Alone

Can you be alone? Can you be really alone and feel the peace that is presented to you or do you get antsy and cannot sit still? Being alone means that there is no-one there but it is not the same feeling as being lonely. When you are lonely you long for someone to be there, and it is frightening to some people for they cannot sit with themselves. When this happens they take the opportunity to immediately let their loneliness and panic take over. And the panic can come in so many different ways that often we aren’t even aware that we are panicked. We start cleaning or washing clothes, or we turn on the TV and start bingeing on our favorite substances. Often times we take to the telephone and bug people for hours on end. Why does this happen to us? Why can’t we sit in silence for a few moments and listen to our minds?

Often times when we are left alone, our inner-anxiety about ourselves and our lives takes over and begins to stir up feelings that we do not want to deal with. These are not usually good feelings that arise, but past memories that we have repressed or run from. At times the anxiety blocks us from confronting those feelings and issues from the past, and this leaves us with unresolved feelings that we do not know how to deal with, and they frighten us! They might tell us what an awful person or bad child we were, or how bad a parent we are for something we did or thought. What we need to remember here is that we cannot resolve the past, but we can understand that we are not that person today! We all have to learn from our past in order to live more quietly in the present.

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