Loneliness

During the last year loneliness has become my most frequent companion. The dissolution of a marriage is inherently a lonely process — the feeling grows as the estrangement from your partner deepens. Loneliness abides in their presence, made ever more salient as the cracks in the relationship widen. With the support of friends and family, it’s the same. As an interloper in the life of my friends, I feel connected and loved and yet also apart. Having individuated from family, there is an inherent distance there too. During the darkness retreat the feelings of loneliness were magnified. The holiday season also intensified loneliness for me — in that I’m sure I’m not alone. Seeing countless families and couples celebrating their lives together inevitably presents a contrast with my own experience. Researchers also tell us we have an epidemic of loneliness - so I’m alone with many of you, together.

Having so many occasions to settle into this feeling, I’ve gotten to really make friends with it. In doing so I was reminded that no one has written more precisely and eloquently about what it’s like to befriend loneliness, Vajrayana style, than Pema Chodron. When I rest into my loneliness, I first noticed the natural yearning for some resolution. Chodron writes,

The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.

Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (p. 68).

In the darkness, no resolution was possible, so I got to experience the desire without the ability to alter the feeling. I found I had the capacity to just feel it. I find now when I rest into the feeling I can feel its energy and feel its okayness too — the dull ache in the pit of my stomach, the sharpness in the corner of my eyes, the energetic flow between them. The yearning for love is also there, tender and soft. It’s okay to want intimacy and companionship and okay not to act on it.

Chodron calls this style of experiencing “cool loneliness” and phenomenologically she breaks it down into a number of different components. What I’ve just described is what she calls “less desire”: “the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up and change our mood.” When resting in cool loneliness there is a kind of contentment (the okayness), and letting go of the need for resolution also means not grasping for distractions. No daydreams, no need to distract with exercise — in my case I’d injured myself when moving out and literally couldn’t exercise for the six weeks immediately following. It turned out to be a blessing because there was nothing to do but be with my arising experience (and catch up on sleep). Chodron calls this “avoiding unnecessary activities.” Loneliness is not a problem to be solved, and doesn’t require some compensating sense pleasure either, what Chodron calls “wandering in the world of desire.” And finally, coming back to the feeling again and again without avoidance is what Chodron calls “complete discipline.” She writes,

Complete discipline is another component of cool loneliness. Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back, just gently come back to the present moment. This is loneliness as complete discipline. We’re willing to sit still, just be there, alone. We don’t particularly have to cultivate this kind of loneliness; we could just sit still long enough to realize it’s how things really are. We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions—all our ideas about how things are—keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way. We say, “Oh yes, I know.” But we don’t know. We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.

Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (pp. 70-71).

Recognizing fundamentally aloneness is healing too. A teacher of mine, Dustin DiPerna, once relayed to me a blessing he heard: “may you die alone and forgotten.” Dying alone is inevitable — even surrounded by your loved ones the process is a solitary one. Getting used to the idea of fundamental aloneness prepares us for death. But in an ultimate sense, in the process of experiencing loneliness I can realize interconnectedness. Connected with the ground of being, experiencing the unbounded nature of awareness present even in the feeling of aloneness, I see that I can’t ever truly be alone. To be alone is to reify separateness, and that separateness is a construction of my mind. This is what it means to experience emotions from a nondual perspective - to fully feel without bypassing it and also to recognize it as empty, embracing all the contradictions to find the wisdom it offers. When I feel lonely I also feel a tremendous amount of compassion, for myself, but also for the suffering of others, for the heartbreak we all inevitably experience. As I write this I imagine those that might read this and recognize their own experience in it. I love you and I’m with you. I take a breath, feeling our pain, and I exhale your relief.