When I worked in Child Protection I learned to my horror that new born babies could die from being lonely. They could be fed and cleaned and still perish from a lack of love and connection. The term for this is “failure to thrive”.
It is also true that as we grow and develop our inner vitality can perish from loneliness. We too, can experience a failure to thrive. It is a deeply crippling and hollow state. We may be surrounded by what appears to be all that we need and still be intensely and devastatingly lonely.
For most of my life I was riddled with a deep state of loneliness. For all that time when I would express the sensation to others they would say you are not alone. I would go on, knowing the truth was, I was.
It was the very first time that I practiced Mindfulness in a structured professional setting with Jon Kabat-Zinn at a professional retreat at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York that I first felt a refuge from the dark state of loneliness that plagued my life all the days before.
It was the connection to self that transcended me into a pathway to find solace and ease from the intoxicating sensations and thoughts that loneliness produces in ones mental, physical and emotional systems.
In the many years since the beginning of my daily mindfulness practice, I still have gone through terrible times of feeling completely alone, however in those moments it was not just feeling, I was fundamentally and practically speaking alone to find my way through life and the great struggle I was facing.
The isolation, alienation, distancing and poverty of a sense of belonging and unity drove me deep into a connection to self, to earth, to my animals and to love.
It was in this way that I learned that the loneliness was a symptom of life’s longing to come home to me.
In this time which we are living, may we all practice coming home to ourselves as a healing balm to the construct of the limitations of the day. It will ease the suffering, I guarantee you.
Lori Ellis (2020)
