The secret, loving message of loneliness

The few scenes in my life with lasting heart-crushing power mostly involve loneliness.

Those are the scenes from which I don’t draw many potent lessons, but only return for inner child healing, again and again.

I often questioned my worth in those days, wondering why the universe seemed to single me out for solitude.

Even today, I still struggle with loneliness sometimes. My husband works a lot and I haven’t made many friends in the area we live.

So I can completely empathize with feeling like nobody understands you, or feeling detached or isolated.

 

Over time, I’ve learned that loneliness is simply a sign of being disconnected from my own heart.

 

The emotion of loneliness, like all other emotions, is only a sign from our internal guidance system that we must recalibrate our lives to better fit our desires, temperament and destiny. It’s a sign to tune in with practices like meditation and yoga.

Loneliness, again like all other emotions, doesn’t mean you’re flawed. It means you’re human. Actually, loneliness is part of the human condition and therefore something that unifies us all! Nearly everyone can relate to feeling lonely at times.

On a broader scale, every outside desire is actually a call from within.

Feeling like nobody loves you is a call for you to love yourself. Feeling like nobody listens to you is a call to listen to yourself. Feeling disconnected from the world is a sure sign that you’re disconnected from yourself.

The world is only a mirror, reflecting your internal experience back to you. It’s truly all a matter of perspective. For example, in my current life, sometimes I’m fully in the swing of living, going to the gym, making yummy food, and pursuing my passion projects while barely noticing that I’m alone a lot.

Other times, I start feeling really lonely and sometimes wonder if I’m a failure because I don’t have more people surrounding me. (Which, I might add is a value I’ve taken on from an extroversion-obsessed society. If our society valued introversion, then perhaps those of us in solitude would grapple less with these feelings and be more willing to embrace aloneness, which is actually a healthy thing to do.)

For me, down cycles typically coincide with a downgrade in self-care. Perhaps I’ve neglected my exercise, or have been working too much without taking time for magical moments like watching the sunset. Maybe my ice cream indulgence turned into an overload and destroyed my healthy eating habits.

These foundational self-care activities aren’t obviously connected to loneliness, but they’re intimately connected to self-love and overall happiness. When holes in self-love and care appear, painful emotions like loneliness more easily take root.

The biggest problem happens when you allow the stigma of loneliness or depression to make you question your worth.

 

This is really important: Feeling lonely does not make you unworthy.

 

It’s a season of life, a lesson of life, and the key, as with any other life lesson, is to embrace it, release resistance and make the most of it.

Taking loneliness for what it is — a signal that you’re disconnected from yourself and the universe — allows you to plug back in. To say that you won’t have any depressing thoughts is probably not realistic, but the ideal is to cultivate a sense of self-worth and love that’s independent of how you feel.

This is an example of unconditional self-love.

You don’t have to be happy to be worthy of love. You don’t have to be surrounded by others to be worthy of love. You don’t need a tribe to be worthy of love. You can spend every single waking second of your day alone and be worthy of love.

You can spend every single waking second of your day surrounded by other people who make you feel alone and still be worthy of love.

The question is not if you are worthy. The question is if you are in tune with your worthiness.

 

When you are detached from your own love, you feel lonely. Loneliness is a call to return to yourself.

 

Of course, you could always go out and meet people, but personally, I’ve made it my life goal to strive for peace and happiness that’s independent of life circumstances. It’s better to find happiness alone, and then seek out people with whom you joyfully connect.

Otherwise, you will probably befriend unhappy people or people you don’t like but hang out with just so you’re not alone and neither of those cases sound like fun.

So, then the question becomes, how do you reconnect to yourself?

HOW TO RECONNECT WITH YOURSELF

• Meditate — even for five minutes. If you’re not practicing the Feeling Awareness meditation and processing stuck emotions, download here. (It’s the meditation technique that changed my life!)
• Send time in nature — for a short walk or a longer hike
• Journal —check out these journaling prompts
• Paint a picture — even if you think it looks horrible
• Practice yoga — move however it feels good
• Dance — shake your body to music you love

The common thread among all of these activities is that they reconnect you with your own energy, your own spirit and that of the universe itself. Once you connect with yourself and the universe, you’re not lonely anymore.

If you’d like to learn a powerful meditation technique to connect to your heart and learn to love yourself, click the image below.

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