I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Natalie Gould’s reflection Unchosen Habits.
I’ve chosen monk-like paths.
At twenty-four, I bought hiking boots and moved to the Isle of Mull in Scotland. I joyfully participated in work and worship with the Iona Community. We lived without electricity, made giant pots of soup, baked heaps of scones, and scrubbed tea towels. The sea and young adults from Glasgow, Grimsby, and Muirhouse taught me about life.
At twenty-six, I lived in Santa Barbara in an adobe hut, smaller than Thoreau’s Walden. The landlord’s dog visited me as I took outdoor showers. I cooked on a propane stove. In sun hats and sandals, I journaled in my small garden. In winter evenings I read stacks of books by the glow of a wood fire.
I loved the wildness of these experiences. I entered into unusual monastic places out of a desire to explore my spirituality and feel a closeness to God through creation.
My most recent time as a monk, however, was not by choice. It brought with it a brutal rawness unknown to me.
In July 2021 at forty-five, I contracted Covid. The illness was mild, but the insult of the infection on a reactive nervous system set off dysautonomia.
Long Covid. Post-Viral Syndrome. Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. So many names to describe an intolerable condition. It held me in place and alone for two years. My full journey through it lasted over three and a half.
I endured an onslaught of symptoms. Insomnia. Temperature dysregulation. Chest pain. Syncope. Obsessive thinking. Shortness of breath. Orthostatic intolerance. Debilitating fatigue. Myalgia. Heart palpitations.
I fought to hold onto some sense of my old life, but the more I tried to retain it, the deeper I was pulled into the illness.
The condition made interacting with people and hearing noise, even listening to music, arduous. It pushed me into the silence of a Trappist.
I could do very little physically or mentally without excruciating symptoms. I was expelled out, in torn sweatpants and old t-shirts, to be an ascetic Desert Father.
Confined to a hermitage of restricted ability, I read the Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila. I tried to absorb the words, but in my cognitive dysfunction they wiggled on the page and slipped by me. Unable to retain her full meaning, I did hold on to an image.
Examining my interior castle, I watched a rebellion of my systems. I received an awareness that I was neither my brain, nor my body. Whatever “me” was, it was something separate from these things. I received a vision of being made of individual cells, all working together as a community of interconnected organisms.
I was housed by my tissues, organs, nerves, and skin. And they were in a revolt. I began to look at their movements — the thoughts my brain produced, the sensations and changes in my body — with curiosity.
Through patient observation and learning about neuroscience, I discovered I could transform my relationship to the cells who housed me. No single pill or practice made the change. It was all of it together. Meditation. Diet. Brain Training. Qigong. Breath Work. Journaling. Parts Work. Somatic Processing. Prayer. An absurd amount of patience.
In my time of forced solitude, of being a monk in the lonely cell of my home, I learned to reshape my thoughts, my reactions, my identities in order to rewire my overwhelmed nervous system. I began to listen to my brain and my body. They had been trying to speak to me for years. Through our conversations we learned to thrive, once again, in community.
Along with my Long Covid symptoms, the chronic tension, back pain, and inflammation from autoimmune arthritis that I had experienced for decades prior to Covid, melted away as well.
A friend told me recently, “If you cut into a chrysalis, you won’t find a caterpillar. You’ll find goo.” In the mystery of metamorphosis, that goo reconfigures into wings and a body, before breaking out as a butterfly.
This unchosen journey was the most difficult thing I have ever done. There were many nights when I didn’t want to go on living. I felt myself liquifying. A single additional cut, it seemed, would slice through my chrysalis and I would simply ooze out into nothingness.
Yet today, I am grateful for this forced time in a monastery, even for the unchosen scratchy garment that was placed before me to wear for a while.
I would not give up the transformation that occurred. I rebuilt my way of relating to the world and my body.
I used to imagine monastic life as a serene experience. I visualized a monk going through their days in soft flowing robes in quiet tranquility as they pursued awakening.
But monks in the world also reside where life painfully pulls us down and stops us exactly where we are. A journey through grief. A struggle through illness. A cataclysmic event.
These are not chosen places of refuge and contemplation. They are whirlpools and firestorms. They are places in which our habits — our old garb and ways of operating and viewing the world — no longer clothe us well.These difficult times of brokenness and restriction can, paradoxically, help one find greater wholeness and inner freedom. For me, it gave me the opportunity to disrobe, to go back down to my skin, to discover who I essentially am, and what I want to become.
Natalie Gould is a coach, storyteller, and retreat leader. She guides individuals and organizations through transformation using grounded, soulful practices rooted in nature, narrative, and informed by neuroscience. She has a monthly newsletter and is writing a spiritual memoir centered around her recovery and a decade on her small farm.
