Britney Spears' Head-Shaving Was a Radical Spiritual Act

The pop star's hit memoir demonstrates the soul-killing effects of being silenced, the spiritual significance of hair, and the liberating magic of art.

During an overnight group meditation a few weeks ago, I thought about Britney Spears. I had been reading her incendiary new memoir, which contains page after page of revelations about a woman we have all heard a lot about for the past 25 years, and yet have rarely heard her own truth. In The Woman in Me, she lays it all out—vilified on a mass scale for wearing sexy outfits, vilified more after an excruciating breakup with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake that included a secret abortion, hounded by tabloids and paparazzi, and separated from her children, she was then depicted as “crazy” and locked into a 13-year conservatorship that gave her overbearing father total control over her life. She went along with it, she said, because she thought if she was good enough, she would get her kids back.

As I meditated, I began to cry for everything she’d endured, good-girl, people-pleasing syndrome at its most extreme, mass-media level. I even imagined a collective action of support for her; perhaps we could all dress up like her and gather on her upcoming birthday for a communal primal scream of rage on behalf of good girls everywhere. (It’s December 2, so get your schoolgirl outfit ready.)

Some might find it strange that I would think so much about Britney Spears during a meditation. But those who know me know I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Britney Spears. And I wrote an entire book dedicated to the inspirational and spiritual lessons we can learn from a variety of Pop Star Goddesses. Spears is one of a handful of Pop Star Goddesses who are ascendant this year, dominating every corner of pop culture: While Britney sits atop the bestseller list, Taylor Swift is simultaneously reigning over arenas and movie theaters with her Eras Tour, a three-hour-plus epic tribute to her stamina and gargantuan catalog, while enthralling the NFL with her love life. Along with Taylor, Beyoncé helped to keep the U.S. economy afloat this summer with her Renaissance Tour, which storms multiplexes in December.

As overwhelming as those accomplishments are, Britney’s story inspires me the most. It is, at its core, the story of someone who has suffered a debilitating soul loss, as shamanism calls it, but is now fighting to put herself back together again. Spears was nearly obliterated by a lack of true expression, a fundamental tenet of Buddhist philosophy. Writer Jack Kornfield quotes choreographer Martha Graham to explain: “There is a vitality, a life force that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”

The Death of Britney’s True Expression

Spears has had a uniquely large platform for nearly 25 years, but her true expression, as she explains in her memoir, has been systematically extinguished by outside forces for most of that time. She has endured a soul-wrenching journey, despite—or, really, because of—the fame and wealth she amassed as a major pop star beginning in 1999 as a teenager. Her body was scrutinized and vilified, the state of her virginity and her breasts were considered fair game for public discussion, and the paparazzi’s upskirt photos of her were widely circulated. But it was her breakup with fellow pop star Justin Timberlake in 2002, after they’d been together for three years, that tripped a downward spiral for her. Timberlake released his hit song lamenting a cheating partner, “Cry Me a River,” with a video that featured a Spears lookalike, implying that she was unfaithful and had broken his heart. This was national news at the time; Diane Sawyer famously said to Spears in an ABC News interview, “You did something that caused him so much pain, so much suffering. What did you do?” In fact, Spears alleges in the memoir, Timberlake had cheated on her multiple times, while she had made out with her choreographer, in a retaliation of sorts, just once; and, she says, she also agreed to a secret, at-home abortion when she got pregnant with Timberlake’s child, a wrenching experience for her.

After she and Timberlake split, a spate of impulsive, 20-something life decisions would get her labelled as unstable. She married a childhood friend in Vegas and then annulled the union; she then married backup dancer Kevin Federline and had two children in quick succession with him before she filed for divorce in 2006. The tabloids closed in, constantly questioning Spears’s fitness for motherhood even as she battled post-partum depression. Pushed to a breaking point, she shaved her head in view of paparazzi cameras and, terrified of losing custody of her sons, refused to hand them over to Federline when her time with them was up. Police were called, cameras swarmed, and she was placed under a fateful psychiatric hold that would soon allow her father to take control over her entire life and fortune in a court-approved conservatorship that would last 13 years, until just before she turned 40. During that time, she writes, everything she ate, everything she did, every person she dated or even interacted with, had to be approved by her father’s team. He controlled the performances she did, down to the songs and even the arrangements and choreography. She was put on lithium and forced to keep an IUD against her wishes.

All that time, she was convinced that the reason she had retained at least some visitation rights to her sons was because she was doing as she was told—by the courts, via her father. The world, meanwhile, was convinced it was all for her own good, as perception of her went from dangerous and “crazy” to subdued and faded, a sympathy case at best and a has-been at worst.

Throughout most of this, Spears took the classy route, which, unfortunately, meant she did not defend herself publicly. She did not dispute Timberlake’s characterizations of her after their breakup, and from there she lost more and more of her power to tell her own truth as she was deemed “crazy” and then completely silenced by the conservatorship. It was only when that arrangement was finally terminated in 2021 that she become more outspoken on social media, writing long, emoji- and tangent-filled Instagram posts revealing details of her harrowing story. The book has finally put it all in order and context, revealing a woman just at the beginning of her own spiritual journey, a quest to find herself, she says, as an independent adult.

While her story is an extreme one, a reverse fairy tale of sorts, it contains lessons for us all—to me, most importantly, about telling your own truth, setting boundaries, and speaking up for your own rights, even if that means people won’t like you as much. This is a lifelong struggle for me, and I can’t imagine how hard it is when judgement comes not from one disapproving look from a friend or a boss, but instead from Diane Sawyer, tabloid covers, and millions of people laughing at how “crazy” you must have been to shave your head.

Head-Shaving as a Radical Spiritual Act

Looking back on the media pandemonium that accompanied Spears’s head-shaving, the only crazy part is how much everyone freaked out about it. The problem was us, not her. My god, how much meaning we’d placed on her hair! She understood this in the moment. She writes: “Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.”

In fact, her head-shaving could be seen as a spiritual act. Buddhist monks shave their head to renounce worldly things. It’s a striking visual representation of their identity as an ordained person, especially, it must be said, when modern female teachers do it. A woman who has voluntarily removed her hair is not trying to be pretty or feminine; she is inherently powerful because she is uninterested in what the world thinks. Spears’s book delineates a heartbreaking progression from that punk-rock act of rebellion, her public head-shaving in 2007, to the 2010s, when she finds herself using her hair to rebel in much tinier ways during her 2013-17 Las Vegas residency show. “As performers, we girls have our hair,” she writes. “That’s the real thing guys want to see. They love to see the long hair move. They want you to thrash it. If your hair’s moving, they can believe you’re having a good time. In the most demoralizing moments of my Las Vegas residency, I wore tight wigs, and I’d dance in a way where I wouldn’t move a hair on my head. Everyone who was making money off me wanted me to move my hair, and I knew it—and so I did everything but that.” (Despite all of The Woman in Me’s bombshells, this passage in which, essentially, only her hair goes on strike is what astonished me the most.)

There is a poem by the Zen monk Ryokan, who was famous in Japan in his time (the late 1700s and early 1800s) that reminds me of Britney. It’s called “Inspiration,” and the title is about as sarcastic as Zen monks get:  

Shaving my head, becoming a monk

I spent years on the road

            Pushing aside wild grasses

            Peering hard into the wind

Now, everywhere I go

            People just hand me paper and brush:

“Do some calligraphy!” “Write me a poem!”

Britney’s story is ultimately about the price of muzzled self-expression, about doing what people command of you—“Do some dance moves!” “Sing me a song that sounds exactly like the recording of you that I bought 20 years ago!”—instead of pushing aside wild grasses and peering hard into the wind to find yourself. Reflecting on her hair-strike in Vegas, she writes, “When I look back, I realize how much of myself I withheld onstage, how much by trying to punish the people who held me captive I punished everyone else, too—including my loyal fans, including myself.”

Great Art as Ultimate Liberation (or: Please Stream Glory!)

In the book, Spears reminisces fondly about her 2007 album Blackout, which she accurately sees as her masterpiece, and which, interestingly, she made during the chaotic year that culminated in her head-shaving. While the world called her “crazy,” she made her best album, the only one on which she has executive producer credit and the only one to be archived by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In more recent years, she managed to work within her oppressive system to make the excellent Glory in 2016, an album she’s also proud of. “It was the one thing in the 13 years of the conservatorship that I really put my heart into,” she wrote, even though she’d put out three other albums and toured during that time. “I worked hard on the songs, which gave me confidence. You know when you’re good at something and can feel it? You start doing something and think, I got this?” She describes getting more excited about her performances after Glory, getting “a little bit of fire back.” In fact, she credits the album with eventually giving her the strength to hire her own lawyer to fight her conservatorship, and eventually free herself.

But in the meantime, her father and his team refused to let her add the new songs to her Vegas show. “I kept begging for a remix or a new number—anything to break up the monotony,” she writes. She hoped to add one of her favorite songs, like “Change Your Mind” or “Get Naked,” but was told the time code of the show was locked, with no hope of any variety. But, she says, she understood enough about the business to know that wasn’t true. Yet no one on the crew, which was under her father’s control, would help her. “Singing such old versions of songs made my body feel old,” she said. “I craved new sounds, new movement. I feel now that it might have scared them for me to actually be the star.”

Her father and his minions controlled her by depriving her of true expression. And the key to her liberation was when, despite their efforts, she found it again.

Her turnaround began when she was set to announce a new residency with a major livestreamed event in October 2018. Fans and film crews had gathered, laser lights beaming and giant screens flashing Britney videos. There were even blasts of fire from the stage. It was a major production. Britney appeared as scheduled, waving to the crowd and smiling. She approached the cameras … but then she just kept walking, saying nothing. She got into an SUV and left.

The world was baffled, but her breakout had begun.

Spears had been telling her father for months that she didn’t want to do a new show. Her solution was another work stoppage. Not a hair work stoppage, but a full strike. Three years later, after a lot of legal wrangling, her conservatorship ended.

She acknowledges that her real spiritual journey is only just beginning now: “I’ve started to experience the riches of being an adult woman for the first time in many years,” she writes, a sentence that makes me appreciate my own life anew. She says she loves to take photos of herself for Instagram, trying on new dresses or even appearing naked, which has naturally caused its share of online uproars. People may not understand it, she says, “But I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture, doing whatever I want with it.”

As for performing again, she says, “I confess that I’m struggling with that question. I’m enjoying dancing and singing the way I used to when I was younger and not trying to do it for my family’s benefit, not trying to get something, but doing it for me and my genuine love of it.”

She may be just beginning to find herself, but it’s clear that she’s found one key to moving forward—the truest of true expression. This book marks perhaps the first time she’s exercised it fully. She’s been rewarded with massive sales, universally positive reviews, and a remade public image. She’s given little public indication that any of this matters to her, though; the renunciation of what the world thinks of her, and the telling of her own truth, seem to be the point.