Loneliness is a Longing for Yourself

What if loneliness was a transcendent doorway?

I spoke this aloud to myself on Christmas eve. Now I transcribe my voice memo for you in hopes it brings you a code of empowerment.

…

Loneliness is easy to be with so long as you don’t believe the stories you tell yourself about your loneliness.

In fact, I think it can be transcendent…

Just the experience of it in the body, it has almost a sweetness, a longing for union. For metness in your essence. For knowing of your own essence.

When there’s not another being present to inform you, or to reflect back to you, in their inevitable bias, you still reflect out, but into what seems like a void.

We get caught up in our minds about that unknown, about what we think the void represents.

When you’re alone, and you are in nature for example, and you walk through the woods with this longing for your beloved, and there’s not a bunch of static in your nervous system from another human being, positive or negative, good or bad, theres a still point to sense.

A more subtle beingness or presence of the non-human life around you… and a deeper capacity to sense your belonging in relationship to the land emerges.

Really, it’s a human need to feel met and belonged, it’s built into our very DNA to be part of a pack, because lone wolves don’t actually thrive.

And yet it can be an addictive pattern in relationship. We can forget where belonging actually comes from, not outside, but within. This addiction can mar your impression of your own energy, distort it.

Addicted to having our attention fixated on moving outward to sense into, to draw meaning from, to get reflection back from, to give to in order to get validity in our own existence… phew. That’s why aloneness is really crucial. It’s the ultimate addiction breaker.

Yet when we’re in times of loneliness in our lives, somewhere we know it’s not a forever thing, that there’s something to be relished, much to be relished in fact.

When all of that sloughs away, what’s left is a whole lot quieter. In that quietness is an opportunity to touch a sacred imprint of your own essence. It can be like sliding into a warm bath. It can be occupied with a soft and gentle presence.

There’s not as much drama, and my goodness, are we confronted with another of our addictions, to drama and chaos, right here in the loneliness.

Pulling back from these addiction is definitely uncomfortable at first, but just like an addictive drug, there’s a period of intense pain right when you start to get clean. Then it slowly gets better.

I believe theres something to be discovered over time. A solidity inside, an imprint of safety inside, a knowingness of self that makes it feel like your feet grow roots into the earth.

Where you can tap into this true experience of yourself, but also to your immediate natural environment, and find the most easeful companionship.

When you have those channels open in your body, and you can feel sameness, and energy exchange, and belonging with the trees, or with the animals, or with your dream guides… to me it feels like it quenches this deep thirst.

It frees up a lot of psychic bandwidth for receiving insight, true direction, purpose, belonging, and safety… all from within.

So there’s an alchemy to loneliness, to embracing it and staying away from the stories about why we feel lonely, what we’re lacking in our lives, the connection we don’t have. That can send you on a real trauma spiral.

In fact, if you’re just with the sensations, it’s not traumatic. But when you start to think up stories about why you’re feeling lonely… ugh.

Like for me, it’s Christmas, and I don’t have a family of my own. Phew, the second I start thinking about that, coupling it with the sensation of loneliness in my body, it gets a thousand times worse. It feels like I’m being punched in the gut.

The experience feels marred by the ‘red’ sensation in my nervous system, but that’s false.

When I take a deep breath and realize what I’m doing, below all that is still curiosity and an ocean of knowingness available. An acceptance of my life as it is, and the gifts that are here, and this is just where I’m at.

This loneliness is for me. This time alone is for me. This circumstance is for me. There is something beautiful to be mined out of every fucking experience I’m in.

This is really at the bottom of all the emotions. Loneliness is a gateway like no other emotion, touching at the heart of the concepts of worth, purpose, and even death.

I feel like loneliness has the steepest medicine curve to finding deeper transcendent experience in my own skin, when I can actually slow down and look at this fact:

We are here for a just a minute, just one tiny blip on the timeline of life existing on this planet, or at all. Loneliness is a longing to know yourself fully, before it’s all over.

So I encourage you to make friends with yourself, get to really know yourself, take off the masks.

Because who you are is a gift to the world and we long to know you too.

I love you.

Wolf Mother