Until You Are Alone

Using ‘me time’ for inner wholeness.

Social networks and online friendships are here to stay. With high volume ‘friend’ counts becoming an ego boost, aloneness can easily be rejected as a form of social suicide. 

With many people dealing with issues of loneliness, positive companionship is rightly to be encouraged. Aloneness therefore is not anti-relationship. It is instead a step to finding peace, acceptance, wholeness and healing in that secret place of the heart and soul.

The following pointers aim to celebrate aloneness as a desirable practice leading to wholesome relationships.

What aloneness is not: 

• Loneliness. You’ve heard it said that you can be alone but not lonely. Loneliness is a state of the mind or soul much more than it is the absence of desirable company.
• Taboo. Consider the sanctity of those moments spent commuting, driving, doing your daily essentials or even those times you simply decided you would rather be by yourself, only to come back more able to face whatever you had to deal with.
• Unhealthy. You need time with yourself to put a lot of things in their right perspective. Sometimes being in the crowd leaves you open to opinions and suggestions that cause you to live someone else’s life other than your own, even if just for a (costly) moment. Aloneness will help you own your thoughts and decisions. Ultimately, you’ll always be stuck with you and the decisions you make, so be as happy with them as possible.

What aloneness is: 

• A sign of self-acceptance. We each really need to be comfortable with that person we’ll always be stuck with – our own selves. When you can spend times of aloneness without feeling like you are missing out on something or someone, that’s a good sign that you are comfortable in your own skin. Yes, build up on your social skills, reach out to people, make someone smile. Just don’t forget that you also need to be happy with who you are, to bring greater quality into all your relationships. No one will bring you the happiness or contentment that you have not first developed for yourself.
• A means to develop wholeness and authenticity. At the very least, times of aloneness will enhance a reflective state when you can ask yourself an honest question – does your inner self match up with the outer you that the rest of the world gets to relate with? A balanced psyche will go a long way to ensure that what people see and what that special someone sees is truly what they will get. After all, no one really wants to uncover unpleasant surprises when they get closer.
• An opportunity to tackle life’s unpleasant moments. When you get alone, you’re able to retreat to a place of safety from where you can take a defensive or offensive stance against those challenges.

Get alone, look inward and take all the time you need to get to loving and accepting what you discover about you. So will the rest of us.

Take a moment to watch the How To Be Alone video below by filmmaker, Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis as she draws you in with beautifully scripted poetry into that place of aloneness (at least before you get back to the familiar).