If we are really lucky now and then, we can come across spiritual teachers/guides who have a good grasp of their complex rich humanity on all levels. That is to say people who can have continuing reflexive insights into the dimensions of their experience and are able to in a very grounded way see the living and continuing role the ego self still carries within their own post awakening story. Its much, much more common that our road will include contact with teachers who may seem well disposed but whose thought and emotional mind-sets have understandably for the larger part succumbed to the illusion of the ‘specialness’ of their experience: An illusion which renders them less able to understand that their expanded experience still also inevitably carries all the aptitudes, prejudices and habits of thought and emotion from their past. What seems to be the ideal to me is the former - the ‘feet on the ground, head in the clouds’ teacher, who is comfortable in their own skin, who sees the role of their relationship with the student not as a means to feed the idea their own special status, and is self regulating in this. A teacher who looks outwards ( having done their own work inwards) with heart and insight and is intent on seeing the equal truth of the true spark of divinity we all possess, and on gently fanning this, when moments arise. Someone who sees the teaching role as much as part of their own education as anything else. It is my deep good fortune to understand that Ishtar Howell is such a person. Someone who continues to surprise me with a reservoir of useful human and yes magical capabilities. To me he is a living reservoir of understandings and diffuse creative insights all wrapped up in being of gentle modesty, whose first rule is do no harm. I could not have wanted for a better ally and friend to help me through layers of emergence.

— David Bingham, Liverpool