Loneliness on the spiritual path

My back is against the wall as I sit in the crowded café watching the scenes unfold. Some people raise their voices above the live music, more intent on being heard than on listening. Others laugh at jokes made funny only by the drinks that loosen their judgment. They connect through the lightness of liquor. I sit like a bird on a branch, watching how people find joy. These places are designed for socialising and for feeling alive. Next to me, someone whispers gossip I wish I had not heard. I feel for the person being discussed, unaware that a stranger now carries their secret or perhaps just a lie. I look at the bars on the window and wonder why I feel imprisoned. This is supposed to be enjoyable.

A deep loneliness creeps in. Not the familiar discomfort of being introverted in a loud room, but something that feels different. Something that changed in me as my spiritual practice deepened. I see the play unfolding. The manipulation, the gossip, the forced happiness, joy pushed into bodies through substances. And I realise that I no longer know how to play. I no longer know how to immerse myself and have a good time in the old way. I feel removed in a way I did not feel before this shift took place. It is not judgment. It is simply the startling awareness that I am not who I was.

Alan Watts once said that awakening can feel like “being suddenly dropped into a world where everyone is playing a game you no longer find interesting.”
That is exactly how I feel. I am in the same room, but I am no longer in the same game.

I am sharing this because I know others feel this too. Loneliness does not only surface in noisy cafés. It follows us even into cacao circles and spiritual gatherings, spaces that claim to be sacred yet often feel like stages. The clothes, the props, the mystical glow. The performance of depth. The pressure to appear healed, enlightened, surrendered. Many of us sit in these circles and feel more alone than we ever did in ordinary life.

And beneath the performance lies a truth few speak about. Abuse in spiritual spaces is rampant. Too many people have lost faith in teachers who claimed to guide them and communities that claimed to hold them. Lineages are diluted into brands. Gurus become influencers. Harm is covered with incense and language about karma, surrender, or lessons. There is a quiet grief in those who once believed wholeheartedly and were broken open by the betrayal. A collective disillusionment that rarely finds words. I write this because naming it softens the isolation.

There are moments on this path when I feel profoundly alone. Not because I lack people around me, but because something within me has changed so deeply that the world no longer fits as it once did. 

One of the earliest fractures in my spiritual path came when I realised a teacher I deeply trusted had knowingly sent me into harm’s way. I told him I didn’t feel safe with the man he encouraged me to study with. He reassured me anyway. Only later did he admit he already knew about the man’s behaviour. That truth broke something open in me. Since then I’ve carried both longing and caution. I want community and guidance, yet trust no longer comes easily. This is where some of my spiritual loneliness began, part protection, part self-chosen distance.

What makes this harder is that I no longer feel a sense of belonging in many spiritual spaces. Something in me no longer resonates the way it once did. In some places I notice the performance before I feel the people. The curated purity. The mystical aesthetics. The subtle hierarchy of who seems more conscious or surrendered. I see how ego can quietly slip into devotion, how the longing to belong can be mistaken for transcendence. And in those moments I sit there feeling like an outsider in spaces that are meant to hold the soul.

As my path evolved, I realised how different it was from those around me. I do not resonate with the pick and mix spirituality that is so common. I am not drawn to crystals or manifestation trends. My practice is Hatha and non dual Shaivism and it feels like home. I know this can shift again since practice always evolves, but I prefer depth over novelty and lineage over trend. So when people speak about the latest spiritual craze, I listen with love, yet it does not land in me. It is not wrong. It is simply not where I live.

Practice also changed me in subtler ways. I have become more aware of the illusion and the performance of self. Ram Dass said, “The game is not about becoming somebody. It is about becoming nobody.”
Yet the world insists I remain somebody. In that café I did not know how to step into the scene. I felt like I was vibrating at a different frequency. Everywhere people keep speaking to me with strategic politeness and subtle performance, and I see the play when all I want is plainness and honesty.

Ramana Maharshi said the self we defend is merely “a thought that rises and falls,” not the truth of who we are. I can rest in this during meditation, yet in daily life I still return to the small self, the separate one who feels lonely.

Another layer of loneliness comes from the way spirituality is shaped in post modern times. It is individualistic, stripped of community, ethics, ritual, lineage and shared intention. Mindfulness is lifted from its roots and repackaged as stress management. Practices once meant for the liberation of all beings are turned into personal optimisation. Thich Nhat Hanh said, “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”
Yet modern spirituality often reinforces that separateness. I am writing about feeling lonely on a path meant to dissolve loneliness because I am in that strange space where I can see through some illusions, but the sense of separateness has not dissolved in daily life. It dissolves only in practice or temporarily.

In meditation I feel the boundaries soften. In daily life I return to the familiar I with its stories and fears. This feels like a threshold. I am no longer who I was, yet not quite who I am becoming.

Some days I sit among people and feel like an observer. Conversations based on roles and identities feel hollow. Even philosophical discussions lose their taste when they are rooted in the belief that the illusion is solid. It feels as if I am speaking a language that no longer belongs to me.

I also miss true spiritual community, not commercialised gatherings or self-improvement circles, but real satsang. Without that, the path becomes quite solitary. Even though my spiritual path has shifted, I still miss the Zen Buddhist sangha I once belonged to. The monks had decades of practice, not a year of retreat turned into an online persona. One told me it took nine years in a remote monastery before his ego even began to soften. That kind of humility is rare in modern spirituality, where a few peak experiences can be mistaken for mastery. In my former sangha there were people of all ages, no payment, no promises, just practice. And it was real.

Some of my loneliness comes from fear. From past harm in relationships and in spiritual spaces. My body remembers pain even when my mind has begun to see through the story. A part of me has awakened beyond those narratives. Another part of me is still healing and still cautious.

And there is a final kind of loneliness. The loneliness of seeing the illusion yet still needing to participate. I still make a website. I still call myself Malou. I still introduce myself as a yoga teacher. The Bhagavad Gita says, “One must act, even while knowing the world is impermanent.”
Alan Watts echoed this by saying that awakening does not free us from life, it teaches us how to “dance with it more lightly.”

I can love with the awareness that romance is something we create. I can step into roles knowing they are only passing forms. There is a spacious freedom in this, yet also a soft ache, because not many people around me live from this place. And at times there is a flicker of jealousy for the ones (including my past self) who can dive in without thinking, the ones who get to feel the uncomplicated excitement of belonging.

Some people understand these ideas intellectually, but for me they came through experience. A shift I did not seek and cannot undo. With that shift came a gentle distance from the world I once believed in completely.

Still, I don’t believe this loneliness is permanent. I can feel that the change in me is ultimately leading somewhere good. It feels like a passage rather than a destination, a shedding before a new kind of belonging can arrive. Pema Chödrön writes, “The liminal space is where we are not what we used to be and not yet what we will become.”
This is where I am now.

So I practice. I breathe. I soften. I trust that the right people will cross my path. People who recognise the same truth. Even the ones who may already exist around me, but whom I have not yet met in the place where truth speaks. Until then I companion myself. I live in the in-between. I let loneliness be part of my awakening.

And when I return to that café in my mind, when I hear the music and the laughter and the gossip, I no longer see myself as the outsider trapped behind bars. I see myself as someone in transition. Someone learning how to be in the world without losing the truth that changed me. Someone learning what Alan Watts meant when he said that “you are the universe playing at being a stranger.”
And in that realisation the loneliness softens.