Many people find themselves drawn to the inner life without access to a community that can hold it — whether through geography, through the loss of a tradition, or through the inability to find a community that is not also a source of harm. Solitary practice is ancient: the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Tibetan hermit tradition, the solitary Daoist cultivator, the lone practitioner of any tradition who has ended up, by choice or circumstance, alone with the practice. The challenge is not that it cannot be done — it is that it is harder, and that the self, without the friction of community, can mistake its preferences for progress.
Rumi