The power of solitude

Question: Should I spend some time in solitude?

Answer: It is the old methods of yoga which demand silence and solitude.

The yoga of tomorrow is to find the Divine in work and in relation with the world.

Look within yourself, reflect upon it and tell me what your choice is.

(Mirra Alfassa, The Mother)

Why do we want to distract ourselves all the time? Why do we want to escape from what we fear we are all about deep inside? Well, it is painful to face ourselves and everything that is hidden there. My awakening started when I was working in a stressful and competitive workplace. I learned that other people were my mirror and they taught me a lot about myself. I loved studying them. I loved all the interactions with everyone.  I was riding other people’s energies and became quite good at it. I had countless spiritual break-throughs in these years and shared them proudly in my first two books. Yet, there was still something missing. As I was facing myself in the outer world, my monkey mind also had plenty of opportunities to keep itself busy with gathering of information, contemplating spiritual insights and writing about them. I realized one day that my monkey mind will never go away until I am finally willing to sit down and resist the temptation to do anything and go anywhere. That’s what solitude is all about. I realized that I would face stagnation unless I bit the bullet and spent the time with my restless self. 

Mirra Alfassa offers an interesting choice in the quote above, I hope that my books can inspire others to shine the light and bring a little peace and love into other people’s stressful life, yet I also figure that many of these light-workers also need stretches of time when they go inside, without doing anything, without striving for any cause, simply being with the center of their being. In short, light-workers also need to spend some time finding the Light inside. 

I remember meeting a former colleague who had withdrawn from the business I was in earlier than me. We met for lunch and when I was telling her about my plans to become an author and spiritual coach, and her response was, “I hope you are prepared for solitude.” It seemed such an innocent remark at the time but the moment she said it I knew it would be meaningful for me. Sure enough, experiencing solitude proved much tougher than I expected. All my life it had been more fun for me to fight dragons in the outside world. When I looked inside I discovered so many confusing and frustrating energies, anger, lack of confidence, ambition, lust, depression, and the desire to be loved and admired. You can fill in the blanks here for whatever it is that is slumbering inside of you. We all have different dragons to slay in the outer world. When we deal with the outer world we can become aware of the drives and fears that rule us. We can express them, transmute them, possibly conquer them. On the outside we can find a way to live with these energies, but it is only on the inside that we can realize that these drives and fears are not us. They are impostors pretending to be us. Solitude has to be a part in awakening to be one with the energies that we normally project in the outer world. Be still and watch them dissolving like clouds in the wind.

I retired from my job in the financial industry a couple of years ahead of schedule due to an organizational shake-up at the firm I was working for at that time. I knew that it was premature for my new spiritual endeavor then but there was just nothing I could do. I was done with the world of finance and economics for good. I looked into teaching at universities but only found closed doors. Shrugging my shoulders, I wrote my books, worked with some clients and just accepted that I also had downtime in solitude. I waited patiently for the relocation of Suzanne from Canada back to the US to launch the spiritual center we had planned. I was often bored in this time until it hit me one day that these two years were in fact the missing chapter in my awakening story. All that light-working of the earlier years still had a lot of ‘me, myself and I’ in it, and solitude was the perfect opportunity to become aware of this ‘me-energy.’

Be still and enter the journey within. Be restless and observe the void we normally like to paste over. Interesting, isn’t, even the expression ‘a void’ as the verb avoid in it. Facing the void is part of awakening. We have to set ourself free from the mind bondage, otherwise the external world will always take us for a ride. As you are holding this book in your hand, chances are that your mind is just waiting to send you on another quest. After you finish this one, and hopefully finding many of the answers you are looking for, you will get restless once again after a couple month and will start reading yet another book on how to attain enlightenment, or signing up for yet another lecture. Enough! Put the book away for a couple of days. Go inside, feel the restlessness, observe how the mind minds solitude. It is written ‘be still and know that I Am God’ for a reason. When I started my journey inwards I experienced:

Loneliness

Emptiness

Boredom

Ennui

And in the void discovered:

Love

Epiphany

Bliss

Enthusiasm 

These characteristics of ‘me-energy’—loneliness, emptiness, boredom, ennui—are nothing but a façade. They are like bubbles in fact, ready to burst in the intensity of stillness and love. They burst into nothingness when you face the void and love, epiphany, bliss and enthusiasm appear. The acronym ‘LEBE’ is ‘live’ in German. In the first stage of our spiritual journey we face life to avoid loneliness, emptiness, boredom and ennui, whereas in the later stage of the Awakening journey we are willing to dig deeper and find life itself within us—love, epiphany, bliss and enthusiasm. Under a veneer of the ‘me-energy’ there is everything we ever wanted. The Beyond is wherever we put our awareness, on the inside as well as in real life. I thank my two year sabbatical for this revelation!

Who is afraid of loneliness if we have solitude to look forward to. May Sarton put this insight beautifully when she writes: 

Loneliness is the poverty of self.

Solitude is the richness of Self (my capitalization).

The self is illusionary, and loneliness makes that fact blatantly apparent. Yet, when we scratch the surface, when we break free from the illusionary self, there is a bounty waiting for us. Welcome solitude into your life and find yet another opportunity to be free!