Loneliness Anatomy

We live in a world with billions upon billions of people. And yet the feeling shared by most of the people walking the planet today is that deep down, each one of us is completely alone. Over the course of the years that I have been travelling around the world, teaching different demographics and leading a spiritual movement, it has become painfully apparent that if most people share this feeling of being alone, loneliness is more complex than meets the eye. It is more complex than just being around other people, and it is this deep sense of isolation that needs a remedy. But at the time that I became aware of this epidemic, I didn’t have that answer. I didn’t have the answer because I felt exactly the same way.

The word loneliness never seems adequate to describe the torment of starvation for closeness. My life had been plagued by loneliness. And fame, which came as a natural accessory to my career, only served to accentuate it like a magnifying glass. I had spent my life never feeling seen, heard, understood or wanted. Fame made finding that closeness that I craved so desperately even harder to attain. To the outside world it seemed that everyone valued and wanted me, but nothing could be further from the truth. People saw me, felt me and understood me less than before. I was surrounded by people but I was nothing more to them than the projections they placed on me. The only value I had, and the only reason they wanted me, was for what they could get through me.

When you’re facing a problem without a solution, you are left with one option and that is to look for the answer yourself. I had found myself in the position of being a pioneer in uncharted territory. I saw all too clearly that loneliness was the number-one source of suffering on our planet and also what we are all trying to avoid through a multitude of different coping strategies. But you cannot avoid something and learn about it at the same time. So, I made the decision to do the opposite. The spiritual teachers of the old world were known to go into the desert or into a cave in an attempt to understand something about the universe. I decided to take the same approach. Only instead of disappearing into a cave, I disappeared into loneliness by shamanic journeying in Central America, where I decided I would look the devil in the face. It turned out to be a little more than a year-long process. Seeing loneliness for what it was, and its anatomy, allowed me to understand its opposite. By seeing loneliness clearly, I saw connection clearly. And so, I emerged into the world again ready to teach people about their loneliness and about connection. And it was with this new-found understanding in my heart, mind and body that I wrote this book.

The Anatomy of Loneliness evolved from the disorganized collection of notes I took, often on tear-stained paper. Papers that were stuffed into my backpack for every shamanic journey that I embarked on during that time period of my life. The book practically wrote itself through me. Using this information, I was able to turn loneliness into connection in my own life and in the lives of every other member of my community.

Unconsciousness can be like a virus that spreads from one generation to the next, but so can awakening. It is my vision that the information in this book will spread across the planet until we can officially say that we live in a world with billions of people and none of us feels alone.

The trauma of disconnection

We all have a different story about when we lost this sense of connection. But somewhere over the course of our young lives, we all experienced a fall from grace – from that deep, visceral sense of connection. As a result, most of us proceed to spend the rest of our lives in a never-ending tug of war between the aspect of us that is desperate to get that connection back at any cost and the aspect of us that wants to push