Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It's restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.
There are six ways of describing this kind of cool loneliness. They are: less desire, contentment, avoiding unnecessary activity, complete discipline, not wandering in the world of desire, and not seeking security from one's discursive thoughts.
Less desire is the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up and change our mood. Practicing this kind of loneliness is a way of sowing seeds so that fundamental restlessness decreases....
The second kind of loneliness is contentment. When we have nothing, we have nothing to loose. We don't have anything to lose but being programmed in our guts to feel that we have a lot to lose. Our feeling that we have a lot to lose is rooted in fear---of loneliness, of change, of anything that can't be resolved, of nonexistence. The hope that we can avoid this feeling and the fear that we can't become our reference point.
When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we're on the right side and who we are if we're on the left side. But we don't know who we are when we don't put ourselves on either side. Then we just don't know what to do. We just don't know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in.... We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength....
The third kind of loneliness is avoiding unnecessary activities. When we're lonely in a "hot" way, we look for something to save us; we look for a way out. We get this quesy feeling that we call loneliness, and our minds just go wild trying to come up with companions to save us from despair. That's called unnecessary activity. It's a way of keeping ourselves busy so we don't have to feel any pain....
Complete discipline is another component of cool loneliness. Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we're willing to come back, just gently come back to the present moment. This is loneliness as complete discipline. We're willing to sit still, just be there, alone.... Our habitual assumptions---all our ideas about how things are---keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way. We say, "Oh yes, I know." but we don't know. We don't ultimately know anything. There's no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives....
{When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chödrön/Shambhala}
