This Lonely Winter

The other day, I randomly ran into a former colleague on the street. It wasn’t someone with whom I was particularly close, but I felt so unexpectedly moved to see her that after we said goodbye, I felt tears sting the corners of my eye. God, I thought, I have been so lonely.

I know I am not alone in feeling alone. This winter, so many of us are walking around lonely, thirsty for community and connection. This much isolation and distance and anxiety around every interaction is not normal.

What’s helped me in recent months has been a three-step process of allowing the loneliness, feeling the body, and de-mystifying the stories that cause loneliness to worsen. These three practices each stand on their own, but can also be combined together in a single meditation session (or just when you’re sitting on your couch) and can, over time, become a kind of second nature.

1. Allow, allow, allow

In the present moment, loneliness is just a feeling. Often, the most painful aspect of it is how hard we fight to push it away—which, this year, may just not be possible anyway. If we let it be, it can just be a feeling. Maybe not a pleasant one, but one that is still less difficult.

So, see if you can allow the loneliness. Can you stop fighting or running away from the feeling? Can you take a breath before reaching for the next Netflix show, or alcoholic beverage, and just acknowledge the feeling is present within you?

I know it feels awful. But like a tantrum-y child, the loneliness wants to be seen and felt - and won’t leave you alone until it is. It helps me to say, “loneliness is here,” rather than “I am lonely.” It leaves room for other feelings that might also be present. It implies that loneliness might not be here after the passage of time. It gives it room to breathe.

2. Turn to the body

Once you’ve made some space for the loneliness to exist, the next step is to turn toward it – but maybe not the way you think.

One of my teachers, Teah Strozer, used to say that the mind is a terrible receptacle for suffering. It tries to solve suffering with logic, bouncing it back and forth, supplying arguments and counterarguments until you feel like you want to scream. The body, on the other hand, can hold a tremendous amount of suffering and transform it to healing and growth.

This doesn’t have to be esoteric.  Have you ever been wracked by a problem and then you did an intense yoga class or gotten a good night’s sleep, and felt the entire structure of the problem shift, ease, clarify?  This is the body’s gift.

So, when you find yourself feeling lonely, ask yourself the question, “How do I know? What signals is my body sending me? Where do I feel loneliness in the body?”  In my case, I often feel loneliness like a vacuum of emptiness in the pit of my stomach. Other times, loneliness feels like thousands of blankets between me, my body, and the world -- an alienation causing me to feel far away from myself, everyone and everything.

What’s true for you?  Drop into your sensations and stay with them as long as you can. Allow the breath to soften and cradle the feelings. This may be difficult, so treat it as an act of self-love and self-care, and be very, very gentle with yourself.  See if anything begins to shift or settle for you.

3. Notice the Stories

As you’re allowing and looking and feeling, you might notice some thoughts come up in your mind, little stories we tell ourselves all the time.  Even if the reason we’re lonely is because we are separated from our loved ones because of the pandemic, we might still replay our inner critic’s greatest hits.  Some of my favorites?  Stories that tell me “there’s something wrong with you” or “no one understands you” or “this is how it’s always going to be.”

When I believe stories like these, I can fall down a spiral of gloom and doom in my mind, producing even more loneliness.  So the key is, with mindfulness, to notice the stories without necessarily believing them.   You don’t have to make them go away—you just have to notice that it’s a loneliness story, not get into whether it’s true or not (which you probably can’t know), and instead come back to the body, and what’s happening right now.

Eventually, this will become second nature.  You’ll hear a “loneliness story” in your mind, and you’ll intuitively come back to the body.  Over time, as you put distance between “you” and your stories about yourself, you may notice a greater capacity to be with your own heart, and with life itself.

I encourage you to try these three practices whenever you find yourself lonely.  And remember, no matter how alone you may feel, all of us are inextricably, irrevocably connected to one another. Even when it doesn’t seem like it. Even when we feel the hard edges at the end of our skin where we end and others begin (and the seemingly endless distance between). If this virus has taught us anything, it showed that, in the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, we “inter-are.” All of us. We are separate, and yet we are not. Something about this paradox is comforting to me. I hope for you, too.