How To Deal With Loneliness – Helpful Advice From Three Experts I Admire

Have you ever felt lonely? If you are part of today’s digital age, you may have experienced loneliness. I know I have.

The pandemic, moving to a new state, and the work-from-home culture made me feel lonelier than I thought I would be. I am starving for connection and conversations by the end of the work week.

I realized I was not alone in this journey. The neighbors I speak to or long-distance friends have all expressed feeling isolated and alone. They long for deep, meaningful connections or crave the physical touch of another human being. All of which are hard to achieve with zoom calls.

This feeling made me dig deep into why we feel lonely and what we need to do or cope with this feeling. In my quest to understand loneliness, I found advice from 3 spiritual leaders particularly helpful, which I will share in this blog post.

I hope you leave feeling less lost and more secure in your loneliness.

Thich Nhat Hanh On The Reason For Loneliness

According to Monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, we feel lonely because we don’t feel connected to others. We don’t feel connected to the wonders of nature, like the stars, air, and sunshine available to us. We won’t feel lonely if we know how to connect with these.

Most of us do not know how to connect with ourselves. We don’t know how to connect with our bodies and our deepest emotions that will help us understand ourselves.

Per Thich Nhat Hanh, this loneliness can become fulfillment if we learn how to love. To love, he says, is to connect oneself with others. To understand the other person and see their suffering with compassion. He says that if we can understand others and be understood, our loneliness disappears.

Love is a gift that makes the other person not lonely because you are able to offer him understanding and acceptance.
Thich Nhat Hanh

Sadhguru On Aloneness Being A Beautiful Thing

In one of his talks, Renowned Yogi and Spiritual teacher Sadhguru says that most do not know how to function at our highest level. So we let our life experience depend on the things we own or the people we have in our lives.

When we realize that outsider factors do not determine our way of being, we see that there isn’t such a thing as loneliness. We begin to enjoy our aloneness.

Within our bodies, we are always alone, Sadhguru says. The beautiful thing about that is that it is our space. No one can take that away from us. Having a space just your own is the most beautiful part of our lives. So let’s not suffer about it, he says.

The most important thing is knowing how we are within ourselves. To not be driven by any needs but do whatever is needed is to live a magnificent life.

Pain or pleasure, joy or misery, agony or ecstasy, happens only inside you. Human folly is that people are always trying to extract joy from the outside. You may use the outside as a stimulus or trigger, but the real thing always comes from within.”
Sadhguru

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche On Changing Our Perspective

In telling us how to suffer less from loneliness, Tibetian Monk, Mingyur Rinpoche talks about changing our perspective.

When loneliness is one of our many problems in life, we don’t put too much emphasis on it. But when it is our only issue at the time, we magnify it by putting too much focus on it. In his words, we turn a molehill into a mountain.

So, it’s important to notice our minds and what is turning into a reality. Like Sadhguru, he asks us to think of aloneness as solitude, which we can learn to enjoy.

To help with the feeling of loneliness, Rinpoche suggests we do an appreciation practice. We can write three things we appreciate about ourselves and the world around us. You won’t feel so lonely if we do it every day for a month.

The mind is the source of all experience, and by changing the direction of the mind, we can change the quality of everything we experience.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

If we look at the advice these three intellectuals are giving us, it’s all about starting with ourselves. It’s about how we can work on connecting to ourselves, understanding ourselves, and our relationship with being alone.

In today’s world, we are scared by the tiny amount of void we experience inside. So our immediate action is to apply band-aids using technology. We binge-watch and use social media to connect with others. But unfortunately, it doesn’t put us in touch with ourselves to truly heal or develop meaningful connections with others.

Loneliness can be an issue not just for people who live alone but also for people living in a family. I have experienced it despite being part of one. We are each consumed with entertaining ourselves that we ignore ourselves and the folks closest to us.

Let’s connect with ourselves and others, starting with the ones closest to us. When we do, we realize that they are just as lonely.

If we genuinely ask the other person how they are, I found that even total strangers open up to you. So let’s take the initiative to help end loneliness for ourselves and others.