Accepting Loneliness

I have this friend who wrote me a letter a couple of months ago.  The first one was on Wonder Woman stationary.  The next, on beautiful resume paper.  Both were reminders of the friends I have made over the past 12 months and the ones who have stuck with me through the years.  Not just new people to go meet up for coffee every so often, but those who I can just sit with.  They are there and I feel blessed to have them.  And yet...every so often I am hit with a wave of loneliness.  This is probably a normal experience for those who find themselves living the single life.  Maybe it is normal for people who are living life at all.  The challenge is finding out what to do with this loneliness.

The extrovert in me wants to run into the nearest crowd of people.  To reach out to the friends I can sit with.  To find an adventure, or run, or do anything but be with my loneliness.  Because I have taught myself that this feeling is wrong.  That feeling alone means I am alone.  I have spent so much of my life trying to be around others because this world tells us to look out  for those who are solitary beings.  We see that person and think they are abandoned, unattended, or deserted.  And it is so easy to believe these words.  I find myself sitting in my loneliness and formulating a list of those who have abandoned me.  I let this list expand until I am spinning with the reasons they have left.  So...I take this feeling of loneliness and I run from it. 

But what would happen if I sat with it? 

I took a mindfulness class last winter and our homework was to do a body scan at least once a week.  I found excuse after excuse to avoid the assignment until my sense of responsibility kicked in and I laid down in the dark to follow the direction of the narrator.  And as I lay there, focusing on my breath, following it through different parts of my body, I began to understand what I was afraid of.  I was running from everything I had been holding in.  I feared facing my pain, loneliness, and grief.  Because mindfulness asks you to not only acknowledge what you are feeling, but accept it and let it go.  How was I going to accept that pain in my chest?  How was I going to accept it and then let it go?  By giving it space to exist.

I spend my time running from loneliness because I fear the "truths" that will pop up in that quiet time.  I have faced that crippling heart-wrenching pain often enough to know its ability to bring me to my knees.  Yet, I have learned that without the space to exist, this beast only grows stronger.  I am fighting to accept the fears I have in order to set them free.  I may miss the physical presence of others, I may wish I had a someone besides my cat to snuggle up to at night, I may yearn for that open and honest conversation...and that is all ok.  I am learning to take my loneliness and sit with it.  I am reading letters from friends and remembering that just because I feel alone, it does not mean that I am alone.

So, I leave you with this video that another friend shared with me this morning.  It opened me up enough to remembers my fears which were saying they needed some time to sit with me.