Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut you more deep.
Let it ferment and season you as few humans
and even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft,
my voice so tender,
my need for God absolutely clear.
Hafiz from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/495676-don-t-surrender-your-loneliness-so-quickly-let-it-cut-you
Note:
I debated working the below poem. I see the glaring imperfection in it and being that it did not come out in a blurp of inspired urging but just from reading my last entry...I thought it was a poem I could work. But, right now I am not going to lol. It is what it is.
I do notice something pretty cool though. When I write something and go back the next day to check my stats and readership, I notice that similar entries are being pulled from the archives. Hmmm! Whether that is coincidence or purposeful is irrelevant...still cool lol.
Somehow, somehow...it brings me to the topic of today's entry.
Loneliness
I tapped into another great video from Tara Brach this morning on loneliness, that feeling we are separate and cut off from the world, each other and ourselves. Painful! But this experience, I learned, is actually a biological aversion to motivate us to seek that connectedness that makes us who we really are. I shouldn't say "seek' as if it is something we need to find for the first time. I should say "remember" because that Oneness, that connection is always there. We just forget it in those moments we feel lonely.
The "Story" of Loneliness
The problem isn't so much the feeling we get when we find ourselves "alone" but it is what we tend to do with it. We allow our anxiety to increase. People who admit to feeling lonely are often anxious. Well if we are biologically designed to be in a pack and we find ourselves outside of one ...whether that is a perceived or actual occurrence...we are going to be hyper-vigalent about the dangers out there because we feel extra vulnerable without the pack's protection. So loneliness focus increases our anxiety
A perception and self perpetuated "story" about our loneliness also decreases our motivation and desire to look after ourselves. Why bother exercising , staying slim, shaving our legs if no one is going to see us right?
Most sadly we tend to fall into spirals of shame when we tell ourselves stories about our loneliness. "There must be something wrong with me if I am lonely or not belonging to the pack." A poet quoted in the video said that loneliness is "an embarrassment of poverty" . hmmm.
Loneliness = Vulnerability and Exposure
So I guess loneliness reminds us of our vulnerability and we do not like being vulnerable and exposed, do we? What we tend to do is try to cover that up with layers of numbing, distracting, achieving, redeeming etc. We take false refuge in whatever we can to avoid that feeling.
What we fail to realize is that vulnerable place loneliness exposes...is the very place from which we can heal. It allows us to connect with Self in a much deeper and meaningful way if...if we allow the loneliness to "cut more deeply" through us to reveal the "sacred longing" that exists in all of us.
Loneliness Can Lead Us Home
If we were willing to simply sit with our loneliness instead of running from it; if we were to gently and patiently call it forth to us as if it were a frightened feral child ( our frightened inner child) and embrace it softly...the unpleasantness of it, the judgment of it, the story line surrounding it would disappear. (Spirio, video below) and our healing would begin. This healing is a return to Love and a recognition that we do belong in a way we could not see before.
Hmm! Something to think about!
Tara Brach (April, 2020) Sheltering in Love Part V- Loneliness as a Portal to Sacred Presence ( part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_V__PzcXhA
Rupert Spira ( July 17, 2020) Exploring Vedanta and Tantric Approaches to Emotions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykqA6aBqopw.
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