24: On Being Alone and Feeling Alone
It’s nearly 1AM and I can’t sleep. Or rather, I don’t want to sleep. Or more truthfully, sleep evades me because I’m drafting, editing and writing this blog post in my head, eager to get it all out.
In my humanness I come with having expectations, hopes, desires and feelings on how situations should be. I can’t help but be human. I try, boy oh boy do I try to release those expectations but I have not nor did not on my hopes for being at OSHO. Hell I even wrote a whole blog post on what I was hoping to get out of OSHO and now here I am, sitting here in the silence of night, 1 week into this experience with a deadly mix of dread and regret. Whatever I had hoped OSHO would be, it’s not. It’s not totally OSHO’s fault but it’s not not OSHO’s fault.
In the past 7 days I haven’t arrived. Physically I’m here but emotionally I’m playing out the past few weeks in my mind. I have not surrendered to being present. I have not opened myself up to this experience, whatever it may be. And for the past 7 days, I’m closed off, isolating, frustrated and annoyed.
But mostly, I’m just sad.
This sadness is pervasive throughout my body, my thoughts, my energy and my overall state of being. And perhaps there are equal parts in me both fighting arriving and utterly unable to arrive because of this current state of sadness. I like the sound of that. Of making this feeling a proper name, making it official. The State of Sadness. It sounds so much more important with this title.
My SoS is complicating many things. And many things are complicating my SoS. The root of this SoS is an all too familiar sense of feeling lonely. OSHO is shockingly the most isolating retreat center I’ve been to. I can’t shake the feeling that even though there are literally hundreds of others around me, and like minded humans at that, I feel desperately alone. To deliciously complicate things, it’s the holidays and I don’t have anyone around me that I love or loves me. I’m ending a 6+ week journey with 2 friends and a love. And I’m tired. And India is hard.
Feelings can often overwhelm facts and this is one of those times. So if I’m going to be alone, let’s go all in. Let’s bask in the aloneness. Let’s isolate. Let’s be solemn. Let’s awake alone. Eat alone. Breathe alone. Think alone. Dance alone. Navigate alone.
BE alone.
Because at some point I won’t be alone and now is all I know. Now is my only truth. And now this feeling is what my truth is.
Where can I take this time to go deeper? To connect deeper? To feel deeper? To BE deeper? So when the moments of love and tenderness, light and hope arise I’ll be ready. I’ll have seen the depths and will be ready for the light and seek refuge on the other side. To know that in time the light will enter in and turn sugar and sweet that which is such bitterness.
This is the hard work. This is where feelings won’t last. My truth will.
I’m not alone. I just feel lonely.
And that’s good. That’s magic. That’s power. It’s good to feel.
Feel deeply. Breathe in the sadness. Because when I’m fighting it how do I fully show up when it’s joy? Love? Anger? Or magic?
A dear friend sent me a Facebook message and one sentence of her note said, “To be you right now…” My initial reaction was to feel flattered. But clearly, a lot has come up in this past week and it’s been terribly sad. I knew this would catch up with me at some point and I’m writing this blog post because while this trip is beyond incredible, it’s also life and I know I’m not alone in feeling lonely.
So to be right now, in this moment I can accept that I feel lonely but I am not alone.
- M
PS.
And just like that, my dear beloved friend sent me this note. So simple yet so poignant, I cried. Yet another reminder that I am not alone. I wanted to share it as a reminder (if to no one else but myself) that I am loved, missed and grateful for my community of humans at home. And when things feels stuck and unmovable I know they are not. This is proof they are not. Things will soften and ease and change, as they always have and always will.
