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Alone along the path
StingRay
Glasgow Explorer
Hi
During and after meditation I have been feeling a sense of being alone on this path for the first time in 10 years. It's not a need for another person as such but more of a deep feeling of being alone as my mind becomes quiet and no longer pre occupied with the binge watching on Netflix or the occasional x box game! Does anybody else feel this way and how would you suggest we deal with this. I feel it deep in my heart and into the pit of my stomach
1
Comments
@StingRay -- Short answer, yes.
So much of identity is bound up with what others think or believe, that there is often a stepping-stone sense of profound loneliness when ... well ... when you discover there is no such thing as "sharing" experience in the ordinary sense. In this realm, "hope," "belief" and "meaning" all take a beating. Assumptions come up short. After a lifetime of supposing that what "we" agree to must be true, the loneliness can be painful.
What to do? Short answer, keep practicing. Keep on no matter what. Bit by bit the need for group-hug meaning or truth is not so insistent. It's OK ... your experience is fine, just like mine. If it's not fine, correct it, but otherwise don't fret.
My Zen teacher once said to me that our practice was about like drinking tea. If you don't know what tea tastes like, all the talk in the world won't change that. "But if you drink tea and I drink tea, then we both know what tea tastes like." This sounds pithy and charming, perhaps, but its meaning can throw a spanner in a world of ancient habits. Your experience is, in one sense, wholly yours, but in another sense it's not separated, is it? Is the one who feels lonely alone? I doubt it.
Take your time. Be attentive and take responsibility, whether as a Buddhist or a car mechanic. Patience, courage and doubt are your allies.
The Zen teacher Rinzai once goaded the monks in his care: "Your whole problem," he said approximately, "is that you do not trust yourselves enough."
Take your time.
And best wishes.
Hi @StingRay -- Is the alone feeling also a lonely feeling when it arises during your meditation? I mean, you are looking for ways of dealing with it, because you feel it that deeply in your heart and the pit of your stomach, right? Up front, I'd say that as you continue on with your meditation, different things will arise, and you'll sort of pass through to other things and then after a while of consistent meditation, you will feel less and less of anything that seems like a bit of a problem. Did you run into this sort of thing when you were doing it before?
Hi @genkaku
Many thanks for your interpretation of things. Your explanation really made sense and inspires me to keep sitting.
Hi @silver thanks for your response. To answer your questions, I feel the sense of being very alone the minute I get up immediately after sitting and then this feeling stays with me for the rest of the day. The strange thing is up until recently when I started sitting again after a 3 year period this deep feeling had never arose before!
Gasho and meta
Good answers. As usual @genkaku provides excellent insight.
However I want to touch further on what @silver is saying ...
Feelings, impasses, obstacles, euphorias, anxieties, loneliness etc have a physical component that you are aware of.
That is a good thing because you can explore how you are not a feeling in the heart or the pit of the stomach. These are sensations or arisings just as 'I am thinking this'.
In a sense you are in a realm populated by feelings, memories, yearnings, fidget tendencies or whatever. You are not really alone any more or less than before ...
Does it matter we are alone, in dukkha, perfect, down, up, sideways, dozy, alert, full of metta etc? At the time of course it seems of import. In essence ... empty ...
@StingRay
Feeling Alone along the path is often just another temporary resting stop along the path towards suffering's cessation. Bravo!
Identifying with feeling apart from the rest of existence defines both the human condition and the very dream that the Buddha asked us to awaken from.
An important step in the dissolving of that dream in a meditation practice requires an ever increasing facing of this dream so that we can illuminate what creates and maintains it.
In practice, as you begin to face this dream, the creator of this dream will simply defend itself and push back according to the degree of threat it feels.
Your resulting feelings of arising uncomfortableness in this process simply proves how successful you are being in the challenging of the dream maker.
When the facing of this dream eventually becomes more important than our fears of what might happen if we transcend it, then the dream will truly start to lose it's ability to define us.
Here, the separations between self and other, dissipate with possibilities just too wide for any dream to contain.
Here, an awakening from the dream becomes possible.
Another way to understand the feeling, is we stay stay with a feeling and label it as something 'not good'. Being alone is something I love. In other words there is an interpretation.
If we love a feeling, we may cling to it equally. You must feel other things in a day too? Maybe you could take up other temporary or preferred clinging?
Hope that is useful. If not, we are not alone and someone with more sense will be along shortly ...
Thank you @lobster and @how
The both of you have made me aware that this feeling of "loneliness" is just another emotion that will pass and is part of the meditation and the path.
Nobody with any sense around? Ah well have to make do with me ...
Emotions are not a problem but we are very attached to them, as we are to our bodies and opinions ... so that very strong attachment is the bond breaker we seek.
It is why equanimity is sought as a required basis.
Thanks @lobster
Good advice. Everyone develops patience in time. Shortcuts not really possible. Being attentive and responsible becomes a distinct interaction. What is this? It is me. Courage is facing that. Doubt is not anxiety ridden but a form of 'unsettling' - neti-neti
http://www.rainbowbody.net/HeartMind/netineti.htm