When I was in seventh grade, the group of girls I hung out with stopped speaking to me. Every time they passed me in the hall, they would turn their backs and giggle. It was my first experience of real loneliness, and at the time it felt like the end 
of the world.That experience stayed in my emotional backpack for years. Even now, just the word “loneliness” can trigger the emotionart melancholy and part lossf those days. It was only after I had been doing spiritual practice for quite some time that I began to see that the emotion of loneliness is not just personal. Like anger and fear, loneliness is one of those universal, primal emotions, a groove in humanity’s subconscious. Most of us (even those of us who like being alone) can’t help but fall into it at one time or another.
Loneliness is more about psychic disconnection than physical solitude. To appreciate time alone, most of us need to feel we have a choicehat friends or family are no farther away than a phone call. If not, time alone can be miserable. In fact, my suspicion is that the primal feeling of loneliness has something to do with a genetic instinct that equates safety with physical closeness to a tribe or family. On that pre-rational level, loneliness can feel like death.
Home Alone
Maybe that’s one reason why loneliness, or even the fear of loneliness, can be such a stumbling block on the road to inner growth. Certain journeys cannot be taken unless you’re willing to face loneliness, and yet many of us are afraid to do so. Have you ever stayed in a relationship long after you knew it wasn’t good for you, held on to friends who no longer understood the person you’d become, shied away from meditation and other contemplative exercisesecause it meant being by yourself?The irony, of course, is that when you accept loneliness, you discover something powerful and freeing on the other side of it. My loneliness in seventh grade taught me compassion for those who are unpopular and inspired me to seek friendships based on intimacy rather than the need to belong. Years later, the extreme loneliness of a rainy week in Big Sur, when I was stuck in a cabin at the end of five miles of dirt road, catapulted me into my first genuine experience of present-moment awareness; I still remember the surprising joy of hours spent watching the path the raindrops made as they streaked down the window.
Loneliness, like fear, is a threshold emotionou have to pass through it if you want to enter the inner world. In fact, loneliness is the shadow side of solitude, that magical and transformative state that poets, mystics, and yogis celebrate as the great laboratory for self-awareness and spiritual growth. If loneliness reeks of alienation and sadness, solitude offers the ground for you to connect to what is truly essential in yourself. Solitude teaches you how to be with yourself, and without it, you never learn to truly be at home with what you are. “Alone…and the soul emerges,” wrote Walt Whitman.
So perhaps the important question when you’re alone during the holidays, or recovering from a breakup, or wondering why all your friends seem so distant and unsupportive, is not, How can I make this empty feeling go away? but, How do I turn this painful state of loneliness into a transformative state of solitude?
A Map of Loneliness
The first step is to identify the kind of loneliness you’re feeling. Loneliness has more than one flavor and many layers. Some of these are purely personal. Others are part of the human condition.The first layer, which I call situational loneliness, is the empty feeling you might get when you’re alone in a strange hotel room, or when you have a difficult task to do and there’s no one around to help.
If you’re an introvert, this kind of loneliness may carry with it a piggybank of painful memories. If you’ve always been outgoing and popular, it may be the odd emotion you felt during the first few days of college or a new jobnd it can knock you for a loop. Often people on their first meditation retreatspecially silent oneso through intense and difficult bouts of loneliness before they can settle into being with themselves.
When you’re experiencing symptoms of this kind of withdrawal, the temptation is to dissipate it with activity. However, being temporarily lonely offers a perfect opportunity to explore solitude. Instead of turning on the TV or going to look for action, you might want to spend some time investigating aloneness.
Situational loneliness is usually short-lived and relatively superficial. Not so the loneliness of true social isolation, which is for many people an ongoing and painful reality. Enduring a failing relationship, being rejected or cut off from your social supports, losing your job or your home, or suffering from a long illness-these are times when we can touch the depths of personal loneliness.
In many tribal societies, the worst punishment is to be shunned or exiled, not only because of the physical hardships it imposes but also because the social connections of tribal life are basic to most people’s identities. To be cut off or rejected can be deeply devastating. Yet it can also be a wake-up call and a powerful spur to inner practice.
