I’m a teacher and a preacher
but I don’t want followers or devotees.
I don’t want more and more students packing my yoga classes
or a congregation filling a stadium week after week.
I think that would be failure.
Failure of my guidance and my teaching.

I’m not aiming for copies of my brand of spirituality,
for others folllowing my path
or quoting me in arguments to defend their position –
political, personal or otherwise.
I can’t think of a greater disappointment.

My deep desire is to call to those who need me now;
to anyone who may be guided by words that I bring forth –
that my translations,
my experience,
my transmission of a small ray of light
may help someone to notice their own
and see the path illuminated before them
not by me but by their glorious shining Self.

And then they’ll take off, I dream,
on their own journey of the heart,
a little more awake to their spiritual nature.
They’ll know what to practice and when,
that will lead to their ultimate, inevitable enlightenment.
They’ll come to visit,
my former students, my audience, my followers,
as teachers and healers and peacemakers.

This is how we’ll heal the world;
by lighting small fires in the open minds that come to us,
then watching those fires spread and burn down the world we know, revealing beneath,
the Kindgom,
the Truth,
Heaven on Earth.