In Yoga diaryIn the Archives series, we share a curated collection of articles originally published in back issues dating back to 1975. These stories offer a glimpse into how yoga has been interpreted, written about, and practiced over the years. This article first appeared in the November 2005 issue Yoga diary. You can find more of our archives here.
When I was in seventh grade, the group of girls I hung out with stopped talking to me. Every time they passed me in the hallway, they turned and giggled. It was my first experience with true loneliness, and at the time it felt like the end of the world.
That experience stayed in my emotional backpack for years. Even now, just the word “loneliness” can evoke the emotion – part melancholy and part loss – of that time. It was only after I had been doing spiritual practice for quite some time that I began to see that the emotion of loneliness is not just personal. Like anger and fear, loneliness is one of those universal, primal emotions, a groove in humanity’s subconscious. Most of us – even those of us who enjoy being alone – can’t help but find ourselves in it at one time or another.
Loneliness is more about psychological disconnection than physical loneliness. To appreciate time alone, most of us need to feel like we have a choice: that friends or family are no further away than a phone call. If not, time alone can be miserable. In fact, my suspicion is that the primal feeling of loneliness has something to do with a genetic instinct. Something that equates security with physical connection to a tribe or family. At that pre-rational level, loneliness can feel like death.
Perhaps that is one reason why loneliness, or even the fear of loneliness, can be such a stumbling block on the road to inner growth. Certain journeys cannot be made unless you are willing to face loneliness. Yet many of us are afraid to do so. Have you ever stayed in a relationship long after you knew it wasn’t right for you? Have you kept friends who no longer understood the person you had become? Shy away from meditation and other contemplative practices because it meant you were alone?
The irony, of course, is that when you accept loneliness, you discover something powerful and liberating on the other side.
How to deal with loneliness
My loneliness in seventh grade taught me compassion for those who are unpopular and inspired me to seek friendships based on intimacy rather than the need to belong.
Years later, the extreme loneliness of a rainy week in Big Sur, when I was stuck in a cabin at the end of three miles of dirt road, catapulted me into my first real experience of present-moment awareness. I still remember the surprising joy of watching for hours the path of the raindrops shooting down the window.
Loneliness, like fear, is a threshold emotion; you have to go through it if you want to enter the inner world. In fact, solitude is the dark side of solitude, that magical and transformative state that poets, mystics and yogis celebrate as the great laboratory of self-awareness and spiritual growth. If loneliness smells of alienation and sadness, loneliness provides you with the foundation to connect with what is truly essential within yourself. Loneliness teaches you how to be with yourself, and without it you never really learn to be at home with what you are. “Alone…and the soul comes forth,” wrote Walt Whitman.
So maybe the important question when you’re alone on the holidays, or recovering from a breakup, or wondering why all your friends seem so distant and unsupportive, isn’t, “How can I make this empty feeling go away?” Rather, it might be, “How do I turn this painful state of loneliness into a transformative state of loneliness?”
A card of loneliness
The first step is to identify the type of loneliness you feel. Loneliness has more than one flavor and many layers. Some of these are purely personal. Others are part of the human condition.
Situational loneliness is the empty feeling you can get when you’re alone in a strange hotel room, or when you have a difficult task to do and no one is around to help.
If you’re an introvert, this kind of loneliness can leave you with a piggy bank full of painful memories. If you’ve always been outgoing and popular, it may be a strange emotion you felt during the first few days of college or a new job. Either way, it can fool you. Often on their first meditation retreat – especially silent retreats – people go through intense and difficult periods of solitude before they can settle into being with themselves.
When you experience symptoms of these types of withdrawals, the temptation is to drive them out with activity. However, being temporarily lonely offers a perfect opportunity to explore solitude. Instead of turning on the TV or looking for action, spend some time exploring solitude.
Situational loneliness is usually short-lived and relatively superficial. That doesn’t include the loneliness of true social isolation, which is an ongoing and painful reality for many people. Enduring a failing relationship, being rejected or cut off from your social support, losing your job or your home, or suffering from a long-term illness are times when we can touch the depths of personal loneliness.
Even though teachings and practices may reveal that the sense of separation is an illusion, the ego finds it difficult to believe. Even when you “know” that this sense of separation is the true cause of most of your pain, something within you continues to cling to it and allow its tendrils to unfurl into every corner of your life.
The feeling of separation – together with the vulnerability it evokes – is the absolute essence of loneliness. It’s always there, ready to be activated. This is why being alone during the holidays can be so emotionally charged. It’s also why arguing with someone you love sometimes brings fear and sadness far out of proportion to the situation.
Even more fundamental are the moments when you truly realize how incredibly vast the universe is, how seemingly coincidental your existence is, and how inevitable it is that you will one day die. At such moments the ego is confronted directly with the truth of its non-existence. Here it is confronted with the vastness and apparent nothingness that underlies its illusion of being someone. And that can be – as poets, philosophers and mystics have noted for centuries – very frightening.
The antidote to feeling alone
However, yoga can show that this apparent emptiness is not empty at all. One of the deepest goals of the practice is to help us see that what seems like scary nothingness is actually a creative, nourishing consciousness. This is the substanceless substance that runs through everything and connects us all.
The antidote to loneliness is to get to know the pure consciousness that lies behind your thoughts and feelings, and to realize how full of potential it is. Once you are in touch with consciousness – or what is sometimes called the Self or Buddha nature – it is impossible to feel lonely, at least for long, because you are connected to everything.
But it’s hard to experience that—or deal with loneliness—unless you’re willing to meditate, which means giving yourself the chance to be alone. Every time you sit to meditate, or take time to be alone in nature, you open yourself to the opportunity to look beyond the illusion of the ego and into that underlying connection. Once you’ve tasted it, it’s there to return to (and remind yourself of) whenever you start to feel disconnected or alienated.
The practice of metta, or what is called loving-kindness – or any practice that involves sending blessings or good wishes to others – is an ideal way to transform your feelings of separation into feelings of connection.
How to move past your loneliness
This is a variation on the loving-kindness meditation that I sometimes do when I’m feeling anxious or sad. It works just as well against loneliness.
Start feeling your own loneliness. Without resistance, you tune in. Then connect to your breathing and send these thoughts to yourself:
As you breathe in, think, “May I be happy.”
As you exhale, ask, “May I feel loved.”
As you inhale, send out, “May all my suffering be healed.”
As you exhale, ask, “May I have peace.”
Then imagine other people in the world who might be feeling lonely right now. These can be people you love, but also people you don’t know. It could be lonely children, homeless people, people breaking up with their partners, people in prison, people in war-torn countries, or anyone else that comes to mind. Send the same loving thoughts to them with the breath:
“May you be happy. May you feel loved. May all your suffering be healed. May you have peace.”
Finally, take a moment to send these thoughts to everyone in the world:
“May all beings be happy. May all beings feel loved. May the sufferings of all beings be healed. May all beings be at peace.”
As you practice this powerful practice, you will discover how it can soften and change your own experience. When you consciously send blessings to others, especially in this systematic way, they forge your connection beyond the people you know. And then, as you breathe, comes the realization of your unbreakable connection. You cannot be lonely when you are connected to everyone, even for a moment. And then you understand how to do more than just deal with loneliness. You learn how to transcend it.
#ignore #loneliness #Heres