After what we could call spiritual awakening happens, there may arise a need to spend time alone with oneself. For me, the need for solitude felt clear and strong. The journey felt too cluttered and crowded when I was surrounded by people, even in my own home. Even in the workplace. Even when I received texts or emails with expressions of concern that felt not quite genuine to me. Because I had never felt more like myself, and yet people I had known in my past expressed that they perceived something was wrong with me for being still. But I felt the opposite: that there was maybe something deeply right going on within me. Something I felt was beyond me and important to look into. How? Simply through spending time alone studying myself.
While people may have understanding family and colleagues, my experience was different. Attempts to explain what was going on inside myself did not meet with compassion or understanding. I thought people would be happy for me and my spiritual awakening, or at least tolerant–I can say that this was not the case, in my experience. Eventually I stopped trying to explain myself when I saw that it was actually doership, or trying to force others to understand where I was coming from. I dropped it, or it just dropped away, and then the feeling happened within me of being more free to simply trust the way as it arose.
Letting go of the need for understanding, compassion, and unconditional acceptance by people from my past was extremely helpful, for me. Was it also painful? Yes. But with the newly uncovered ability to observe my thoughts and feelings, that pain was seen for what it was: something that comes and goes. As George Harrison sings, “All things must pass away.” The painful feelings did pass as I became more still and less reactive, by nothing more than what I could call grace. Solitude helped this happen, at least for me.
Being alone may not necessarily require moving to the wilderness, or retreating to remote places, or entering into a hermitage. For me, traveling provided the solitude and connection to nature that was required. I spent time by myself in the woods, in small towns, near the ocean, in the mountains, and on the high desert.
Aloneness may be viewed as wrong by society, but if we are comfortable with aloneness with a purpose of connecting with something grounded within ourselves, or even eventually with a greater purpose to shine a peaceful light into the world, then I want to say this clearly to those who may wish to hear this: consider for yourself that it may be neither wrong nor selfish, at least to me, to take time in solitude, if that feels required. Even ten minutes whenever possible can feel healing and useful during spiritual awakening, I find. Not all journeys need to include traveling great distances. Solitude can even be found within a household or in a garden.
Pretending to be a persona that I am not was no longer possible, and I knew deeply that it was up to me to go within and allow the gap to bridge between self-awakening and gently letting go of people, places, and things that no longer resonated. For me, I wanted to do this with compassion. There was pushback from those who did not appreciate my apparent changes and increasing quietude. In some instances, I dropped trying and simply said nothing; walking away happened sometimes. There were demands for answers and other emotional reactions to my changes that I witnessed in others, but I also noticed something greater than those reactions was the feeling inside of me that it was important to my life’s purpose that I treat my connection with the Source as though it were a most important inner sanctuary. Devotion to being genuine and being alive happened within myself.
And I stopped explaining myself to those who only showed reactivity over time. Sometimes I noticed feeling pressure from my own conditioning when there was pushback. Eventually, over time, letting it be felt simply okay. I did not feel resentment towards anyone, but peace was there. How? Because I remembered clearly when I myself had acted those same ways, with reactivity, before what I am calling a spiritual awakening. Everything that appeared as conditioned in others’ behaviors, I recognized as things I had once done, too. I saw myself as I saw others. This helped me constantly stay in touch with heartfelt tenderness, even when saying nothing. Quite a change from how I used to be, indeed.
When it became clear to me that a spiritual journey was unfolding within me, and I began turning inward, people who I had once known, including family and acquaintances from the past, simply began to distance themselves. There were occasional questions directed at me, usually with no lead-up or context, for which I suddenly noticed having the strength to simply let be and leave unanswered with silence and well-wishes to each person in my Heart. This was something that happened through sheer grace, in my eyes. Others may call it luck or other things. And that’s all fine. It happened, and I don’t know how or why.
Taking time to be still, to be alone, showed me useful skills and inner tools including how to trust myself and how to recognize a greater peace. People, places, and things may take their chosen leave during this time of solitude, but it can also happen that, slowly, others may happen to connect when we are not expecting anything or looking for any shred of external validation beyond what we give to ourselves. Then, wow. To me, the simple daily path that unfolds in real time has been an amazing journey that started with allowing solitude to happen.