Loneliness is not a thing to be conquered. It’s a thing to make friends with—then you’ll be with your best friend wherever you go—your sweet red heart.
I just attended the Nutcracker, with family friends and a holidate. I’ve been attending, with a few misses, for 10 years. I’m not sure why I don’t get tired of it, why it only grows on me, why the music seems perfect, why the cute children (clumsy, adorable) and the professionals (impressive, refined) in the ballet alike add to the wonder of it.
I love this Holiday time of year. I’m Buddhist, so I enjoy the Jewish traditions along with the Christian traditions along with the crafts fairs and whatever else comes up. It’s a time of year where, especially if it’s snowy, the cultural traditions only seem to underline the simple, quieting, slowness and familial (even for those like me, single and without family) cheer of this season.
Of course, the cheer can also highlight a sense of loneliness, of missing out. Why am I single? Why am I alone? For all my work, why am I not actually helping this world of ours all that much? Why am I the 6th man on most friendship teams?
This loneliness can calcify into poor-me, for any of us. Or, it can manifest in raw heart, in empathy, in caring, in sweet sad joy. And that, for me, is the essence of the sweetness of this season—not some saccharine forced-happiness.
The Buddhist View of Loneliness as a Good Thing.
“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” ~ Janet Fitch
The below is a great quote…
Reminds me of Robin Williams’: “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.”
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche & Pema Chodron.
Via my mom, via Trungpa Rinpoche
“Although the warrior’s life is dedicated to helping others, s/he realizes that s/he will never be able to completely share her/his experience with others…Yet s/he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing her/his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart. This is not something to feel bad about; it is a cause for rejoicing.”
From 2009: Tonight in Boulder there’s a Valentine’s Ball, which elephantjournal.com is proud to be sponsoring (it’s 80s style, and benefits the Women’s Bean Project). There’s hundreds of gorgeous in-and-out people going to St. Julien, friends partying at b.side, and all the other restaurants and bars will be full of sweet lovers and banded-together loners alike.
But the ‘shadow’ side of St. Valentine’s Day, is, of course, similar to the ‘shadow’ on Christmas, that other warm and bright holy-day all about togetherness. For tonight more folks than not find themselves alone. And whether we’re ashamed of that loneliness, or fine with it, we have Hallmark to thank for this day which reminds us that loneliness, uncovered, is at the heart of being a true, full human being. At least, that’s what I was taught.
See also: The Four Stages of Loneliness & 10 Salves for a Broken Heart.
My first love was a girl named Susannah. We met when we were in high school, and had a glorious, tragic, intimate year-and-a-half together.
After we broke up (all my fault), I missed her every day, for years.
Every single day.
It helped somewhat that I’d been raised in the Buddhist tradition—I’m sure other religious and agnostic childhoods would bear other helpful fruit, but what I know is my own experience. Reading a teaching on loneliness by Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun who was an early student of Chogyam Trungpa and now studies with Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, I was amazed that in the Buddhist view the feeling of loneliness is identified as the feeling of Buddha Nature itself.
In other words,
loneliness is not a lacking of something, but rather the aching fulfillment of our open, raw, caring nature.
I remember thinking about this as I left a cheerfully crowded banquet, looking up at Marpa Point (a big mountain) glowing under the moon up at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center, in 1992, and my friend Jenny comforting me. I missed Susannah so badly that night, the stars and moon and silhouetted mountains seemed to prick little holes in my silly red heart.
Other Buddhist texts remind us that when we fall in love with our teacher, or the Dharma, it is only a recognition of our own enlightened nature in others, or externally. We have only to realize, in such open, empty moments, that the love that we seek is present, now.
But over to the experts.
‘An analogy for Bodhicitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment and blame. But under the hardness of that armour there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all.’ (The Places That Scare You, p4)
Chogyam Trungpa on “desolation, relationships, and loneliness as consort.”
Student: I’d like to ask a question about loneliness and love. In my experience, the kind of love where two people try to be together in order to protect themselves from loneliness hasn’t worked out too well. When you come in contact with loneliness, it seems to destroy a lot of things you try to pull off in trying to build up security. But can there be love between two people while they continue to try to work with the loneliness?
Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s an interesting question. I don’t think anybody can fall in love unless they feel lonely. People can’t fall in love unless they know they are lonely and are separate individuals. If by some strange misunderstanding, you think you are the other person already, then there’s no one for you to fall in love with. It doesn’t work that way. The whole idea of union is that of two being together. One and one together make union. If there’s just one, you can’t call that union. Zero is not union, one is not union, but two is union. So I think in love it is the desolateness that inspires the warmth. The more you feel a sense of desolation, the more warmth you feel at the same time. You can’t feel the warmth of the house unless it’s cold outside. The colder it is outside, the cozier it is at home.
S: What would be the difference between the relationship between lovers and the general relationship you have with the sangha as a whole, which is a whole bunch of people feeling desolateness to different degrees?
TR: The two people have a similarity in their type of loneliness. One particular person reminds another more of his or her own loneliness. You feel that your partner, in seeing you, feels more lonely. Whereas with the sangha, it’s more a matter of equal shares. There’s all-pervasive loneliness, ubiquitous loneliness, happening all over the place.
Student: Would you say that loneliness is love?…
…for the rest, and much more, go to Chronicle Project.
Pema Chodron via Shambhala Sun magazine. Excerpt:
In the middle way, there is no reference point. The mind with no reference point does not resolve itself, does not fixate or grasp. How could we possibly have no reference point? To have no reference point would be to change a deep-seated habitual response to the world: wanting to make it work out one way or the other. If I can’t go left or right, I will die! When we don’t go left or right, we feel like we are in a detox center. We’re alone, cold turkey with all the edginess that we’ve been trying to avoid by going left or right. That edginess can feel pretty heavy.
However, years and years of going to the left or right, going to yes or no, going to right or wrong has never really changed anything. Scrambling for security has never brought anything but momentary joy. It’s like changing the position of our legs in meditation. Our legs hurt from sitting cross-legged, so we move them. And then we feel, “Phew! What a relief!” But two and a half minutes later, we want to move them again. We keep moving around seeking pleasure, seeking comfort, and the satisfaction that we get is very short-lived.
We hear a lot about the pain of samsara, and we also hear about liberation. But we don’t hear much about how painful it is to go from being completely stuck to becoming unstuck. The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality, like changing our DNA. We are undoing a pattern that is not just our pattern. It’s the human pattern: we project onto the world a zillion possibilities of attaining resolution. We can have whiter teeth, a weed-free lawn, a strife-free life, a world without embarrassment. We can live happily every after. This pattern keeps us dissatisfied and causes us a lot of suffering.
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.
The middle way is wide open, but it’s tough going, because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern that we all share. When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel. We don’t want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me.
Meditation provides a way for us to train in the middle way—in staying right on the spot. We are encouraged not to judge whatever arises in our mind. In fact, we are encouraged not to even grasp whatever arises in our mind. What we usually call good or bad we simply acknowledge as thinking, without all the usual drama that goes along with right and wrong. We are instructed to let the thoughts come and go as if touching a bubble with a feather. This straightforward discipline prepares us to stop struggling and discover a fresh, unbiased state of being.
The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.
Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.
There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are…”
…go to Shambhala Sun’s web site for the rest.
Bonus: “For all those moments after a breakup when it hurts too much, know this…”
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