From Puran Bair --

When I was 27 I met my teacher, a man who would become my friend for life. The initial attraction was very personal: I thought he knew more about me than I did. What he saw in me was what I wanted to see in myself. Over the three and a half decades I knew him, he not only showed me what I had missed in myself, he taught me how to see into the hearts of others.

I valued so much the opportunities I had to speak privately with him. We would talk about the holistic path and how it works, and we would discuss the challenges and difficulties of my life and how they related to the path. From the insight and strength I received from these talks, I gained immeasurably. He became my greatest supporter, the one who knew me best, the one I could count on to help me figure out my mysteries, and the one I trusted most.

Looking back on many, many conversations, I have come to understand there were three categories of lessons and guidance he gave:

The first was help in accomplishing whatever I was engaged in. He was genuinely concerned about my worldly problems, and he also knew they were the catalysts for my growth. There were problems with my business, with my relationships, and with my health. They became his own problems and he spoke to me earnestly about them, but he always left the decisions to me. By working with me on my pressing need, he was able to help me with my heart's growth in practical ways.

Secondly, my teacher always seemed to know my path, where I was on that path, and what was next. This gave him more hope than I had for myself, for he could see long-term beyond my crises to the progress I was making as a mystic. He happily celebrated the steps I went through in "realization", the ability to understand myself and the world and the interaction between the two. But he was not a passive observer -- he urged me on by prescribing exercises I could do on my own. Some of these were very difficult, but his support allowed me to do what I couldn't have done alone.

Thirdly, he modeled a character that was more important to me in the end than anything he ever told me. He was a great man, not small or petty, a noble man, capable of putting the welfare of others ahead of his own. He treated his personality as an art form and that inspired me to try to do the same. He showed me the difference between the politeness that masks one's feelings to pretend at greatness, and the character that expresses one's heart to demonstrate its greatness. What came out of our relationship, for me, was a more whole and grand version of myself than I had known before.

When he asked Susanna and I to start a new school, I hoped we would be able to offer the valuable mentoring relationship I had known and even make mentoring the main thrust of our school, the central activity that would pull all the teaching together in a way that best suits each person. With the help of Susanna's background in counseling psychology, it's clear that's what has happened in the last eight years.

In this beautiful path of the heart we don't work alone. We have the advantage of looking for and finding all that we seek in a human form. You develop the ability to see the unlimited potential in a human heart, and then you become what you see. Your mentor is your mirror in this process, showing you all that you can recognize and inspiring you to be all that you can see.