A: A meditation teacher does three things. The first contribution of a teacher is to be a reminder. As Hazrat Inayat Khan put it, "My presence stimulates in your heart that feeling which must always be kept alive." In a world that is so strongly outer-oriented, it is inspiring to know someone for whom their inner condition is their priority. As everyone else is busy living, he or she is concerned about living from the heart. Teachers make mistakes, but still their aspirations, and perhaps some parts of their lives, are exemplary. They are our models.

Second, the teacher knows a method of meditation that they can impart to others. In learning meditation, there is some technique to be learned. Some methods, like Heart Rhythm Meditation, are complex and have steps and stages to go through. Questions arise when you attempt meditation, which I believe is the most difficult and most worthwhile thing that one can learn to do. We get blocked and stuck at crucial points, which are fortunately well-known to a teacher. It's so difficult that meditation can't actually be taught, it must be caught. We catch it from our teachers and, to some degree, other students. Meditation, like swiming, is difficult to learn without a teacher, and books don't help much.

The third contribution of a meditation teacher is to "Open the Window." Beyond the example in life, beyond the teaching of a technique, there is an intervention that the teacher performs that makes it possible for a student to go beyond their usual, solitary experience. The teacher activates the connection, which always existed, between the student and The One and Only Being. What the student experiences is then a result of their own, direct, internal connection.

One teacher describes the contribution of a teacher to a student even more modestly than I have. He tells a parable of a bird that one day flew into a temple and couldn't get out. The bird flew from window to window, battering himself, in a vain effort to escape. Then, exhausted, the bird rested on the windowsill of the only open window without realizing it was different from the others. A teacher, who had been watching the bird's frantic efforts, immediately clapped his hands. The startled bird jumped through the window and was free.

Every student of meditation has their own story about an experience they had in a group of meditators that they had not had alone up to that time. But whatever you experience with a teacher will eventually be reproduced in solitude. You have no more dependency upon a meditation instructor than you have upon a swimming instructor. Once you've got it, you can do it on your own. But to go farther, you may need another boost from a teacher.

We all need reminders as we try to integrate our meditation experience into our lives, and those reminders need to be close and frequent. I propose we use the beat of our hearts as our reminder. When you get used to feeling your heartbeat in meditation, a deep conditioning is developed that will result in spontaneous occurrences of conscious heartbeats during the day. Every time you have one of these moments of conscious heartbeats, it will remind you of your heart, the real teacher, beating within your chest.