Sure. There are plenty of times when we just feel lonely. I find that “lonely” often shows up shortly after I’ve been with a group of people whom I love to spend time with. As I said in a previous post, loneliness like this is a feeling of loss: of company, of laughter and stories, of shared touch, sound, smells, food. We can benefit so much from social connections that when it’s time to go home from those gatherings, we feel the loss. That’s real and normal. 

There’s another experience that often hides behind what we call loneliness. We don’t name it because we are afraid of it. We are afraid of it because for most of our lives, we’ve had to hide it and hide from it in order to survive.  It’s our authentic self–the one who emerged from spirit on a given day in time and space. As we grew, there were things about our authentic self that some people around us were not ready for, and they pushed back. Don’t be so loud, so colorful, so bold, so vocal, so energetic, so rambunctious, so creative, so wild, and so and so and so. We learned to hide that self and hide from that self. 

Along comes a space, now, of quiet, and not really loneliness, but alone-ness. In that space, the voices requiring us to stop being so much our authentic self exist only as shadows themselves. If we allow the silence to fill that space, we get a glimpse, and then some fuller images of who we are. And that may come with a whole range of feelings. We call it loneliness because that gives us permission to find distractions. At some point, we may decide it’s no longer okay to distract from our authentic self. 

There are plenty of times when we are just lonely for those we love. And there are times when that eerie feeling is not loneliness. It is our true self knocking at the door of our attention. 

~Robert Patrick

If these kinds of questions and experiences sound familiar, you might find spiritual direction a good way to explore them.  Here’s how to get started.