My new conscious relationship book is here! Alone: The Truth + Beauty of Belonging is a love letter to anyone and everyone who’s ever felt the slow-burning sting of being alone and wondered what the hell to do about it.
How to be single, how to be a parent, how to be an entrepreneur, how to be a friend, how to be a partner – all of it can feel very lonely. But it’s not “alone” that is a bad thing…it’s the meaning that we give to it that affects our emotional health.
For example:
People spend tens of thousands of dollars to numb out the feeling of being alone, AND people spend tens of thousands of dollars on silent retreats to be alone.
Maya Angelou said “You only are free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”
When did “alone” become a four-letter word?
What if we could start normalizing the human experience of being alone in a loving and focused way, therein offering so much comfort that this feeling of loneliness is not only a part of the human condition but is also a shared experience in feeling alone?
I have a recurring visual image that we are each walking along a path— all seven billion of us, walking seven billion individual paths. When you meet someone (for better or for worse), it feels like you’re walking along the same path, but really, it’s just that your individual paths are superimposed on top of one another.
This is true of our partners.
This is true of our kids.
This is true of our colleagues and clients.
This is true of our parents and friends.
There are moments (or long moments that feel like years, or really long moments that feel like decades) during which it seems that you are walking the same path as someone else until you get to that (mostly) inevitable fork in the road where you realize your paths are going in different directions.
Why? Because you’ve been on your own path with its own direction this whole time, even when it felt shared. And your job in this life, at least one of your jobs, is to follow that path that you alone are capable of walking while living out the purpose, lessons, experiences, obstacles, and pleasure along the way. That’s it. That’s fact.
We are destined to walk alone, which isn’t a bad thing. So, what exactly are we afraid of? And why the hell are we afraid of it?
I bet you know as well as I do from your own life experience that the fear of being alone motivates a lot of people to make a lot of hella bad decisions in work, life, and love, like:
• staying in the wrong relationship for a really long time
• putting up with unkind / abusive / otherwise toxic family members
• hanging around deadbeat friends with borderline abusive or codependent personalities
• accepting less money than what you’re worth
• generally setting (or following through on) few-to-no healthy, loving boundaries
These are all rooted in protecting ourselves from the fear of being alone. In confronting my own deep-rooted fear of being alone, I learned a hard but life-changing lesson: we are always alone. And at the same time, we are never alone because we are always with ourselves. From first breath to last, and in every breath in between, the only person guaranteed to be there with you is YOU.
So, if we are never truly alone, then the feeling our “alone-ness” is masking, i.e., the deep desire to being and knowing that we are loved, completely reframes our sense of belonging because we always belong to ourselves, which is a profound sense of love and acceptance. It’s in our alone-ness and in our solitude where we discover just how whole we are, which is the truth and beauty of belonging.
Being able to embody the sovereignty of what it means to be alone and reclaiming it as your own is paramount to strengthening the relationship you have with yourself. And the relationship you have with yourself is the platform upon which literally every other relationship is built, from work and money to life and love.
Because when you belong to yourself, and especially when you can see your Self as a part of something much, much bigger than yourself, the truth and beauty of it is that you are never really alone.
I am here to support you; whether it’s the massive clarity and embodied action plan that comes from a Breakthrough Day Experience, the deep encouragement and life-changing sacred space that comes from a Six Month Private Membership, or simply the ability to Find Your Flow in a one-hour call with me, lean on me to work out what the hell has been holding you back, and cultivate the safety and actual lasting change to heal you forward…
…to reclaim your inner calm during chaos.
xx LW
