both knew I was about to spill my guts all over his floor. Then he asked me why I’d come to see him and, bam, we were into dead bodies, purposelessness, and my life in a shit basket.

“Who am I?” I parroted back. I had no idea how to answer this question.

He nodded, shaping his hands into a steeple beneath his chin. The kind of move that said, Go ahead, dummy, say whatever stupid thing you are about to say. No matter what you come up with, you are going down. The sign on the door behind him said “BEWARE PIT BULL” in red capital letters.

Jesus, what had I gotten myself into? Better yet: who let the dog out? Not even ten minutes in and already the back of my knees were sweating.

His name was Avery. I’d heard about him through a woman I’d met in a writing class. She had Muscular Dystrophy and said, with this teacher’s help, she’d ditched her wheelchair and almost all of her meds. She said he could heal with his hands and his philosophies had changed her life.

A spiritual teacher? Healer? Here? I thought these people lived in Ojai or Santa Fe or an ashram in India or something, not fifteen minutes up Route 495. And certainly not this dude who looked, and sounded, like Gabe Kotter from Welcome Back Kotter, if you go back that far, with maybe some Marty Feldman (British comedian with big eyeballs) thrown in.

There was nothing New Age or woo woo about him. No Gandalf beard. No crystal rings. No patchouli, robe, or turban. No pictures of people twisted into yoga postures on his walls. Just a middle-aged guy in a button down. With a Brooklyn accent. And a 70’s-style lip sweater.

“I don’t know how to answer this question anymore,” I said.

“Give it your best shot.” He smiled, clearly enjoying my discomfort. This man was so going to kick my A.

“Well, for starters, I’m a human being… a woman.” What choice did I have but to start with the basics? I was married, so I was a wife. I was a sister, a daughter, etc., but all of that sounded so wrong coming out. “I don’t know…” I shrugged. “I’m just me…”

"But what does ‘me’ mean?”

"‘Me’ means there are things that make me the person I am, just as there are other things, personality, characteristics, that make someone else who they are."

"So you are the body sitting in front of me? Is that what you are, a body?"

"Well, no,” I said. Game on, mister. “What I really am is the soul, the essence inside the body. The body just helps me to get around.”

At the time, I thought of the body much like a rental car. Maybe there was a Hertz-like terminal on the other side where we chose our bodies before coming to earth. A body wax museum, as it were, with all sorts of makes and models, colors, and sizes. It was more virtual than physical. Maybe we walked through the different options with a guide of some sort, discussing the pros and cons of each avatar, based on who, what, and why we came here to be. (Why I didn’t go for the Halle Barry model? What was I thinking?)

"So you're a ‘soul’?” he asked.

“I think so—yeah, something like that,” I nodded.

“You think or you know?”

Geez, no wiggle room with this guy. “I know,” I replied.

“Okay, if you know, then tell me what a ‘soul’ is?”

He smiled: gotcha again, ding-a-ling. I was starting to feel like I was on the Spiritual Gong Show. That’s who you think you are? Wrong! Gong! When was I going to get dragged offstage with a hook?

“A soul is a spark of Love…it’s the energy that keeps the body going,” I explained. The qi, the prana, the essence, that immortal part of what we are. “Without it, the body would have no life.” His expression told me I was getting closer, but still oh so far away.

“So this is what you are, this ‘spark’?"

I nodded in agreement but admitted it had been a while since I felt myself as that spark. I told him there was more of a black hole where all that light used to be. My eyes started to fill, despite the pep talks I’d given myself not to cry. Why couldn’t I pull off just one hour—one hour!—without the tears? He handed me a tissue.

“When you say ‘God,’ what does that mean to you?”

I told him I wasn’t sure about that one anymore, either. I shared my first meditation experience, how afterward I’d come to think of God as a loving presence, energy, or whatnot. I no longer related to God as an entity… like the needy Sky Man of my upbringing who seemed, more or less, emotionally stuck at the high school level and who rained shit-storms down on earthlings when he was in a bad mood.

But now, I felt nothing.

“Your God concept is breaking down,” he concluded. “This is good. Normal.”

Did he just say this was ‘normal’? I felt about the furthest thing from normal, like I’d spent the past couple years sitting in a dunk booth, getting plowed into the water over and over again.  

“You can’t get to the truth until you break through the untruths, the limiting beliefs, blocking the way.”

“If it’s so normal, why does it hurt so much?” Why did I have the overwhelming urge to give up, pack it all in? Like it would be easier to swallow a bottle of pills than continue on this journey?

“Because it’s not easy letting go of your old way of seeing,” he shrugged. “When our concepts start to die, it can feel like we are dying because the mind associates who we are with our concepts. It can be very painful. Does this make any sense to you?”

Sort of, in a distant tunnel kind of way.

“That feeling of separation comes from your belief that there is separation,” he explained. My perception was clogged with limiting beliefs and concepts like old food stopping up a drain. It was always clogged. I was just finally waking up and noticing it. “When you detach from the stories your mind is telling you about what you are and what ‘God’ is, you will understand what I’m saying—and when you get this, you will feel free in a way that you never have before. But don’t take my word for it…this is something you have to find for yourself.”