Loneliness

 

The antidote to loneliness is solitude.

 

… the highest and most decisive experience of all, … is to be alone with one’s own self, or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the psyche. We must be alone if we are to find out what it is that supports us when we can no longer support ourselves. Only this experience can give us an indestructible foundation.

Carl Jung

 

A death, a betrayal, and a child’s illness plunged me into a dark winter period of life. None of the usual things, people, or activities offered solace.  For many months, I felt as if I were falling, physically falling, with that drop in the stomach churn one gets when an elevator descends too rapidly.  Because these losses and their unmooring was so extreme, none of the usual things offered solace.  The emptiness was too large to fill with work, friends, lovers, naps, wine or ice-cream.  The familiar world swirled around me, but I was no longer a part of it.  These losses pried me from the usual comforts leaving me feeling profoundly alone.

 

While there were months of darkness, sorrow, and loneliness, there was not only darkness, sorrow, and loneliness.  An unexpected lightness and a joy sometimes broke through the emptiness a visitation from a place beyond myself and the sorrow I carried.  This light and joy grew into an inner companionship which slowly over a long period of time led me across the bridge from loneliness to solitude.

 

I did not isolate myself during this time still visiting with friends, absorbed with work, preparing for yoga assessment, but because of the losses I had much more time alone with myself.  I began to find solace in nature taking long walks in the woods and spending many hours sitting by lakes and rivers with my dog.  For the first time in my life, I might go a day without speaking to anyone.  I started to travel alone to remote places and new cities.  Something inside of me was supporting my solo pilgrimage, calling me into solitude for long stretches of uninterrupted time.  I had never before felt such a calling, but solitude was where I found courage, deep healing and eventual peace in the midst of loss. 

 

The calling into solitude was I believe cultivated through years of daily asana practice.  Yoga gave me the physical, emotional, and spiritual strength to be with myself in grief without needing distractions.  In the daily practice of asana, we cultivate a closeness with the Self, exploring the inner edges where the known parts come up against the unknown. While the ego takes us up to that inner edge, surrender is what gets us across. The ego is terrified of the unknown and will do everything in its power to keep things the same.  The soul however longs for the unknown where it finds growth and freedom.  Quieting the ego and cultivating soul strength, asana taught me how to abide with myself in darkness as well as in light. 

 

It is only through solitude that we can come to know ourselves at the deepest levels.  There comes the blessing of quiet and not needing to speak.  There is the learning with practice that we can rely on ourselves even in pain and sorrow to find inside that which sustains us when nothing outside can.  No one can carry our burden of loneliness.  If we ask others to carry this burden, our relationships will strain and break.  The extent to which we can abide with ourselves in solitude is the extent to which we can give love, care, and attention to others and heal ourselves.