Love Note #4: Navigating Loneliness on the Spiritual Path

Dear Ones -

A good day to you from Santa Fe, New Mexico where I am spending a few days with friends before I head into the woods for our annual men’s retreat.

Today I want to write a bit about the spiritual path and aloneness, as it’s a major theme that rises for most of us as we shed conditioned ways of being and come into living our essence.

Prior to the shift in consciousness that I experienced, I was an exceedingly active social being. As a gregarious extrovert, this was easy for me, and I filled my calendar with all manner of coffee dates, hikes, potlucks and gatherings. Imagine my surprise when spiritual deconstruction started to take away my relational capacities, and my habitual pull toward relating started to shift in dramatic ways! I no longer recognized myself as a social being and had many adjustments to make to orient to my new way of being.

The first thing I noticed as I went through deconstruction was that while I craved company, the kind of company I craved was quite rare. I found that most of what others were concerned with was not of interest to me. In fact, it was rather painful to be present for it. It was as if my system had become much more sensitive to the energetics beneath the words, and much less interested in the content that was covered. I no longer could enter conversation from only my head – my body had to come along and my body didn’t find most of what was going on in everyday discourse to be nourishing. And what I craved the most was pure being.

It took me a while to notice this and adapt to it. At first I kept my habitual socializing up, at least by making plans, but as the dates for the events came closer, I either found that I didn’t feel pulled to go, or that if I did go, it wouldn’t go well. Whatever it was that I used to find in the kind of socializing I did no longer existed, or at least, wasn’t food for me anymore. It was rather comical, as though I was going to a cupboard where the chocolate used to be, but there was no chocolate there, and yet I kept going to the cupboard for quite a while. Slowly I got the message and realized that I had outgrown a certain way of being with others.

When old ways of being with people drop away, at first there isn’t a new way, and at this point, we can face a variety of flavors of loneliness. Many of them seem to be based on developmental deficits—young places where we were left alone in the crib will rise to be digested and moved through. Times where we felt like the odd person out in elementary school will rise and we’ll wonder what’s wrong with us that we aren’t having a good time socializing any more. We might start to conclude that there’s something very wrong. And the culture will tell us, with its pop psychological advice, that we just need to get out there and be around people. But it’s not working.

This is a time that is ripe for meeting and digesting some of the emotional fuels that drive us into conditioned habits. While some things that are uncovered can be met solo, if overwhelming states rise, it’s a good time to seek the support of a trauma resolution specialist. It’s also a ripe time to turn toward the Holy and rest in our own nourishing presence. Finding sangha and spiritual community where a deeper form of connection can be supported can be useful.

I also found that things rearranged themselves and the Holy became my main squeeze. Through that unity, my eyes looked out with fullness rather than lack, and connecting with others became more of an offering, or shared play, than looking to get needs filled. The creature of the body likes puppy piles and hugs, and the young aspects of us like to be mirrored and understood, but the One that looks out of our eyes knows and loves only itself everywhere.

*This is a big topic and one I have spoken about many times. If you would like more on this particular theme, you might explore one of these videos on the topic: Solitude & Loneliness, The Gift of Solitude and Solitude & Company on the Spiritual Path.

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