In this season of gratitude, my thoughts turn to the gratitude I feel for the teachers I've had in my life, especially my spiritual father, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. This has led me to think about what a teacher does, a critical question for IAM, a school of meditation that trains teachers.

A teacher is a model of the result of the teaching. He or she can do something that we cannot, like cross a lake, solve a formula, or serve an exquisite meal. A meditation teacher is the proof of the meditation. It's the charm of the personality that attracts us to whatever the teacher is offering. How many college students have chosen their major so they can be like the one who teaches it? The personal example of my teacher was certainly what drew me to his teaching.

A teacher is an instructor who knows a method of action or a body of knowledge that he or she can impart to you. I think of those who taught me to row a canoe, to program a computer, to cook brown rice perfectly. I had a wrestling coach, a mentor in graduate school, and a sweetheart that first revealed to me the ecstasy of a kiss.

A meditation teacher is one who can share the steps of the method of transformation. Illumination may occur in a flash of grace, but to make it reliable there is something to be learned. Some methods, like Heart Rhythm Meditation, are complex and have steps and stages to go through. Questions will arise when you attempt meditation, the most difficult and most worthwhile thing that one can learn to do. Meditation, like swiming, is difficult to learn without a teacher, and books don't help much. We get blocked and stuck at crucial points, which are fortunately well-known to a teacher, who can suggest a new approach.

There is something else a teacher does that makes learning and performance easier in the teacher's presence. I don't think I could have learned to swim without the voice of my swimming coach; his instructions got buried in my fear, but they were resurrected by his confidence in me.

Beyond the teaching of a technique, beyond the example in life, there is an intervention that the teacher performs that makes it possible for a student to go beyond what they can do alone. My teacher used to say, "If all I had to go on was my own teaching, I could not learn to meditate. Meditation is so difficult that it can't actually be taught, it must be caught."

In meditation, we say the teacher "opens the window." We feel the difference between our meditation experience alone and our experience in a group, and again the difference between a group without a teacher present and a group with a teacher. The teacher activates the connection, which always existed, between the student and The One and Only Being. This allows the student to experience a lifting of consciousness that reveals what had not been seen before and touches what had not been felt before. I cannot speak of the gratitude I have for what I have been shown and permitted to experience from the world unseen - first through communing with my teacher.

A master teacher has an additional effect that lasts longer than the time spent in their presence. Not only can the teacher lift the consciousness of those in his or her presence, but also raise their ground level of consciousness, which we call raising realization, which is a permanent change. This may result from the teacher absorbing the disharmony in the students that clouds their minds and covers their hearts, or it may result from a transferrence of a charge of energy from the teacher's heart. I have felt both sides of this, and I feel it recurrently when I think of my eternal gratitude for the relationship beyond life that has began here in this life with my teacher and my students.