Being alone
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I saw this and thought, we should talk about it...
@adamcrossley said:
For a lot of young people and singles across the world, this may be the first time in a while that they are confronted with being alone. It is like being on a retreat, where you have a lot of time to reflect on your thoughts.
The effects of being alone can be quite wide ranging. The last five years or so I have lived in a deliberately simple lifestyle without a lot of social contact, I felt the need for solitude and it was good for me to combine it with a study of Buddhism. But I have noticed that it helps to work on yourself in this period, it helps to have a focus. It stopped bothering me after a year or so.
I came across this piece on loneliness, maybe it helps some...
https://www.lionsroar.com/six-kinds-of-loneliness/
What are your experiences with being alone? What advice would you give on the subject in the time of coronavirus?
Comments
I occasionally yearn to be alone. As things are, my life currently dances to the tunes of other pipers....
Advice? Learn to appreciate the positives this hitherto unheard-of experience has brought you. And be glad you're upright, breathing and above ground...
I luvs it!
When alive I am a loan.
When meditating, I am alone.
If you are not happy with self ... how can you enjoy companionship?
For example these party goers having a sing song ...
I chose to live alone and have done so since 1998... The first year or so was for me the hardest, having to work through years of conditioning, gradually removing layer upon layer of attachments that had made themselves at home AKA "the comfort zone"...
Woe is me for I'm alone
was once a manta I had known
But alas....loneliness on introspection
is just a mind lost in its own projection
When recognising that this is true
loneliness will no longer bother you
I totally agree with you friend @lobster, but I wish I could teach others to be more patient and accepting of self, so that they would suffer less aloneness.
"Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves. a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own"
~Page 16 'The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" Sogyal Rinpoche~
Perhaps it is not ourselves that we are afraid of facing, but our kleshas, our own flaws and negative emotions. If you can work on those and reduce them, I suspect you’ll find a path to virtue and automatically also be at peace with yourself.
I'm sure for Buddhists, that's true. For those who don't follow a Buddhist path, and don't know about such things, I would surmise there's no separation between ourselves and the flaws/emotions. They would be indistinguishable one from the other...
Curiously, we say "I am hungry" or "I am tired"... Thus identifying with the sense or emotion, making it one with ourselves and enmeshed with our Self.
Latin-based languages actually say "I HAVE hunger", or "I have sleepiness" (Ho fame, Ho sonno) because these are external factors affecting us, that we must address. In Italian, if someone is fatigued, physically, or mentally drained, then it's "Sono stanca" - I AM fatigued - in which the person identifies more with the personal sensation of feeling done in...
It's a differentiation that doesn't exist in British...
Just noodling...