Loneliness – Meet the Most Important Person in Your Life

“Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.” Mother Teresa

I will never forget the feeling of loneliness, though it is something I now rarely feel, but those memories are still etched on my heart.

There is no one memory, more a series of them, as people in my life came and went. Yet I was brought up in a loving family, by parents who were very much together in their game of life. I was surrounded by a large extended family who were also in long running relationships, it seemed like the thing to do was find that person to partner with.

Happy ever after is what was fed to me through the very fabric of the society I was brought up in, and people leaving my life was something I felt acutely – and took personally.

Being a sensitive soul, I like to go deep with people, so I’ve always tended towards a small group of close friends rather than a large social circle. Having moved around and moved through different relationships though, I will acknowledge that small group has changed and grown over the years, but with each chapter there can only be a spotlight on a few.

So those few who hold my heart and attention in the present moment are always the ones most acutely felt when they exit my life. What I feel now when this happens (something I am largely at peace with) is massively different compared to my earlier years. I will try to describe what has made the difference.

First though, a few of those earlier memories.

I remember bumping into an old friend at university one day, a day when my usual circle of friends were not there and I was feeling like a spare part hanging around between lectures. It had been hard adjusting to university, it was so completely overwhelming in its size and culture compared to anything I’d experienced before and there was real no sense of belonging.

My old friend had been one of my closest in our early teenage years, and we often stayed at each other’s houses. But I had let that friendship slip as my focus was drawn into a relationship at the age of sixteen. So bumping into her at university made my heart lift, but as we stood and talked it became obvious how much she had moved on, and she had someplace to be; there was no welcome to join her.

My heart sank as I watched her walk away. There was no malice in her actions, but I felt terrible none the less. I became acutely aware of how she must have felt when I had left her to pursue other interests. That is the hardest part of friendships and relationships, letting go when I’ve outgrown them.

Yet I have always let go, the calling inside me to move on stronger than any regret about staying. Sometimes, though, the call to move on has not been mine.

I can vividly remember sitting in my room at my parents’ house one Saturday night, looking up through the street beyond, and watching a neighbor head out for a night on the town with his friends.

I’d been in a relationship with a guy I met at university and, in that summer I graduated, he had left me. He’d had the whole of my heart for almost a couple of years by then, and I just felt so totally rejected and worthless.

On that Saturday night as I watched my neighbor, I felt utterly alone and sad and wondered how to get past what had happened. Having been so involved in that relationship and, having just left university, I really had no circle of friends that I could even ring up and go for a drink with. Even my younger brother was out having fun with his friends.

Slowly, starting with a girlfriend of my ex’s friend that we used to socialize with, I built another circle of friends and life moved on.

In later years I can then recall – in another relationship – my partner going off out with his mates one Sunday evening. I had moved cities and pretty much had our relationship and my work, that was enough to keep my attention fully occupied, so I hadn’t really cultivated a group of friends to socialize with and didn’t much feel like doing that anyway.

It was a strange thing to be faced with an empty space, scary even. But there I was, his Sunday night out became a regular thing. At first I felt lonely, then I started to fill my time with things that interested me and quickly began to look forward to ‘my’ time.

That might sound so obvious, but living in constant company had gotten me used to compromise. There was freedom in watching the kinds of TV shows that only I wanted to watch, listening to – and dancing to – music only I liked, reading books and having time to reflect and contemplate.

But being on my own with my thoughts was not always an attractive concept in days gone past because I was completely identified with the thoughts rather than simply observing them. Talking to a friend the other day about this same topic, I was sharing a memory of being in a motel with the kids and waking up one night about 4am, hearing a loud bang in the neighbourhood.

Wherever my thoughts had started, they quickly spiraled to a bad place in that half awake state. I was soon imagining a mad gunman on the loose and had carefully planned an escape route in my head that included waking the kids up and getting them well away from danger without alerting the gunman. Thankfully I caught those thoughts, observing how they were making me feel and reasoning the unlikely nature of them.   

While I had learned the ability to ‘talk myself down’ from a highly anxious state many years before, it was actually during the time my partner’s social life had left me free each Sunday evening that I began to take more regular notice of my thoughts and how they were making me feel more generally.

I read a book by Brandon Bays called The Journey, recommended by a friend. The Journey was Brandon’s account of self healing, fully recovering from a large tumor with no medical intervention.  

It was the beginning of the journey to me, the journey to my inner world that included no one else.  You see, up until that point, it had always taken another person to explore the depths. But this was all me, figuring out who I am, life and all that I and we are capable of.

That was about 15 years ago and it has, by no means, been an easy journey. There have still been moments of the good, the bad, the downright ugly and the amazing. But loneliness? Not so much. Every since Brandon took me on a guided meditation and showed me how to find the peace within myself, and how connected to everything else we are, loneliness is no longer there to be felt.

The single biggest shift in that conscious awareness of my thoughts, and of the much larger part of myself behind those thoughts, has come through regularly meditating. My whole concept of how who I am, how the world operates and how to get the best out of it all has completely changed for the better. I feel more in control, happier and – most definitely – not lonely.

So have you met the most important person in your life – you – in this way? If you’ve had glimpses of it, I’d encourage you to regularly practice observing what you’re thinking and feeling, the connection between the two and your power to change it. A more balanced and contented you leads to a more balanced and contented world; a world in which loneliness will be a thing of the past.

Other related articles of Shona’s you might enjoy:

Who Am I Now?
Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First
Saying Goodbye
Meditation – You’re Cornerstone to Success
Keep Growing: Don’t Look Back - Don’t Look Down

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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