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.