How to Deal with Loneliness

All of us feel lonely from time to time, no matter how well-connected, or how well we have structured our lives to be constantly around other people, or hear and see people via the Internet, TV or the movies.

For single people in the holidays and aging adults, that loneliness can approach physical pain in intensity. Highly successful professionals who are around well-healed colleagues nonstop Monday through Friday may find their home or neighborhood a ghost town during the weekends.

If we give in to that loneliness, we can feel totally worthless, and our lives can seem an empty game amounting to less than nothing.​

Alone – Yes. Lonely – No

Alone does not mean lonely, and lonely does not mean alone. You can be in a crowded, noisy party late on a Friday evening and feel gruesomely isolated.

You can be alone on a deserted island or in an Alaskan forest and find yourself joyfully communing with creation, even though the next person to you may be miles away.

Alone is a physical condition, based upon your proximity to other people. We don’t usually consider plants and animals; in which case, we are never truly alone on this planet.

Lonely is an interpretation of your experience that has a profound impact on your emotional well-being.

Very often, this is a consequence of living in your head out of present time and ignoring both your heart and your gut. While the mind is a matchless servant, it is a wretched master.

For many of us, loneliness starts in college, when we devote countless hours to reading books and writing papers. It is endemic to the life of many attorneys, who must spend days on end poring over law books and doing corporate discovery with mountains of data.

Ways To Cope With Loneliness

The way out of this distressing feeling begins with a profound understanding of relationship.

Back in the 1970’s, Werner Erhard gave the dictionary definition of relationship as “a relatedness through affinity way of being,” maintaining that you are ALREADY related to everyone and everything.

This understanding was enhanced by a model drawn from Scientology called ARC, which stands for Affinity, Reality and Communication. While we are physically related to everyone and everything, occupying a definite position in time and space, we feel a sense of relationship with people we like, with whom we have basic agreements (or an understanding) and whom we understand, and who understand us.​

The key is to start communicating and in the process experience love… for one another and everything surrounding us.​

Werner Erhard went on to show that love is a function of communication, that when you share an experience with another in such a way that he or she “gets” it over on his side, and you get that he or she gets it, you spontaneously feel love.

We can take this up a notch by diving deeply into the spiritual dimension with the realization that the nature of our Creator, of our Source, is love… Absolute and Unconditional Love.

While this is a shocking assertion to many, the entire Christian tradition was founded on this principle, and it is to be found in the other great faiths and religious traditions, as well. When you presence the Creator as Love, you spontaneously feel love.

For Christians, it is usually Jesus Christ, or the Blessed Virgin Mary. For Hindus, it would most likely be the avatars, Krishna or Rama. For Buddhists, it would be the Bodhisattvas, especially Avalokiteshvara, or Kuan Yin.

This type of love is way deeper than any romantic love. Tap into that love and it will melt your loneliness away. Instead of feeling emptiness… you will experience harmony and contentment within.

If we truly are related to everyone and everything, and if the feeling of loneliness is but an interpretation of our experience, how do we access presence, especially the sacred presence of love?

While some people will emphasize walks in the forest or by the beach, as well as various forms of yoga and meditation, there is another possibility that is just as potent, if not more so. It lies within the experience of community.

Find a Conscious Community

All the great traditions have community as an essential element of enlightenment or salvation. For Hindus, it is the temple or ashram; for Buddhists, it is the sangha; for Jewish people, it is the synagogue and community center; for Muslims, it is the Mosque or Uma.

Find YOUR community!​

Find a community that values relationships… AND... where you feel comfortable to be yourself. A place that allows you to open up and explore your true self (interbeing) as well as experience that spontaneous deeper love. However, you have to participate and communicate.

Implement Some of These Steps Today

• Choose to be alone when you are alone. When you actually choose it, time will go by quickly, and you might find even find it a joy.
• Reach out to others on a daily basis with a little smile, a quiet “Hello” and direct eye contact. One of the biggest secrets to initiating a relationship with someone it to be interested IN THEM, rather than trying to be interesting. People who are interested only in themselves get boring very fast.
• Consider taking a consciousness acceleration program with lots of social interaction from the human potential movement. Est and its present-day incarnation, Landmark Education, made this type of learning available around the world. Today, you can find many variations on this.
• Get involved in a service organization, such as Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. Some of my most valuable friendships came out of participation in peace and environmental organizations.
• Explore Meet-Ups and other Internet-mediated events, based on shared interests with others. Richard Bolles, author of the Parachute career series emphasized the best way to overcome interview fright is to interview friends and acquaintances based on a mutual passion. One of mine, for example, is film studies.

Steven Spielberg, in his classic, Close Encounters, subtitled his stunning film, “We Are Never Alone.”

This is literally true, whether or not we meet any interplanetary or stellar aliens. We don’t need to be dismayed about occasional feelings of loneliness. We are divine being human for a time. We are, indeed, related to everyone and everything, as creators within our own creation.

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