{"id":231945,"date":"2023-04-10T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2023-04-10T11:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=231945"},"modified":"2023-04-10T13:02:51","modified_gmt":"2023-04-10T12:02:51","slug":"how-to-bear-your-loneliness-grounding-wisdom-from-the-great-buddhist-teacher-pema-chodron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/04\/how-to-bear-your-loneliness-grounding-wisdom-from-the-great-buddhist-teacher-pema-chodron\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Bear Your Loneliness: Grounding Wisdom from the Great Buddhist Teacher Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWe are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cYou are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,\u201d the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary<\/a>. How much trust and love we wrest from life and lavish upon life is largely a matter of how well we have befriended our existential loneliness \u2014 a fundamental fact of every human existence that coexists with our delicate interconnectedness, each a parallel dimension of our lived reality, each pulsating beneath our days.<\/p>\n

In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 her timeless field guide to transformation through difficult times<\/a> \u2014 the Buddhist teacher Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n<\/strong> explores what it takes to cultivate \u201ca nonthreatening relationship with loneliness,\u201d to transmute it into a different kind of \u201crelaxing and cooling loneliness\u201d that subverts our ordinary terror of the existential void.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Sunlit Solitude<\/em> by Maria Popova. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we\u2019re on the right side and who we are if we\u2019re on the left side. But we don\u2019t know who we are when we don\u2019t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don\u2019t know what to do. We just don\u2019t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. 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. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what\u2019s happening.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Buddhism, all suffering is a form of resistance to reality, a form of attachment to desires and ideas about how the world should be. By befriending our loneliness, we begin to meet reality on its own terms and to find contentment with the as-is nature of life, complete with all of its uncertainty. Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n writes:<\/p>\n

We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions \u2014 all our ideas about how things are \u2014 keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way\u2026 We don\u2019t ultimately know anything. There\u2019s 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. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Lone Man<\/em> by Rockwell Kent, 1919. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So faced, loneliness becomes a kind of mirror \u2014 one into which we must look with maximum compassion, one that beams back to us our greatest strength:<\/p>\n

Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn\u2019t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Rachel Carson on the relationship between loneliness and creativity<\/a> and Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness<\/a>, then revisit poet May Sarton\u2019s splendid century-old ode to the art of being contentedly alone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is Maria Popova<\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What <\/em>is<\/em> all this? (More<\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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