I’d say a teacher is even more important than that.
Meditation is a powerful class of techniques for examining the mind, and sometimes people struggle to deal with what they discover doing it. Meditation is not all upside, as this post suggests; plenty of people have negative experiences as part of meditation practice, although they usually, with some guidance from a teacher, see their way through them and find themselves in a better place at the end of the experience. In fact, meditation can be especially rough if you have a lot of psychological “shadow”, i.e. “stuff” or “baggage” you would normally think of working through in therapy, since meditation won’t on it’s own help with that stuff and can make the experience of it worse as you see it more clearly. A teacher can help you deal with these sorts of issues, offering advice, practices, and the compassion of another human as you deal with the negatives that can come up.
This isn’t to put anyone off meditation, just to give appropriate warning that it’s a very intimate and powerful practice that can bring up positive as well as negative experiences, and navigating that on your own can work out for some people but doesn’t for everyone.
I’d say a teacher is even more important than that.
Meditation is a powerful class of techniques for examining the mind, and sometimes people struggle to deal with what they discover doing it. Meditation is not all upside, as this post suggests; plenty of people have negative experiences as part of meditation practice, although they usually, with some guidance from a teacher, see their way through them and find themselves in a better place at the end of the experience. In fact, meditation can be especially rough if you have a lot of psychological “shadow”, i.e. “stuff” or “baggage” you would normally think of working through in therapy, since meditation won’t on it’s own help with that stuff and can make the experience of it worse as you see it more clearly. A teacher can help you deal with these sorts of issues, offering advice, practices, and the compassion of another human as you deal with the negatives that can come up.
This isn’t to put anyone off meditation, just to give appropriate warning that it’s a very intimate and powerful practice that can bring up positive as well as negative experiences, and navigating that on your own can work out for some people but doesn’t for everyone.