An Antidote to Loneliness/January Retreat

When I first entered the small 10′ x 10′ cabin (that’s 9.29 square meters) and began to settle in with my clothing, food, etc. panic shot through me: I’d made a mistake. I’d just spent 10 months in limited social contact and now I was entering into complete isolation?

What was I thinking?! I remembered that I could leave at anytime. I had nothing to prove, this wasn’t an endurance contest, there were no retreat police holding me there. Yet I also relished the challenge of 21 days in solitude. I needed the alchemy it would provide.

Intimacy

As each icy cold night yielded to lengthening January days and I pumped water from the well, continuously fed the small wood burning stove and cooked canned soup on a tiny camp stove, I realized I was never lonely, I never felt isolated.

I had been slowed down enough to allow the world to meet me: birds, wind, prayer flags flapping tirelessly, snow and ice crunching beneath my feet and the slant of sunlight were my companions.

That subtle sense of grasping at experiences in which many of us are well trained, stopped. I could allow myself to receive the vitality of life always pulsing, nudging, meeting me.

What I experience as “loneliness” is a lack of intimacy with myself and the world. I feel impoverished and unworthy of my own good companionship. We are pack animals and we do need connection with others.

Yet, loneliness can be an alchemical invitation to go deeper into our experience. Intimacy with ourselves is an antidote to loneliness. If we allow it, loneliness is an invitation to life lived more genuinely and generously.

Each time you receive your breath, your movement, birdsong or even difficult moments, that pulse of life is right there to meet you: it’s that close in, no cold winter cabin required.