Do I need a meditation teacher?

You can begin meditating tomorrow with nobody beside you, on an ordinary chair, for a few minutes, coming back to the breath each time the mind drifts. A teacher earns their place later, when the instructions you started with stop answering the questions your practice raises, and in traditions where a method is passed on from person to person.

When I was starting out I first found a yoga school, where we meditated a lot. I also tried a bunch of other traditions and schools, and read a bunch of books about spirituality and meditation, some with instructions on how to meditate. When I look back on those years I can clearly say that if I had not practised together with other practitioners and a master, my road would have been much more unclear and bumpy. Yet I think the answer to the question is no. You don’t need a teacher to start meditating. But without one, it might take you a very long time to figure out what meditation is about and how to approach it.

Starting on your own

The first trap for a beginner alone is reading a busy mind as failure. Mindful’s guide says people assume they’re doing it wrong because the thoughts keep coming. Sharon Salzberg expected her attention to hold for about 800 breaths the first time she sat; it held for one. The NHS beginner guide treats wandering as part of learning and adds that people with plenty of experience still drift. The practice lives in the moment you notice and come back.

Without a teacher, a few things fill part of the gap:

• A guiding voice. Recordings and apps lead you through a sit as it happens. Calm’s guide suggests this helps most at the start, or when silence feels like too much, and that it makes practice less lonely.
• Company. Psychology Today notes that meditation may work better with social support, whether a structured group or a friend or family member. Mindful lists sitting alone, sitting with like-minded friends, or joining a taught training such as MBSR or MBCT.
• A little instruction. Wikipedia’s meditation entry mentions research in which plain spoken and video training increased how long people meditated.

Where a teacher starts to matter

Two reasons sit in the note above. One is time, the years it can take to work out what meditation is for. The other is that some paths open through a teacher’s instruction, and the odds of finding your own way into them are close to none.

The traditions bear out the second reason. Ornstein, quoted in Wikipedia’s meditation entry, observed that most techniques are only “artificially separable” from the whole system of practice and belief they grew in. A monk’s sitting belongs to a day of codified rules and shared rituals inside a monastery. Even within one faith, Taylor noted, schools and individual teachers teach different kinds of meditation, so a method lifted from a book reaches you without the setting it was made for. The Art of Living puts it historically: sages once taught meditation only to students they judged qualified.

If you do go looking, a teacher over video counts, and Mindful offers four plain tests: whether the two of you click, whether they’re open and reachable, whether their grasp of practice runs deep, and whether they could treat you as a friend.

What the research can and can’t say

No study in the research behind this page compares people who learned with a teacher against people who taught themselves, so nobody can put a figure on what a teacher adds. What science has measured is programs. Goyal and colleagues (2014) pooled 47 trials with 3,515 participants and found moderate evidence that mindfulness programs eased anxiety, depression and pain, with no sign that they beat other active treatments such as drugs or exercise. Khoury and colleagues (2015) found MBSR moderately effective for stress, anxiety and depression in healthy adults, but the studies varied widely, and the authors asked for more work on which elements of the program do the most. A teacher is one of those elements, and the question is still open.

Van Dam and colleagues (2018) warned that weak methods and misinformation around mindfulness could leave people harmed, misled or disappointed, and they count possible adverse effects among the areas research still has to map. If practice stirs up something hard that doesn’t settle, or you’re living with anxiety, depression or trauma, talk to an experienced teacher or a mental health professional before pushing on alone.

When the student is ready

There is a saying which goes something along the lines of: when a student is ready, a master presents himself. It was 100% like this in my life, and I hope the same for you.