The Pain of Loneliness and the Pleasure of Love

It is obvious that we need to experience love, it is the experience of who we really are. When we do not, we suffer, we feel lonely, cut off emotional and energy-wise form others and life. This is why we fear rejection as much as we fear death. Feeling alone can feel like death itself. We are not connected with others and life. We believe that if we are not accepted by others, we will be alone and that seems insufferable to us. If we examine the reasons people commit suicide, we will find that they were feeling lonely. Regardless of whether those around them did love them, they were unable to experience that love connection.

There is a difference between being alone and feeling lonely. Some of us have had the experience where we might have hundreds of people who love and admire us and yet we feel lonely. Another can be living alone in a cave and feel united with all of humanity and all of creation. Thus loneliness has nothing to do with how many people are around us, but has to do with our ability to feel our connection to them. It does not matter whether those we connect to are physically near us, far away or even passed on into the spiritual realms. We feel our connection with them wherever they might be.

Many of us simply lost the ability to know and express what we really feel and this becomes a major obstacle in our exchange of love. When cut off from our feelings, we are also cutting others off from important parts of our being. Some of us simply do not know what we really feel, and we often confront the others with the wrong emotions, which confuse and create unnecessary conflicts. When we do not receive the love we need, or are afraid to accept love because we have identified being loved with some danger, we choose to not feel that connection, no matter how much others might love or respect us. In such cases we might seek to fill that emptiness by other means such as overeating, drinking alcohol, drugs, over working, accumulating wealth or fortunes, being over focused on sensual pleasures or activities. We might even loose ourselves in serving others with the hope that they will love us.

The emptiness of being alone is unbearable because it is actually the opposite of the truth. Our emotional states are affected by the degree to which we ourselves think and act in harmony with inner selves and ultimate destiny. Loneliness is painful, because it is in fact a separation from our true inner self. Anger is painful because it is the opposite of who we are. Fear is painful and disseminating because it is a negation of who we really are. Loneliness, anger and fear are born of the illusion that we are separate from and vulnerable to others and life itself. It is wise that we experience these emotions as unpleasant, because that gives us the motivation to move out of those states towards unity. This is also why we feel so good when we feel love, unity, peace, accepted and safe.

Human nature is programmed to feel separation as painful and unity as pleasant. This wisely creates the stage for our evolution and movement towards a more loving reality. Our inner emptiness is caused by our lack of contact with our inner higher nature and true self. We long for our true nature which is ultimately divine. Our true self is the one universal consciousness which is also the true self of all other beings and of all creation. We will never solve the problem of our emptiness until we reunite with our true divine self.

The truth is, most of us do not get all of our needs fulfilled by our partner, nor do we fulfill these needs for our partners. All of the problems in our relationships are caused by our need to take rather than to give. When we are attached to and need the others to be as we need them to be in order to feel safe, worthy and free, then we are more frequently hurt and angry. Love has nothing to do what the other can offer us. Our unhappiness in relationships comes from our attachments, needs and expectations and not because we “love” the other.

Often we are also ready to make various alterations in ourselves and our lives with the hope that others will love us more. We suppress feelings, needs and activities with the hope they will accept us. We try to do things we hope will cause them to need us and perhaps love us. We spend time, money and energy altering our appearance with the hope we will be more attractive to others. We fetter over our weight less so for health reasons than out of concern about how we appear to others. We seek to amass money and material objects believing that others will want to be with us for those reasons. Each of us seeks ways to be attractive, desired and hopefully loved by others.

The problem is that we seldom obtain the love we need in these ways. Others subconsciously perceive our selfishness motives and frequently do not respond in the ways we need in order to feel loved. We then feel even more pain, because after doing so much to be loved, we are not getting what we need. We will not solve the problem by seeking to get others to love us. For those of us who have not yet become aware of an inner source of security, satisfaction, self-worth, love and purpose, facing loneliness is similar to facing death. Without a relationship with our self or with the divine, there is no life, no source, no happiness, no security, no purpose for living without others.

Even when our partner’s consciousness leaves the body, we suffer because of our needs not our love. We can continue loving others even when they do are not physically present, just as we can love someone who is living elsewhere on the planet. The problem with the absence of the others physical presence is not that we cannot love, but that we cannot touch, hold, hug and receive from them. They do not need our love now, because now that they are free from the illusion of separateness, they are now experiencing the totality of their being.

The process of self-discovery requires work or even struggle to deal with these attachments needs and fears. However, it can be a rewarding process as we can remain simply a curious observer in this process, with a knowing we are totally connected to our being right now, as we always have been. The only thing we’ve really lost is the awareness of our connection. As we expand and become more aware, what happens? We find that we need less and less from the outer world and other people. We realize that security, love and joy are innate qualities of being. They can’t be lost, only forgotten. So the highest project we can devote our self to is self-discovery. In the end, loneliness will seem like a phantom, something barely remembered. Yet even today, if we start to discover who we really are, every moment will be the opposite of lonely. Instead we will be absorbed in the essence of life, and nothing is more fascinating.

Christ encouraged us to love others as we love ourselves. He did not say, love others and not yourselves or love yourselves and not others. The reality is that we can love, accept, understand and forgive others only to the degree that we love, accept, understand and forgive ourselves. The opposite is also true. We can have as much understanding and love towards ourselves as we do towards others. These are interdependent.

May we all learn to be happy with or without a partner and even when our partner is not giving us what we need or want. Once we have learned these lessons, we will very likely have all we need from a partner, because we do not need any more opportunities to learn such lessons. The lesson is to love ourselves and the other unconditionally. …….Love and light Christina