Despite our connection with others, we are all asked to travel alone. No one can experience life for us, know what it is like to feel scared or touched or excited for us, breathe for us, or enter into the mystery on our behalf.
The whole and broken yogi is at home in this type of aloneness, which burns with the richness of the emotional spectrum, their experience colored by a certain sadness. Not the sadness that something is missing but that it is so full that it aches for this life.
We know that at any moment our hearts might break, we may fall in love in the most excruciating way, the rug is sure to be pulled out from underneath us, and we’ll be asked to meet deep waves feeling. Somehow we have no choice but to enter into the core of mercy and grief, suffering and joy, and darkness and light.
“Loneliness,” on the other hand, is usually born out of a resistance to present embodied experience, a subtle turning from shame, fear, sadness, and rage. When we are not able to provide a home for these ones, we join them in their orphaned state and feel cut off from life, lonely, and disconnected.
In a moment of surging, these ones need not be healed, but held and allowed back home. To abandon and send them away creates the foundation for the experience of loneliness, where we fall out of touch with the grace and wisdom-field of the inner world.
It is so fragile here, this nervous system, these mirror neurons, this sensitivity. Perhaps it is a unique configuration found only in this star. Let us re-open the temple of the heart and provide sanctuary for the inner travelers, that they may reveal the path out of loneliness and into aloneness, which we will walk together with all beings everywhere.
My latest book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available
My next two events:
The Great Befriending: A Five-Day Journey of Self-Love, Deep Rest, and Coming Alive (with Jeff Foster), September 21-26 in Loveland, Colorado
Stay tuned for details regarding a five-day winter retreat January 23-28 at Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado
