Inner intimacy: Loneliness as a path to love

I used to avoid being alone. The fear of being alone ran deep — deeper than I understood at the time.

But learning how to be alone – learning how to stay with myself and hold myself through the emptiness that arises there – is what has allowed me to fall in love with myself. Because it has allowed me to meet myself, hold myself, and become deeply intimate with myself.

I realized it was my avoidance and fear of loss and grief that made it feel so unbearable to be alone. Because naturally, when we are alone and not distracting ourselves, there is often a loss that is experienced. The loss of connection (or at least, it seems that way). 

This is the thing nobody tells you about emotional avoidance: emotional avoidance is often a loving attempt to protect ourselves from pain, but it doesn't actually spare us from it. Instead, it shifts the pain into a different form: the pain of being disconnected from ourselves (the most painful thing of all). And it postpones the love and safety we so often search for in others, which only become possible when we are finally willing to turn toward what is asking to be felt.

Once I learned to hold the pain of that seeming loss of connection, I found connection within. And that connection can never be taken.

Finding Connection Within

Learning to be alone with yourself — truly alone, without distraction or escape — is one of the most radical acts of self-love there is. It is the foundation of self-intimacy: the relationship you build with your own inner world, your own tenderness, your own truth.

That connection to Self is the most important one I have ever made. And it is from this place of inner union that everything I have ever wanted is being born.

One way I have learned to stay with myself during challenging emotions is by turning them into art. That may be dancing, singing, writing, or simply observing the sensations in my body as if they were a piece of art. 

This practice of sitting with uncomfortable emotions — rather than running from them — is what slowly taught me how to be comfortable alone. Not just tolerating solitude, but truly enjoying it and finding something sacred in it.

The more of our pain we can become intimate with, the more intimate we become with ourselves as a whole. Personifying it, romanticizing it, and seeing the beauty in the pain can help soften its edges and allow us to open to what it is here to show us.

Below is a poem I wrote in a moment when I felt highly resistant to feeling the pain of the loneliness inside me. But in allowing that pain to speak through my writing, it was alchemized into wisdom, and I went from resenting it to feeling deep tenderness and love toward it.

My hope is that it inspires you to dive into your pain, listen to it, and open to receiving the wisdom it has for you – so you can meet, hold, and therefore love yourself more fully. 

Because the path to self-love will lead us directly through the places we've been most afraid to look. Loneliness is not the obstacle. It is the doorway.

Held from within

It’s too quiet.

The quiet pierces through my chest.

It burns and my heart clamps down at an attempt to push it out,

to push out the pain,

the pain of the silence,

of what feels like death.

I feel suffocated by it,

consumed by it.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t do this.

It’s too much.

I need to escape.

I need to get out of this darkness that’s rapidly closing in on me.

I squirm and tighten.

The walls of my heart are closing in,

trying to protect,

protect against the pain,

the pain of loss,

of grief,

of loneliness.

But no matter what I do,

my heart aches.

My heart yearns for a tender touch.

The walls only hurt her more,

hard and unforgiving

against something so infinitely soft and tender.

She doesn’t want to be confined by old fears and wounds.

She wants to be held –

held by soft, yet strong hands,

held so she can be free,

held in her tenderness,

in her aloneness,

so she may discover that she is never really alone.

She is infinitely held

and infinitely loved.

And by diving into the ache,

she finds that inner strength and softness

to hold herself,

to hold her own tender heart.

And through that holding,

her heart feels safe to melt

and to open –

opening to love,

from within and without.

...

You must open to truly receive the gifts life longs to give you,

and you must feel held to open.

So hold yourself.

Don’t hold on.

Don’t squeeze.

Hold with a spaciousness,

a trust.

Just enough to provide containment,

but not so much that you create confinement.

It’s a gentle, yet strong hold –

one that allows room for opening without falling apart,

one that allows for falling apart so you may open.

How to Hold Yourself

This is what it means to be alone without feeling lonely. Not the absence of longing, but the presence of yourself within it. When you learn how to hold yourself — with that same soft strength the poem speaks of — solitude stops being something you survive. 

It becomes something you return to. A place where you and yourself are always, quietly, in love.

If you feel called to embark on this journey of falling in love within, it is truly my greatest joy and highest calling to support others in reconnecting with the love that already lives inside them.