my one spiritual mentoring, its cruel end, and my inability to find another
icon: "spiritual (a photo of a snow leopard with (edited) violet eyes staring straight into the camera)"
Have you ever had a spiritual mentor? if so, what was the relationship like, and if you are no longer close or in contact, was there anything specific that caused the disconnect (aside from moving away from the religion/spiritual practice in general)? (from here)
I've never had a personal one, but I think that my ex-pastor was a spiritual mentor to me in that I admired, learned from, and engaged with them on spiritual issues. Our relationship was me listening to their sermons and going up after sometimes to mention a bit that was especially meaningful or ask a question about something that wasn't clear. I took notes, applied things to my life, and felt like I grew as a person through it. This was true for about 13 years.
Then they preached about 'witnessing' (xtian-speak for trying to convert people) and said it was the most important thing. This contradicts what Jesus said is the most important thing (loving God, others, and yourself), so I went up and asked how those things could be reconciled (thinking that I must have misunderstood something). This person then got very defensive and started attacking my life, saying I wasn't doing enough in this that and the other, and told me that they weren't my pastor. That was the end of that. (the whole story)
Since then I have tried to find people who seemed ahead of me in the direction I want to go, but I haven't had much luck. I have a unusual approach to spirituality in that I treat it as a practical balance of the pragmatic and ethereal, but a lot of people either don't put the pragmatic in their spirituality or they don't explore spiritually because they're focused on the pragmatic and don't hold the ethereal as a priority. To compound that, I reject hierarchy and gender but not the concept of deities -- yet I don't consider deities at all central to my beliefs. This is an extremely unusual spiritual attitude.
I meet people who are more advanced than me, but not people who are more advanced in the ways that I want to grow. They have to exist, I'm sure, but I have no idea how I might find one.