The spiritual teacher is a modern and mostly unregulated category covering those who teach religious or contemplative practice outside, or alongside, the established traditions.
Teaching outside the institutions
The category gathers a wide and loosely bounded range of figures who offer instruction in meditation, contemplative practice, self-realisation or spiritual growth, often drawing on one or several traditions but operating outside the ordination and oversight of any established religious institution, so that the standing of a spiritual teacher rests on recognition by students and on reputation rather than on any conferred authority. The rise of the category reflects modern conditions: the movement of religious ideas across cultures, the weakening of institutional religion in many places, and a market in which teaching is offered and sought directly.
Freedom and its risks
The absence of institutional oversight gives the spiritual teacher freedom to draw on many sources and to teach outside inherited structures, but it also removes the checks that ordination and hierarchy provide, and the modern history of the category includes both genuine and valuable teachers and a significant record of exploitation and abuse where unaccountable authority was claimed over followers. An honest account holds both in view. The category has no exact traditional parallel precisely because it is defined by standing apart from the traditional structures of authorisation, and it is one of the characteristic religious forms of a globalised and individualised age, in which spiritual authority is increasingly recognised directly rather than conferred by an institution.