Are you my teacher?

I've been on the spiritual path for a number of years now, and I've encountered numerous teachers, and I've learned a lot from all of them, but I've never felt that feeling that people often describe upon meeting their Teacher, their guru with a capital G. Ram Dass just sobbed at the feet of his guru, having only just met him. I want that. I admit it. 

Margaret Mahler, the famous psychoanalyst, would say that I, like most human beings, am still struggling with the process of separation-individuation that I began in late infancy, and that because I have not completed that process, I need an idealized external object in order to feel okay, or fully alive. Whatever the case, about two weeks ago, I took a yoga class from a Sikh yoga teacher here in LA and by the end of the class, I felt like the boundaries of my heart were dissolving. Chanting near him, I was able to trust his voice so completely that I felt as if I was actually listening, hearing another voice, for the first time. I was able to allow my body to completely absorb the sound of his voice, and when I sang or chanted, I felt like my voice was flowing out of my throat like water. Without conscious effort, I sang harmony. There was a dissolving of the boundaries between my body and the room that reminded me of the ecstasy I felt after giving birth to, and nursing, my daughter.  

Two weeks passed and I didn't see him again, and I wondered what it would be like when I did. So I took my second class with him on Tuesday night, and it was the same. I told him what was happening to me, and he talked about how anything I'm seeing in him is my own divine nature reflected back at me. Teachers are mirrors, awakeners of what has been sleeping inside us. "So, are you my teacher?" I asked. He shrugged, "I don't know." 

I came home to my Robert Johnson book, Owning Your Own Shadow and was immediately immersed in his examination of the process of falling in love. "To fall in love is to project the most noble and infinitely valuable part of one's being onto another human being." He goes on to say that in the west, we do this in romantic relationships, while in the Eastern world, it is "confined to the relationship between a guru and his student." When I think of this teacher, I vacillate between feeling an ancient and intense longing and the complete fulfillment of that intense longing. When I am with him, I am in some kind of internal free fall that would normally be terrifying but because he is there it is bliss. If this belongs to me, this bliss, why am I projecting it onto him? 

I don't want to deny the power I feel in this teacher's presence, but I also don't want to abnegate self responsibility. Or rather, I do want to abnegate self responsibility, as badly as I've ever wanted anything, but I know that's dangerous behavior. And so I keep sobering myself up with the idea that I am just projecting what Johnson calls the "golden" part of my shadow--the light I refuse to own as mine--onto him. I counteract this by creating my own disillusionment, pinching myself awake from the dream of being saved by another. 

As I sit with this dilemma, I sit in pain. Instead of dissolved boundaries, my heart feels raw and arthritic. I wonder if I will ever heal from the hurts of my childhood--the abandonment at eleven months, the mental and verbal abuse. I wonder if stepping into the pain will kill me. I can't do this alone. I long for my savior, my knight, my guru. I want to run into his arms and be healed. Mahler would say I long for my mother, for those blissful early days of complete merger with her, for however long they lasted. I continually find myself in the middle of the primal wound, the moment when everything shifted from good to bad. The way it must have felt to be left at eleven months old. This meeting with this teacher has put me there. In the mirror he provides, I see myself hopelessly lost, and blissfully found, and lost again. 

Johnson writes, "At critical moments in life it is always possible to sort out what belongs to one and what does not. There is a moment of sanity when decision is possible." I feel myself there.