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Steven Sashen is a self-help teacher and author who writes the weblog The Anti-Guru, but we read him more like an antithesis guru — a guy who asks you to consider what it would be like if you didn’t follow a guru’s thesis.

(T)his site is about discovering how to look to yourself for the answers you seek. Or, at the very least, how to see more clearly when you’re looking out at teachers or teachings that promise answers to your questions. In fact, maybe seeing clearly what’s ‘out there’ is the easiest way to discover what’s ‘in here.’

The Anti-Guru is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites, and although this is one of those selections where you’ll find an occasional typo, misspelling or misplaced punctuation mark, Sashen’s writing has a conversational quality that helps express his ideas with clarity.

A central idea in Sashen’s guru antithesis is that there are different kinds of acceptance — accepting what is, for example, as opposed to accepting that you want to change it — and that the first leads to a continuation of pain while the second leads to an energy and attention that may bring healing. The idea is part of a technique developed by his friend, meditation teacher Robert Hover, whom he discusses in his Aug. 30 entry, first addressing Hover’s critics:

(The critics are) saying, ‘Meditation is about accepting things as they are, not trying to fix or change or improve them. It’s not about getting rid of the pain; it’s about accepting the pain as it is.’

First, nobody ever asked the critics this question: ‘Why would you want to accept the pain as it is?’ If they were rigorously honest, they would answer something like, ‘So I would be okay with it.’ ‘So it wouldn’t bother me.’ Or, if they were really honest, ‘So that it can change’ . . .

With Robert’s technique, you simply start with what’s true — ‘I have a pain I want to get rid of.’ Simple. Accepting that you want to change things is a profound kind of acceptance.

In fact, Robert explains, pain itself increases the amount of energy you have available to you, an amount of energy you can’t get if you’re not aware of some pain. And the desire to get rid of the pain is like the lens that focuses that energy . . . Meditation is actually a tool developed to imitate this natural process of Pain > Energy > Focused Attention > Healing.

In other words, life can be simpler — and sweeter — than a lot of the self-help gurus would make it.

Sashen says he spent three decades following ‘paths’ recommended by the gurus — everything from Aikido to Zen — until one day, as he explains in his Aug. 14, 2006, entry . . .

I stopped nodding my head and, instead, I began tilting my head. Almost literally, instead of nodding in agreement, I took on the attitude of ‘Hmm…? What’s really going on here? Is it true?’

Since that moment, my life has never been the same.

Like a magician who shows how the trick is done, Sashen invites our skepticism about all self-help phenomena — for example, a recent one called The Secret, a belief that positive thinking and a ‘Law of Attraction’ allow our feelings to influence events in our lives.

For now, let’s not even bother analyzing the evidence that The Secret works. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t long ago that we were saying, ‘I know that sacrificing a virgin every night brings the sun back the next day . . . because the sun keeps coming back every time we sacrifice a virgin.’

Or, as he told the Toronto Star in an interview for a May 18 article:

The ’secret’ – it’s an enticing notion. It’s the carrot on the stick. If someone says, `I know the answer,’ you’re going to want that. If you tell people that the answer has been there all along, and it’s been hidden from you – well, people will beat down the doors to get that.

Like the gurus, of course, Sashen also is a teacher. Some of it involves healing through Kabbalah, a Torah-inspired set of thoughts we don’t even pretend to understand. And he teaches advanced meditation and a concept he calls Quantum Wealth.

What we find appealing about The Anti-Guru is its invitation to join the dialectic — the guru’s thesis, the anti-guru’s antithesis and possibly, through your understanding, the synthesis of a better life.

– Sid Leavitt