In my life, I have had many teachers, people who took me from the point where we met to guide me to critical turning points; where everything I knew about myself had to be forged in fire that either it dissolved, evaporated within the intensity of the fire of the cosmic chaos that birthed it, or it integrated its essence into my core, granting the sense of a perfect rebirth of soul and body, tempering a quality of Consciousness within me so profound that all I could do afterwards was move forward with ineffable strength and grace.
I find it harder to part with them than to discover them. I recognize the signs, yet I hesitate to close the circle. For, on one level, every teacher-student relationship is a place of safety and intimacy, earned over the years; and at the same time, it is a convenient excuse to postpone taking my own responsibility, even that of my own teaching, should that be a part of my future path.
The first awareness comes as a small tightening in the center of the chest that whispers, “look at me”, with understanding, clarity, and bring along your composure, because you will need it. The mind resists this movement; it begins to procrastinate.
I examine my inner investment, the years I sat faithfully to listen, to practice, and to apply what I understood, with hope. Over time, I left behind so many details and techniques and now focus on the essential phases; those in which the teacher would not allow any aspect of my pseudo-ego to gain further nourishment, showing me instead that this is as far as I am allowed to carry it in my life.
I, who listened to no one but the voice of my own consciousness, had to sit with these people, time after time, and listen, often humblingly. It is their devotion to a way of life unlike anything else I have known that moves me. And their penetrating and vivid understanding of the most difficult human traits, known only to a true ascetic and cultivated consciously by only a small portion of humanity, weaving together our universal tradition.
I was illuminated by the light of their life’s work. Within it, I discovered my most stable footholds toward spiritual freedom and earthly self-realisation. I benefited, to the extent I could endure the resonance of their faith; high enough to converse with the Divine and become its expression on Earth, deep enough to encompass what the spiritual training strives to explore, broad enough to include all the different manifestations of the mind seeking to understand all that is visible and invisible in a conqueringly comprehensive way.
Only when I began to apply the principles they taught did I finally understand the resilience of their patience. They made it seem easy, though it demanded immense energy and study; and the strength to keep asking of yourself to continue walking into the unknown, contrary to every survival instinct that wants you safe, fed, and swaddled, a child in a child’s world.
Every spiritual training is paradoxical; you follow in the footsteps of all who wrestled with the darkest within them, yet they continued regardless of what they saw. And this inscribes within you a new frequency of being that will not let you rest until you find your own “tone” on the spiritual path.
Everything I endured, I endured only for the beauty of love; that sacred, unspeakable beauty when someone shows you, as clearly as they can without ever stating it directly, who you are. How difficult it must be for someone to do that for me… Not even the people who gave me life could fully withstand it. As for acquaintances and friends, most of us usually move through an overfilled bubble of polished lukewarmness, where nothing essential is ever spoken.
It took many years, and all of myself, to learn how to endure as they did; their teaching stripped me bare, decomposed me, and recomposed me. I had to die in doses and be reborn in doses; as many as I could bear, and as many as I could not. Relentlessly, each time.
Desperately slowly, different aspects of myself began to realign. Unexpectedly, the world around me became multidimensional as my senses awoke from their slumber, and my discernment developed from consciousness, not from logic. Inevitably, the deeper I moved into the realm of essential wisdom, the more I began to see the stages of completing of a primary, foundational cycle of training.
And where once I sought only to secure their presence in my life by any means, slowly I began to speak of cost. No longer dedicating all my vacations to yet another exceptional training. No longer locking myself in rooms on weekends while the sun outside opens the heart more than anything else. No longer living in a circle where all my friends are only fellow students. No longer paying money to feel alive, interesting, enough.
I learned the theory thoroughly, in all its dimensions. I saw my case in its entirety, in its light and shadow. I understood, experientially, multiple levels of life and the laws of the world, yet it never ends. The Field is eternal and inexhaustible. With some, I journeyed deeper; I can now practice much of what they taught me. Still, our companionship together ends here. From now on, my Soul longs for another path. For just as once it was time to leave the womb, so now it is time to leave the womb of foundational teaching.
Every birth is different; some infants stay until the last moment, some are born all at once, some must literally be brought out. There is no rule for all. But a birth that does not bring forth the life it carries becomes death. An ending that does not close cannot become the new beginning that inevitably arrives.
In studentship, I gave them permission to use my energy, more each time, from the simplest things to the deepest, and after years even to the innermost. A gesture of dizzying trust, whose thought alone frightens me. A risk… For a while, this was necessary. How else would I see all my blind spots if no one held a reflective mirror for me and restored my relationship with Light?
Having received, at full cost, all they had to teach me, any desire to prolong our interaction within the same framework now conceals a false hope: that the solution I seek lies in one more meeting, one more training, one more dialectical coexistence. This now weakens me.
They did what was theirs to do, and that is already enough. Nothing else is owed by anyone. And so the path remains open and accessible for both of us.
I recognise that another cycle of my studentship closes when I begin to see the human being more than the teacher. I allow myself to take them down from the pedestal of authority, to laugh, to critique, and to overlook their flaws, their missteps, and their personal disconfirmations.
I see them with all that I admire, with all the strong emotions our relationship brought into my life, and I thank them for everything, while also seeing their current struggles, their fatigue, what they did not say but now I read in the air, knowing it was already there from our first meeting.
And I feel the urgent need to remain in my place, in my empowerment, and no longer relinquish even a piece of it. Not even to those I owe so much. For there is no spiritual training in which the students are weakened by the teacher.
I leave them with pain. Because the beauty of That which is greater than me reminds me of my finite nature, of this endless mortality that will not allow me to attain perfection. And they are the living reminder of the preannounced decay and imperfection of human presence. And also because their love comforted me. And out there, beyond their spiritual fold, it may be cold, and things may be difficult and chaotic.
I leave them with the awareness that I owe them nothing, and they owe me nothing. For this is the way of the path; the calling lifts it forward, and the longing for freedom and wisdom unfolds it.
I leave them with love for myself. By leaving them, I embody a new form of faith in myself. I declare emphatically, in every direction, that I trust myself, come rain or shine, from the Chaos of Existence to my simplest actions.
The arrival of the end is simultaneously a culmination of the perpetual personal request to heal this suppressed, multifaceted, omnipresent sense of insecurity, smallness, and unworthiness. By leaving them, I leave behind this heavy, dismissive energetic shroud in my past. I do not renounce it; I remember it as a reference point for what I no longer need to carry within me, which Gods not to believe in, and which life not to surrender to slavishly.
The basic or first essential level of apprenticeship is the space of veils, where everything falls, one by one, as necessary. It is the period when the one and only core begins to appear; faint at first, yet authentic, cosmic, mine. And whatever essence this core holds grows slowly; as the internal field of vision clears, focuses, opens, I see how everything that clouded it now quietly recedes. In this space, I begin to look without fear and discern what I truly deserve.
Then comes the moment of consciously parting from a great love; this is an act of the hero within us. I become once again the heroine of my life. With all my courage, with coherent intention, with clear compassion, and with purified faith.
And so I leave them; sometimes with a warm, sincere handshake; sometimes with a gift; sometimes I embrace them warmly, softly saying, “Thank you for all the Love.” Sometimes, with a quiet gaze, I simply walk away. But always, within me, I bow deeply, honoring them sincerely, unabashedly, erotically even, for what they brought me is Life itself renewed within me. Then, I step back mentally, change direction, and I am again free and self-empowered to stand before my own path.
I call equally to all positions of life within and listen anew to the times: is it time for action or for silence? Where should I go and where not? When will I be a student again, when a teacher?
And I say yes where I feel the call holds love for me and my life, and no not to all the transient Sirens who care only to drain my energy.
And I begin to vibrate with the magnificent experience of discernment that they instilled in me at a cellular level. Thus, I move autonomously forward, sometimes within my wisdom, sometimes within my folly.
Yes, this is how I leave them.
With intimacy within me, more free, more human, and ready to love again, as they did.