The Art of Being Alone: How Mindfulness Can Be a Solution for Loneliness
“It's your road, and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”
-Rumi
Very few of us know how to be alone with ourselves. There’s a difference between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness is a feeling. Like all feelings loneliness comes and goes. It never lasts. But like other unpleasant emotions when we’re in the grip of loneliness we fear that it will never end, or certainly that it will not end soon enough for our liking.
Then, the mind layers thoughts on top of this feeling. The thoughts string together to become stories, which the mind has an unconscious habit of believing without really questioning these beliefs. We don’t tend to pause and notice “just thinking,” for example. We become immediately entranced with the content of our thoughts and soon, we’re emotionally swept away.
So these stories produce more feelings. For example, you think that whatever you’re experiencing is unfair, or you reactively wonder how you can change your experience to feel better, or perhaps you believe a story about why you deserve to feel lonely. Unquestionably, you believe these stories, or perhaps you produce different stories to try to persuade yourself otherwise. But you won’t escape from a prison of thought through more thoughts.
A more skillful response is to step back and notice that we’re lost in thought, then to inquire into what’s going on when we’re trapped inside this belief or story or feeling.
Whatever the specific storyline around experiencing loneliness, it’s very likely bound up with a strong feeling underneath it: resistance to reality. The mind is resisting when it doesn’t want to accept the truth of our present experience. That’s why true meditation is an invitation to surrender to whatever is arising, here and now. It’s a turning towards the truth of this very moment.
While loneliness is a feeling that makes us isolated, separate, dis satisfied, solitude is an art: the art of being alone with oneself. Like any craft, it comes easier to some than others but it is a skill that anyone can cultivate. In fact, it is a skill that everyone should cultivate.
Why should you cultivate the art of being alone?
Let’s start with the question: what is it that you really want? That’s actually the most important question to begin with. You could and should inquire just into that question until you get to the bottom of what you really want.
But whatever the answer to that question is, the art of being alone is a craft worth honing. If you want joy, peace, and contentment you can learn to tap into this dimension of Being by ceasing to look outward for your happiness and starting to look within.
If you want meaningful relationships, then the art of being alone will dramatically improve the quality of your relationships when you realize that you don’t need other people to be happy. You value these relationships for all of the same reasons--they bring more love, laughter, growth, joy, meaning into your life--but you don’t need this other person in order to feel happy, whole, complete, or worthy of love. True intimacy is built upon a foundation of two autonomous individuals consciously entering into relationship with one another, and evolving together. Codependency arises when we place the burden for own happiness on the shoulders of other people.
Cultivating the art of being alone is also a good thing because it is a more reliable road to happiness over the long run. People come and go in our lives, whether by choice or by accident or by fate. Identities can and will be taken away from you: people lose their jobs, get divorced, move locations, and lose their support networks. Life can strip away these layers of identity from us. If you mistakenly think that your true nature is the same as these layers of your ego, you’re left feeling very isolated, confused, and afraid.
Ask yourself: “Who am I really?”
We think we know, but our inability to find joy, peace, and contentment by ourselves, even within the most comfortable of circumstances, betrays our own ignorance to this seemingly basic question.
This is why the great Zen teacher Dogen once said that “Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.”
Meditation is an invitation to become profoundly intimate with all of your experience, which is inevitably not separate from yourself. You become intimate with the breath, then the body, then the heart. You increasingly become content to experience just this moment. Breathing is like this, hearing is like this, drinking this cup of tea is like this.
This moment, just this, is enough.
You can replace the grand term of “Enlightenment” from Dogen’s quote and substitute any number of other words: Meditation, Presence, Awareness, Happiness, Contentment. See what works for you. The language isn’t what’s important. What’s important is what the language is pointing towards, which ultimately is the answer to the question: “Who am I?”
In an important sense: this is what meditation is, it’s an invitation to become intimate with oneself.
The question “Who am I?” is not designed to lead us to any satisfactory answer, which is what the ego so desperately desires, but rather to draw us deeper into a state of questioning. It’s in fact a call to listen more deeply, to become more intimate with oneself and one’s experience, to learn to rest in this beginner's mind of not knowing, which becomes not a source of uncertainty and fear but rather a source of spaciousness and freedom.
When you find yourself stuck in a particularly difficult emotion like loneliness you can close your eyes and silently sense your way into the question:
“What does it feel like to be trapped inside this belief?”
Tune into bodily sensations. Don’t answer the question with more thoughts. When thoughts inevitably arise simply notice them with curiosity but don’t become enchanted with the content of thinking. Allow your attention to drop down deep into your body; feel as if the question is coming up from the lower belly, and dissolving into the area around the heart.
Inquire into the felt sense of what it’s like to be trapped inside a belief or story about why you’re feeling lonely, separate, not enough?
Spend sufficient time just sitting with that question and settling into the felt sense of it, more and more. If the feelings are increasingly pleasant notice that. If the process becomes increasingly unpleasant, notice this also. But welcome whatever arises within awareness with openness, curiosity and gentleness.
After a period of time. You can open your eyes, and then write down in a journal what that experience was like for you, what thoughts and feelings arose, what insights might have come.
Please share whatever comments or questions you have about the Adrian Baker Meditation Facebook page and I’ll do my best to answer them.