How to Tell If a Spiritual Teacher Is Trustworthy: 7 Questions

A trustworthy teacher leaves you more able to think without them. Everything else, the warmth, the presence, the depth of the talks, can be real in a teacher who is quietly making you smaller. The seven questions below help you see whether a teacher is making you more able to think without them, and none of them needs inside information. You answer them from what you can see.

I didn't ask any of them during the seven years I spent in an organization that turned out to be cult-like, and I would have answered most of them wrong if someone had asked me. Later I practiced for more than twenty years in a tradition that welcomed questions, and for a stretch I was an instructor myself, so I've seen these questions from both sides of the room. They're the questions in the free guide; the guide adds the specific warning signs and good signs for each one.

1. Can I disagree with this teacher and still be welcome?

In the first organization, disagreement wasn't a position you could hold. There was understanding, and there was not understanding yet, so anyone who disagreed simply hadn't reached the level where it would make sense. Questioning something meant your consciousness needed work. A healthy room has space for a dissent that stays in the room. If disagreeing with your teacher feels like disloyalty, that feeling is information, and it's worth more than any explanation you're given for it.

2. What happens to people who leave?

Listen to how a group talks about the people who walked out. Ours had a phrase for it: stepping out meant walking into the lion's den, and a few times a year someone would update the story of a former member who was now said to be miserable, sick or lost. A group that needs its ex-members to be cautionary tales is telling you what it thinks of the door. In a healthier place, leaving is treated as an ordinary decision. Whether the people you know can leave without being explained away says more about the group than anything it says about itself.

3. Is my growth measured by my experience or by my position?

For a while I took my place in the organization as a sign of progress. I was trusted with more, included in more, closer to the center. I thought the group was recognizing my spiritual development. It was recognizing my utility, and what we called advancement was mostly becoming more invested. The test is whether you'd describe your growth in terms of what changed in you or in terms of where you now stand. Watch for it in yourself too. Devotion to a practice can turn into devotion to a position surprisingly fast, even among volunteers with no official ranks at all.

4. Do I have full access to information, or is knowledge "reserved"?

The practice I was given at the start was presented as simple. Then, a few weeks in, I learned there were elements I'd missed, each with consequences I couldn't check, and none of it felt like a demand. It felt like a beginner finally being let in on the details. The list never closed; there was always one more thing I hadn't done correctly yet. A group that releases its basic terms in stages, after you've committed, has decided what you're allowed to know before you agreed to anything. Ask what the next level costs, in money and in time, before you're standing on it.

5. Am I becoming more capable of thinking for myself?

This is the question the other six serve. If someone had asked me during those years whether I was thinking for myself, I would have said yes and meant it. The evidence pointed the other way. Once, in front of a room, a teacher congratulated me for turning down something nobody had offered me yet, and I went along with the decision he had just made for me. A good teacher works in the opposite direction: they want you to outgrow your need for them. So look at the small decisions. Are you making more of them yourself than you did a year ago, or fewer?

6. How does the teacher handle being wrong?

None of my essays has the scene this question asks for, a teacher caught in a mistake and owning it. What I can describe is the opposite arrangement: in a system built so that every success belongs to the method and every failure belongs to you, the teacher can't be wrong by design. Ask the simple version out loud: is there anyone here who would tell the teacher they're wrong, and has it ever happened?

7. Would I recommend this to someone I love?

I didn't ask this one either. Later, my mother told me how much she had suffered during that period, watching me disappear into something she didn't understand and couldn't reach. She had been running the test the whole time, from outside, without a name for it. If you'd hesitate to send someone you love, especially someone vulnerable, into the room you sit in every week, take the hesitation seriously. It has usually noticed something you haven't put into words yet.

Asking them again once you're inside

The answers change. A group can pass all seven the year you join and fail three of them five years later, after it has grown, or after you have, and by then you're the one with the most reasons not to notice. I saw the warning signs clearly and stayed about six months anyway, so I no longer trust a single check. About once a month I run a short test of my own on whatever I'm committed to at the time; its first question is nearly the first one here, with "respect" where this one says "welcome". It takes a few minutes, and the uncomfortable answers are the useful ones.

Before you judge the teacher

Two warnings that point the other way. First, the questions are about how a teacher and a group behave, not about how they look. I once closed a video within a second because the speaker looked old and tired, and I once judged a teacher's credentials by the furniture in his house. Both times I was answering a question nobody had asked. Second, checking can become its own trap. Verification is good for outside facts; turned on your own decisions, it can become a way of never making one.

Where this page stops

These questions are for staying awake while you follow someone, or while you decide whether to. They won't diagnose a group for you, and three or more uncomfortable answers aren't proof of anything on their own. They're a reason to look closer. If you've already left a group and the questions are still echoing, the trail Life After Leaving a Cult picks up from there.