The Process of Becoming a Spiritual Teacher

There are many paths to becoming a spiritual teacher, spiritual healer, or some other type of spiritual practitioner.

And there are many types of spiritual teachers and healers. All of them operate at different levels of ability, and with distinctly different purposes.

I am a spiritual freedom teacher.

I’ll explain more about that shortly.

Some major types of spiritual teachers include:

• Lords of Social Order and Conformity
• Medicating, Coping, and Numbing Spiritual Practitioners
• Dissociated Magical-thinking Spiritual Teachers

What Is a Spiritual Teacher?

Very briefly, the process of becoming a spiritual teacher entails:

• Choosing What Kind of Teacher You Want To Be
• Finding a Mentor or System to Instruct You
• Becoming Clear Through Your Inner Work to Handle the Suffering of Another
• Deciding Whether You are Going to Do this Full-time or Intermittently

There are other aspects of this process, but that’s the quick summary. There’s a lot involved in the four steps of the process.

If you’re new to my work, you may appreciate my free newsletter on spirituality:

Basic Types of Spiritual Teachers

There are several over-arching types of teachers.

Lords of Social Order and Conformity

This type of spiritual teacher is typically a man in a major religion. They’re called a priest, rabbi, minister, imam, and other names.

Major religions serve a sacred role–to help people coexist together. If people believe similarly, they’re likely to live similarly and to coexist better. To me, that is the inherent philosophy of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other major religious systems.

They’re typically not about freeing people of ego. They’re about following practices and believing in certain ways to help large groups of people live together.

They’re very necessary.

People need social order, and most people and spiritual seekers will never be interested in realizing spiritual freedom.

While there should also be more “Ladies of Social Order and Conformity,” the reality is that this is a space dominated by men–take a look at the Catholic church. I currently don’t think there are any women cardinals.

Medicating, Coping, and Numbing Spiritual Practitioners

Look, most of modern spirituality is about making people feel better. That’s most of what the students who have come to me have tried to achieve. They confuse inner work as a way to feel better rather than to be free. Mixed in here are vinyasa yoga teachers, breathwork coaches, spiritual chant leaders, and others who offer services which legitimately make people feel better. But there tends to be so much confusion and distortion of spiritual sounding-ideas about what is happening.

Feeling good is not freedom.

Many substances, retreats, and practices are used by these types of teachers that only offer temporary solutions. Some can be used badly and do harm. Too often, these are very incomplete spiritual teachers who don’t look holistically or deeply at where the sources of the suffering are. That includes some of the ones who think they do.

The Problem of Incomplete Spiritual Teachers

More than a few of these teachers are also in the next category.

If a person knows that they’re helping someone to cope, however, that’s a very valuable service. We need lots of vinyasa yoga teachers, breathwork coaches, spiritual chant leaders, and others helping people to stabilize.

Dissociated, Magical-thinking Spiritual Teachers

These people are a deeply problematic type of common teacher. This is all of the energy and psychic world, as well as in other spaces.

Psychic and energy work is nonsense. The vast majority of it is unresolved trauma.

Yep.

I said that.

I have a whole history of using the terms “psychic” and “energy,” but after more than 15 years of teaching, what I discovered and have been humbled by is that energy is a placeholder word.

“Energy” is a placeholder word for feelings and sensations that we don’t understand and for which we lack language.

Psychic is typically projected emotions, fragments of ego, and sensations onto other people and places.

These practitioners are trying to fix people with energy fixes, but that’s not the reality of what is happening for people. It certainly doesn’t show a person the way out of suffering. It’s all about BELIEVING. And people can create all kinds of personal experiences by believing crazy shit, thereby reinforcing the false beliefs.

7 Signs of a False Spiritual Teacher

These magical-thinkers and dissociaters can be in the other types of spiritual teachers, including the spiritual freedom teachers.

They’re out of touch with themselves and reality. If you want to truly be of service to others, you’d do well to avoid “energy training,” “psychic teaching,” and other dissociated work.

Spiritual Freedom Teachers

We teach people how to strip away ego and body attachments to realize that they’re free. At no time are you ever limited by the thoughts, emotions, and sensations happening inside. No matter how powerful those things are, you have other choices.

Spiritual freedom teachers need to realize freedom themselves to help others see and release their attachments. For the traditions that teach people to do the work correctly, you may find some in Buddhism, non-duality, and Sufiism. They can be a great space for codified spiritual freedom teacher training.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of distortions in these traditions. Buddhists can get stuck in meaningless meditations or intellectual pursuits. Ecstatic dancing does not an enlightened Sufi make. 🙂

I have crafted my own path, which I do not recommend. It’s the longest, slowest, and most painful way to learn to teach.

It is best to find someone who can mentor you directly.

How to Find Spiritual Freedom

Ego Corruptions of Teaching

For some people, you know you’re here to teach at one of the 3 levels (seriously, do not do the dissociated teacher path). It is absolutely vital to do inner work.

Inner work is about peeling away layers of ego so that you are truly clear on who you are. Actually, many people who think they are teachers or healers are just trying to teach or heal themselves. Others use teaching and healing as identities and as ways to get social approval. Some just like feeling special, and they see a spiritual teacher as a “special” person.

Being a spiritual freedom teacher is anything but special. It is about making the darkness your work because

no one needs a light in the mid-day sun.

Much of the work you do will only be known by you and the person you’re with.

The Desire to be Special

Many Trees in the Forest: All Are Sacred 

You don’t all have to be like Eckhart Tolle or Rumi or [Insert your current favorite spiritual teacher here]. 

It’s impossible.

You’re not them.

You’re you.

You’re going to have a certain way of sharing and offering to your spiritual students that is all your own. It’s like the different trees in the forest. What they offer to the forest and environment around them can be extremely different from tree to tree. The great redwood provides enormous shelter to many beings around it with its huge stature and great boughs. It also holds a great piece of the Earth with its roots and stabilizes the environment around it.

The peach tree does not do these things.

Instead, it nourishes people and animals with its sweet fruits that it spends all spring and summer growing. Both are very important, and both have amazing things to offer.

But consider what would happen if the peach tree suddenly decided it should be the redwood or if the redwood thought it should be the peach tree? The peach tree would spurn its fruit and struggle to grow taller and hyper-extend its roots to stretch out farther. Meanwhile, the great redwood would twist, bend, and slouch to try to stand at the level of the peach tree and toil endlessly to produce edible fruits, but none would taste right.

All in the forest would wonder why these two beautiful trees were so utterly confused.

Everyday Spirituality: Cultivating an Awakening (my ebook)

Types of Development as Spiritual Teacher

For most people, learning from a set tradition is necessary.

Others will sift through all the intellectual knowledge and experiential practices that they can find in this crazy society and on the Internet. They’ll go through trial and error to figure out what works for them as they develop a stronger inner knowing.

That second one sucks.

I did it.

I made countless mistakes. It was slow. It created more pain and wasted so much time.

I can show you how not to make those mistakes, as I’m sure others who took this road can.

The positive side is that I can really tune into an organic, individualized approach for the mentee.

Spiritual Teacher Mentorship Program

The codified systems will require you to follow the programs. That has value too. Being an ordained minister gives you social validation and the backing of an organization that can be encouraging to many spiritual people to listen to you.

Self-care and Expanding Your Natural Gifts

As a spiritual teacher, you can’t take care of anyone else unless you take care of yourself. If you truly are called to teach, you will be your first and primary student to care for before you expand your boughs to support others.

But in doing your work to dissolve the veils of ego lies that still bind and blind you, you’ll go through phases of interest and loss of interest with teaching.

You may find what feel like natural gifts to you, although when you look deeper you’ll often see how your childhood developed a lot of these things for you. Perhaps they got forgotten, but now you have remembered these interests and abilities. It’s like finding a love of running that got forgotten at age 12 because everyone told you to only focus on academic pursuits. Now you can reclaim that ability and bring it forward into your adult life.

A more relatable talent and necessary ability might be listening deeply. This is a crazy culture. It can get you so focused on your individuality that you forget how to listen to others. Rediscovering that ability and cultivating it further are critical steps in the process of becoming a spiritual teacher.

A great spiritual teacher needs to be a great listener and holder of space.

Understanding How to Hold Space

So many people have been crushed since childhood that even feeling like a person can seem like a monumental task. You are likely to teach people like this.

If you are feel like your soul has been lost or crushed, you’ve got a lot of work until you are clearer enough to teach others. There needs to be a strong sense of self to which you are ironically unattached to anchor yourself and others in spiritual truth.

What do I mean by being unattached to a strong sense of self? That’s a conversation for a one-on-one session.

Confusing Healing Work With Life Work

Discovering Your Limits

Not everyone who comes to you should be taught by you. Sometimes, this is part of the tests of the universe to see if we can discern the appropriateness of teaching.

Some people aren’t ready for you.

Some people you’re not ready for.

The ego often thinks that it has to prove something or act a certain way and see certain kinds of results. There’s a lot of immaturity in every type of spiritual teacher.

We’re not here to solve people.

Spiritual freedom teachers are here to be ourselves;

we are here to BE.

If we try to do things we are not prepared to do, pain and suffering can quickly arise for us and our spiritual students. This statement isn’t meant to scare you.

It is meant to caution you about the importance of

doing your own work,

going through your relevant spiritual training, and

staying present to the reality in front of you.

Having spent years (I started teaching in 2010) sharpening my perception, I notice very subtle body language signs that help me to show people where to unravel an attachment.

That didn’t happen over night. It happened because I cleared space to see reality.

It’s up to the student to take the advice and go further.

And if I see someone who is not able to handle the work, I redirect them to the appropriate practitioner or steps to create a stable foundation.

Building a Mind Strong Enough for Awakening

No Where to Go as a Spiritual Freedom Teacher

You have no where special that you need to go to do your teaching.

Every corner of the Earth needs it.

Now, you may feel strongly about living and teaching at a particular place.

Cool.

Go there.

But the here and now is always here and now.

There is no need to set up shop at an ashram; yoga studio; Mt. Shasta; Bali; at one of the Sapta Puri in India; Sedona, Arizona; or some other “spiritual” place. Downtown Oakland is fine. The outskirts of small town America is fine.

All of life is spiritual.

The Path to Nowhere

The “Why” of Your Spiritual Teaching

Really investigate the “why” of why you want to serve as a spiritual teacher.

Then keep clearing out more ego until there is no pressure at all to do this.

Is there a clear knowing that you want to teach others?

Or do you not care at all?

Actually, the latter is a far more powerful place to teach from.

When there is no impulse to teach, it’s much more likely that you have freedom yourself from attachments that would have impeded true spiritual teaching.

Ironic.

I know. 🙂

This isn’t a race.

And there’s a lot of internal leg-work that has to happen so that you’ll be in integrity and can maintain your body, mind, and emotional health.

Depending on your type of spiritual teaching, this work can be very demanding. It’s not a path that should be taken lightly or as a way to save the world.

The Humbling Process in Becoming a True Teacher

Deeper and Deeper Investigation of “Why”

You’re not done with the “why” yet.

Three years into seminary. You may have more to do.

Five years after your one-on-one mentorship, you may have more to explore.

However, it really matters “why” you’re doing this. Deep ego attachments can corrupt this work in so many ways.

Corrupting Inner Work

As mentioned earlier, a lot of very wounded people think being a spiritual teacher will make them feel special. They think they’ll be seen or heard.

Guess what?

You’re going to be ignored a lot.

Your direction will be sabotaged.

Your students will leave you.

Some will speak badly to you and about you when you’re not around.

Does this still sound good to you?

I know some wounded healers/spiritual martyrs are already trying to say that “Yes. I am here to serve.”

But being a spiritual teacher is not about being a doormat. That does not serve anyone.

You’ll only be walked on. Your students will not learn much except to be a doormat to the whims of life and broken people.

Lost in a Savior Complex

When the Teacher Is Ready, the Students Will Appear?

I initially believed that students pretty much started appearing almost as soon as I announced on my blog that I was a spiritual teacher in 2010. My doors weren’t kicked down, but students appeared. Over time, as I’ve completed important aspects of my own work, I’ve realized that I situated myself at an amazing crossroads in the Internet world.

The start of people looking for serious spiritual guidance had begun or was beginning in 2010.

I also understood/understand search engine optimized content.

This was not Divine chance.

This was surrendering to reality and using the social tools that were available to me.

As such, I want to emphasize that things “don’t just happen.”

If something seems easy in your life or your spiritual teaching, someone else did the hard work for you.

It’s easy for you to read this on your phone because of millions of workhours, tons of infrastructure, and billions or trillions of currency put into creating this system.

You didn’t just find me.

This blog post got put out in plainsight for you by society’s choice.

What happens when things aren’t so easy for you? Do you quit because it is not “flowing?”

Also…

There are very real business decisions to make if you want to be a part-time or full-time spiritual teacher.

How will you consciously market yourself?

How will you not limit yourself in being seen?

Competing for attention is part of being a full-time spiritual teacher.

It’s all starting to sound less glorious, isn’t it?

The Path to a Dream Job

Your Students Will Have Major Ego Issues

You’re going to have many students with issues.

Most people come to a spiritual teacher to solve a problem.

They don’t come to realize spiritual freedom.

Typically, they think spiritual freedom will magically fix that problem.

You’re going to have to be a detective to find out what the real problem is.

For example, a physician may have a patient complain about neck pain. When they look deeper in a holistic way, they may find that the person’s pelvis and spine are misaligned.

Get to the root issue, and the other issues goes away.

That’s part of why doing your work is so key. You need to be clear, know how to get to root issues, and not get deluded by delusional spiritual students.

If you’re not clear, you’ll get in trouble. There’s so many people who think they have to teach or heal the minute they’ve had even a flavor of truth or a brief glimpse of a spiritual awakening. But they can get triggered and emotionally drained. Then they can’t give to anyone. And they don’t know what’s happening.

Well, they got going before they had their own foundation set.

It’s always good to finish building your own home before inviting people into it. But once it is built, then you have to figure out how open the doors should be. You may be surprised at how often you have to close the doors.

Oh.

I bet that doesn’t sit well with the spiritual martyr/doormats.

You’re a human being.

You have limits.

There is cruelty in this world.

Surrender means accepting that and taking appropriate action.

Learning About More Than Your Own Ego Issues

There’s a lot that goes in to dissolving your ego.

That’s not enough.

You also have to be able to help a wide variety of people dissolve their unique egos.

You will need to understand many ego issues that you don’t even know exist.

If you’ve never experienced scarcity fears, how will you help someone with that issue?

What about sexual trauma?

Narcissistic abuse?

Neglect and emotional abandonment?

Nutritional trauma?

Self-cause financial impoverishment?

There’s a lot going on for a lot of people.

Also, how many layers of social illusion are you still stuck in?

Have you unlearned hyper-independence?

Have you unlearned your valuation system? (That’s how you inherently place value on everything to decide what to do or not to do.)

Have you unlearned your likes and dislikes and created new ones?

How about resolving codependence and enabling that shows up as being a “nice” person in this culture? You’re not going to be a nice person as a spiritual freedom teacher. You’re going to learn what it means to operate from unconditional love.

Does the deep tissue massage therapist seem nice when they’re bearing down their elbow into stuck fascia?

This work is a lot like that.

Many Levels of Learning to be a Spiritual Freedom Teacher

There’s so much more than talking about spiritual ideas and helping people meditate. Truly, if you want to just do that, be a Lord or Lady of Order or a Coping Spiritual Teacher as mentioned above.

Some of the skillsets you’ll need to develop to not only break people out of illusion, but to also help them re-imagine and re-pattern themselves to truly realize spiritual freedom include and are not limited to:

• Cheerleading and celebrating
• Disciplining and scolding
• Selling concepts and practices
• Investigating
• Holding space and being mentally, emotionally, and physically clear
• Health advising
• Career advising
• Practitioner advising (you’ll likely send a lot of people to therapy/back to therapy)
• Instructing incrementality (giving people small steps to succeed at to gradually build them up), and a Hell of a lot more.

If you choose to do this full-time, you’ll need a suite of business skills, or you’ll need to hire someone to do this for you.

There’s also a whole lot to talk about with money.

How to Consciously Use Money

That’s for another time and for those whom I’d mentor.

Get to Work

In short, I encourage you to get to work and to use the many resources that are available on this blog and on my YouTube channel to help you truly know you and to realize spiritual freedom for those who want to be spiritual freedom teachers.

Jim’s YouTube Channel

There is a lot of nitty-gritty, but this overview should offer greater clarity about what this work entails.

If you are interested in being mentored by me, here are some details on that path. However, I only work with the most serious and dedicated people who are interested in being spiritual freedom teachers.

Jim Tolles’s Spiritual Teacher Mentorship Program

Updated 9/2/2025