THE CHOSEN TEMPLE OF SOLITUDE
Quiet, calm, still
Quiet, calm, still. Nothing to distract you from you. Immoveable and rested. You with yourself. Thoughts lay in the background, sensations and feelings exist somewhere inside of your awareness, and in the foreground there is just you. The world doing and being as it does, and here you remain aware and unaffected by all the content of life in your chosen temple of solitude. For some solitude seems lonely and for others a deep relief. How do you relate to it? Do you crave it and then fear it when you get it? Do you escape into it because it feels safer than relating with others? Some say that there are no others. That all of life is just us relating with ourselves and that people, while real in and of themselves, are just projections in our mind of what we think they are. From that perspective we are always in solitude with ourselves, but creating the illusion of others with whom we interact with from time to time.
What happens when solitude doesn’t feel chosen? When people leave our life, partnerships end, jobs are lost and communities dissolve out of our life. Often we despair. We feel wrecked, even hopeless and incredibly alone, as though nothing is here for us. Lost, confused and searching, we try to find connection in a sea of disconnection, yet we keep coming up empty handed. Nothing to hold onto except our own hands. Feelings arise that our own hands are not enough. That whatever is here inside of our body can’t survive physically, socially or emotionally on its own, yet there is nothing else to offer support. When solitude isn’t chosen we wonder why we exist, if we belong here and feel as though the mystery as enveloped us completely. Some fear blackness, nothingness or what might be called the void. Others feel purposeless and as if their life has no meaning. When solitude isn’t chosen it can feel like life isn’t choosing us.
While it would be nice if there was a switch to flip, where we instantly came into choosing the solitude we sometimes find ourselves in, that switch does not appear to exist. If it did we would all be instantly enlightened. Instead most of us suffer in disconnection, even when we are surrounded by people, have partnerships, are employed and engaged in communities. We are all in solitude all of the time, we are just covering up the silence so we don’t have to feel the emptiness below it, that some might know is there, but that rarely ever gets fully touched. For all of us it is just us with us. There is only you inside of your body and mind. We are all walking with just ourselves. While we meet other travelers along the way, all meetings are temporary. The only thing that remains eternal is you with you.
MAKING PEACE WITH YOURSELF
From peace to choice
The first step towards choosing the solitude that simply is, is first finding peace within. Not being at peace with the quiet, empty, still is not being at peace with the core of your own being. Most people are like little jumping beans, moving up and out of the stable ground of their own self. Some never stay to rest at all, constantly hovering above and then wondering why they don’t feel restored, present and stable. What does it take to make peace? A whole lot of self-acceptance. Acceptance isn’t something you do once, rather you do it each and every day. When you rise out of the stable ground of yourself and get lost in the activity of life, you get more and more disconnected from the quiet still of yourself. Lost inside all of the moving parts, emotions, sensations and thoughts of life, the only thing that will help you come back down towards yourself is non-resistance. The allowance of what is to be. Through allowance more and more peace settles in.
Peace doesn’t mean you are a doormat, it means you respond consciously with life rather than react to it unconsciously. Without peace there is no choice. This is why we feel so disempowered collectively. We are out of touch with peace and therefore have no choice. We are operating as a bunch of reactive mechanisms, thinking we are making choices, but really we are just hijacked by our own unconscious survival strategies. Choice arrives through clarity, through clear seeing of yourself. Without this we are powerless, at the whims of life, other people and circumstances. Thinking that we could choose the temple of solitude with full embrace is just fantasy. We can’t even come into acceptance of our own emotional state. Without the peace of the heart we will never rest into and choose the solitude that is always with us.
When we have allowed and accepted what’s here, choice arrives. The option that you can be with yourself, and just yourself, and that it is enough, becomes available. You may not immediately fall into love with yourself, but you will come into a sense of ok-ness. That you can be here. That you don’t have to fly out of this reality and into another one where you might better belong. You are here and therefore there must be reason and meaning, even if you don’t know what it is. The mystery feels less overwhelming and more inviting. A place that is still perhaps uncomfortable, but you can be with it. The uncertainty of what lies ahead is breathing rather than suffocating and hoping that another breath will arrive so that you can survive another moment.
You can be in the solitude and let whatever comes in be here and whatever goes out to leave. Where once there was tight grasping now there is fluidity. You know you are ok on your own, because you are always on your own. The more you are with yourself the more you feel supported, because you are supporting you. You’ve stopped leaving. All things, people, events, activities, sensations, emotions and thoughts come and go. What remains is you. The chosen temple of solitude is you choosing yourself. It is allowing life to move, shape and contort itself in whatever ways it needs to, yet you remain stable and clear, all the while falling more and more deeply in love with yourself.
Dr. Amanda Lalita Love, Subtle Energetic Chiropractor & Integrative Somatic Healer, Boulder, Colorado
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