Loneliness on the Spiritual Path

Why, after awakening, do we want everyone else awake too?

There was a period of time after my awakening when I was pushy about the growth of people around me. Now, I do think that healing work is part of my path, that it’s one of the few things that bring me fulfillment and purpose in this life. Helping other people grow out of the suffering that binds them is a true soul desire for me.

However, that needs to happen only when someone is drawn to and resonates with whatever insight I feel led to share. It shouldn’t come from my need to have someone understand me now that I feel set apart by my experience of spiritual awakening. And for some time, I can admit, that’s exactly where it came from.

Loneliness Before Awakening

I have this pervasive need to belong, to not be alone. I’ve never had a problem spending time with myself; it’s deeper than that. I don’t want to be existentially alone: in my perspective, in my experience, in my knowing.

For much of my life, I've felt like something of an outsider. I was a chameleon, able to change to suit my environment, to be likable, acceptable to everyone, without ever really feeling total belonging anywhere. I felt uncomfortable, alien, and I desperately wanted to be part of a whole, one indistinguishable cog in a beautiful system of working machinery that provided a place I would always, always fit without effort.

I generally try not to judge myself for this feeling. I think some of it might be very Piscean of me; my ability to be so changeable and my malleable identity make it easy to feel like I fit nowhere.

We all are that “oneness”, and so at a soul level, the more in tune we are, the more we want to experience that wholeness. It’s not so strange, then, for me to yearn to return to that.

Some of it may be part of my own soul’s work, to simply accept that this experience of aloneness can’t be avoided, no matter how aware of oneness I become. It is what it is.

Whatever it is, that deep aching for belonging, I don’t think it’s so uncommon. We’re social creatures.

Of course, even when we feel it, we’re never alone because we all share the experience of being human. I try to remind myself that.

Loneliness After Awakening

After awakening, it only got worse. It’s my feeling that after awakening, the experience of separation of any kind becomes more acute. Again, I’m not speaking of physical separation, I’m speaking of the more esoteric kind.

Coming into an embodied awareness of what we are (that is nothing, emptiness, in my experience, though some might call it oneness or consciousness on the other side of the coin — words can’t contain it anyway, but we try) can lead to a feeling of connectedness to all things. This is usually blissful.

Finally, after having spent most of our lives trapped in the ego-mind’s perception that we are this body, separate from everything and everyone else, we are free.

Then, of course, that blissful oneness is gone (whether it takes two minutes, two months, or two years, it always leaves eventually). You're unceremoniously dropped back into your mundane existence, you can’t feel that connectedness anymore, and your experience of separation, which you’d grown so used to inhabiting, is no longer comfortable or desirable. You want the oneness back.

Or maybe (and this is how it was for me) your embodied awareness of what you are begins a crumbling away of everything that you are not. We often find, as that happens, we identify less with the people around us. What we used to care about, desires that were tied to our ego-identity, like the drive for success, are gone.

We see people going about their day-to-day lives, doing the laundry, washing the dog, worrying about school, about work, and we think: “They think all of this is reality, but it’s not. This is all false. This is all a dream. None of this matters.”

This can be incredibly isolating. Suddenly, everything about our lives and the lives around us feels small, insignificant. And we feel like the only ones who see how pointless it all feels. No one gets it.

We may even know people that are spiritual in mind, that understand the concepts of oneness and ego death. But these are just concepts and there’s a difference between practicing spirituality and having an embodied spiritual awakening.

Even if we try to explain, people won’t get it unless they’ve seen it for themselves. Usually, for whatever reason, the people who have aren’t our friends and family, and they aren’t physically around us. So, it’s lonely.

Awakening isn’t special; it isn’t anything other than a remembrance of what we truly are. And not awakening, in the grand scheme, doesn’t matter because whether we see it clearly or not with the mind, we are what we are. Still, it’s like taking off a VR helmet and looking around to see yourself standing in a sea of people that still have that helmet on as far as the eye can see.

It’s lonely.

Wanting Others To Awaken

Here is where, I think, the burning desire to drag everyone around me into greater awareness of themselves came from. It wasn’t so clean and altruistic as wanting them to be free of their suffering, although I did want that and still do want that.

It was a voice in the back of my mind that said: I know what’s keeping them bound. I can see it. I can see what’s blocking their soul’s growth. And maybe me telling them won’t get them to awakening, but it will get them closer and the closer they are to awakening, the closer I am to not being alone anymore.

It wasn’t always conscious, but eventually, I started to understand the feeling, the voice behind my ever-present need to challenge the egos of people in my life. I started to understand that when I shared insights from that place, it wasn’t always the right time for that person to hear what I had to say. It didn’t lead to growth, just frustration for me and them.

I thought I was doing them a service, trying to pull them along on this journey after me. But the truth is that everyone has their unfolding, their process, and it happens at a pace that’s right for them. I have no right to interfere with that unless I’m asked to, invited to advise or guide them.

“You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop.”

— Rumi

How To Combat Loneliness

I’ve begun to make my peace with the idea that much of this spiritual awakening journey is a solitary one. There are monasteries, temples, and ashrams where we can find spiritual practitioners, and there, perhaps, we might feel less out of place because those people will get the vague outlines of what we’ve come to realize.

But even there, having actually had an awakening is likely to feel like an anomaly. Seekers haven’t yet awakened, after all. Awakening is where the seeker ceases.

This is not the sweet, Hallmark, togetherness version of awakening people like to think exists. The gritty reality is that even though awakening is not extraordinary, for whatever reason, everyone in the world hasn’t had an embodied experience of it yet. And that’s okay. It is what it is.

I’ve also better learned how to use my chameleon tendencies to meet people where they are. Yes, it’s somewhat of a mask, but aren’t we all always wearing a mask?

It can be fun now, putting them on, like playing dress-up with an old box of identities left hidden backstage — a feather boa here, a fedora there. And yes, most of the time, I couldn't care less what we’re talking about. None of it matters to me, anymore.

What does, though, is the connectedness that begins to hum beneath the words. Because when I see someone, really see them, when I’m present, their soul shines through. It’s there, no matter how smothered or dormant.

Instead of seeing it and trying to drag it out into the light before they’re ready, I just see it, now. And I acknowledge that no matter where they are in their soul’s journey (awakened, unawakened, free, bound) they still are that which we all are. We are both that and nothing more. And so…for a brief moment, we’re connected.

For a brief moment, it’s enough.

❤

If you’d like to chat more about this, go ahead and drop a comment. I love having discussions down there. And if you want to make sure you don’t miss anything I write, feel free to sign up to be a Medium member.