Why Taking Time Alone Is SO Important
…the most important thing you could ever do
There are a lot of things that people think are important in life. More importantly, there are a lot of things that other people tell you that you should think are important in life. While I am on the one hand being hypocritical by saying this fact about being alone, on the other hand the practice of it shall allow you the space to be able to undoubtedly and clearly discern what is necessary, desirable and valuable to your own estimation of importance going forward.
Overwhelm of the senses and essentially neural activity leads directly to the feeling of losing oneself in the process of living day to day, which added up over an often infinite-seeming (but certainly finite) duration of one’s life experience. “That’s what sleep is for” you might be saying if you’re particularly motivated to excel or succeed in life, or you may take that a step farther and claim the lack of your personal desire or need to sleep.
To feel alive and present in your BODY is crucial to experiencing a truly vital life (yes, that’s a tautology but it often isn’t one in people’s experience). Readiness to receive life’s gifts is accessible and available if and only if you’re there for it — in your body. You’re feeling what’s going on when you interact with your immediate environment. Sensitivity to the environment around and the environment within is the lasting point here. Overload of the senses cannot allow this to be experienced, because the you simply have no ability to distinguish between an on and an off state of the nerves of your brain and body firing.
It’s not easy to visualize or comprehend what I’m talking about unless you experience true sensitivity at last. It’s commonly accepted to feel numb or in other words to not feel deeply and subtly. Only something that is an overload to the overload is actually experienced when you’re overstimulated. Otherwise, at all other times, you are wont to run away from feeling anything at all. I don’t blame you. I was exactly the same way. Wanting another high or another rush of something — whether it be a substance or success or physical touch or an Instagram post — to feel something and often times just not feel so unbelievably crappy. When you do experience what’s in your body, you realize the destruction that has been caused at one level to the most exterior body, but the wounds you’re covering up by doing so in the process.
Gosh, those wounds are tough to face, tough to acknowledge, but once you do you begin to recognize that they’re not who you are. The worst of what you’ve experienced does NOT define you in the marginal, let alone the foreground. Yet, they can rule our experiences if we hold those wounds in our body and do not feel them when they were inflicted.
For me, these wounds were that of having lost the two most important women in my life — my ex-girlfriend and my mom. Having had the experience of love be so dominant and profound in my life, I had nothing to complain about, even when my mom was sick with cancer I knew and felt love. Much of that came through my girlfriend, as I was able to pour into another deep feelings of appreciation and love. If you haven’t experienced this, and especially if you have, to give attention to something that was once profoundly beautiful that you see as lost or broken in the present is horrible beyond belief. You trigger a cycle of worthlessness and confusion and brokenness and the effort to survive becomes strenuous and yet, meaningless. To live but to not live for anything is to live a half life — but feels worse than not living at all. When things seem to be going just fine, that’s when they’re about to totally unravel on the inside. And when you feel like you can’t tell anyone or talk to anyone because it feels like it’d just be a burden, you keep digging and digging and digging. You can’t stop feeling helpless. You can’t stop feeling alone. You can’t stop feeling like a failure. What is the point. Notice the period. It stops being a question and just the lull and droning of LIFE.
What?!?!?!
This brief opportunity is spent begrudging and questioning your very existence, your innate value to those around. And even when you give back to others and that feels nice, you can’t stand being alone because you’re “alone with your thoughts.”
Which is why you have to do it.
Honey, please, I’m begging you. By all means, share it, share what you’re going through, share it with me. BUT, the prudent but, is that what you’re going through today ultimately can never be addressed by anyone but you. YOU have to say hello to the ignored child, the one who loved but didn’t feel worthy of receiving enough of it. If you do not learn to become your own best friend, and today’s struggles or yesterday’s wounds don’t heal from within, someone can give you advice or solace once in a while but the solution is always you. Within you. You can’t go to sleep experiencing from within the body of another. You deserve to live in a comfortable place, and that ultimately starts in one place.
This is going to sound like a bit of a warp on the whole piece up til now, but beginning by detaching from the situations that rule your mind and experience is often the only way to go. What do I mean? Take a step back and look into the front seat from afar. What’s happening in the scene in front of you or even in the form of thoughts you hear or speak to/about yourself. Again, note the period. Don’t even pose the question in the form of a thought. Tricky? Maybe at first. Just take a look and see it as a movie that’s unfolding in front of your very eyes. You can’t observe your eyes except through a mirror, but yet the whole universe is happening inside your mind — your field of perception. You can be attached and feel like your stomach is churning — it probably is! — but when you remove the worrying about what will happen to you, and you remember that it’s a movie you’re getting to watch and be thrilled by, you can begin to experience some respite, some peace with all you thought was wrong. I say remember. Because you have this ability to take a step back farther and farther as an observer of reality, especially that of your own thought process, it beckons the question of who YOU are in the mix, when the thoughts can be observed by YOU. You are that, the observer, the witness of this life experience. For now, rest in that, that you can observe your own life without thinking that what has happened in the movie — your critical thoughts about the movie — is who is directing it, who is producing it, and who’s acting in it.
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