When I first met my partner Julie, almost thirteen years ago, I remember telling her that my greatest fear in life was that I would turn out to be “mediocre”. She looked at me and said, “there is only one thing that is mediocre about you and that is the way you’re dressed. But we can fix that. Just give me your credit card.” And Julie has done a great job of improving my wardrobe over the past ten plus years. But my point is that I had a dreadful fear of mediocrity, of somehow being like other people, being average and unremarkable; I felt like I would do anything to stand out and be different.

Recently, I have begun experimenting with dropping all need for specialness. I can see that there is a small child in me that wanted love and attention in a crowded environment (four older siblings) and that a large part of my motivation was not a spiritual need to express my unique being (which is how I had explained this unrelenting drive to express myself uniquely) but a psychological need to earn love. What if I am perfectly love-able and I am not doing anything particularly extraordinary? What if I am going to the laundrymat (we are renovating our home and our washer and dryer have been offline for several months), and I am as ordinary as ordinary gets, and I have no need to stand out in any way? (As an important aside, it is always so interesting to me when I uncover something that has psychological roots, like this need to be extraordinary in order to receive love, and to notice how I have been operating under a spiritual justification, in this case that I have been focused on expressing human uniqueness).

So I have been experimenting with enjoying the ordinary, not solving any big Sounds True problems or making “big deals” or creating a big splash of any kind. And I am noticing that I am happier than I have ever been. I am relaxing into being one of six plus billion people and simply being “one of us.” I don’t have anything to prove or anything to earn. Instead, it is about being present to what is needed and asked in the moment without a big agenda. I feel like a person instead of a striving determined-to-be-extraordinary achiever. And what I am noticing is that the glistening of the trees is brighter, the fur on Jasmine’s back (Jasmine is our 16-year old cocker spaniel) is even softer, and that I really enjoy going to the laundry mat!

A friend who regularly reads my personal blog asked if I would comment on what I saw as the difference between what she described to me as ‘loneliness’ and a related experience she referred to as ‘aloneness.’ Here is an excerpt of what emerged from our conversation…

At times, a very familiar sense of ‘loneliness’ can begin to color your world. You may wonder if it will ever go away, when it will yield to your deep longing for connection, and why all the work on yourself has not yet transformed the despair. The feeling of loneliness is a reminder of separation, and has a way of cutting into the aliveness of immediate experience.

The reality of ‘aloneness’, on the other hand, is translucent, in a way, and vibrantly alive. Despite your connection with others, you are asked to make the journey of the heart alone. No one can experience life for you, love and be loved for you, embrace and feel your tender heart for you, or die for you; likewise, you for them.

The traveler of aloneness is at home in this type of environment—and remains committed to it—knowing that organizing her reality around love will almost always trigger the experience of tender vulnerability and penetrating, transformative sadness. Living in the burning alive field of aloneness is so open, so unknown, and so unbearably touching; it is always uncertain and forever without ground or reference point. It reveals the truth that we can never fully look to the known to tell us who we are or anything certain about the nature of love. For love is of the unknown, infinitely creative, and emerging as a firestorm of grace in the radiant here and now.

Within the mandala of purifying aloneness, we know that at any moment our hearts may break, that we may fall in love in the most surprising way, that old dreams are sure to crumble, that what we thought we ‘knew’ *will* dissolve in front of our eyes, and that we *will* inevitably be asked to meet deep waves of feeling and sensation. As we commit to the very embodied path of the heart, only one thing is certain, really: that *everything* that has yet to be metabolized in our somatic environment will come on display, especially in intimate relationship, as it is seeking wholeness and integration.

There is a part of us that knows that as we open in this way, we will no longer be able to avoid the terror of intimacy, the surety of complete exposure, and the reality of crushing aliveness. We may realize that, without our conscious knowing, we have taken some forgotten vow to turn all the way into the preciousness of this life, willing to enter directly into such achy tenderness, into suffering, into penetrating melancholy, into the darkness, and into naked vulnerability—guided only by the unknown and by a love from beyond. It is not easy to live in such an open and unguarded way, but here we are: We have come here to give our hearts to others and to this world.

Though related, the experience of ‘loneliness’ is usually borne out of a resistance to our present experience—a subtle (or not so subtle) abandonment of feelings of grief, sadness, hurt, vulnerability, and shame. In our early environment, certain feelings were simply unsafe to touch, hold, and express—there was no true home made available for them. Because we are wired to do whatever we must to maintain the critical tie to our caregiving surround, we very intelligently and creatively chose to disembody and split off from these wild movements of fierce grace within. This was a very healthy, short-term strategy for a little boy or girl, yet here we are, several decades later, and burning to know the aliveness and mysteries of lover and beloved in this world.

When we are unable/ unwilling to meet these primordial companions—and are not able to stay with, hold, and metabolize them within our own somatic immediacy—we feel cut off from life, lonely, and disconnected. We yearn and long, at the deepest levels, to meet whatever guests appear in this sacred body, for we intuit that each is a special doorway Home. And we become lonely when we are not able to do so. It is the melting of these wounds and tangles that becomes the essence of the path of re-embodiment and opening the heart. The only way out is through; and the only way through is by love.

It is so bittersweet, really. Being an open-hearted human, who is always and eternally both broken and whole, can feel so fragile. Our old friends sadness, grief, jealousy, hopelessness, and raw vulnerability are so often sent away, out the back door of our hearts, and into a lonely forest. This is sad. Please, don’t go, friends! Stay close! Let us keep the door open to these ones, moment-by-moment crafting a warm home and safe refuge for the entirety of what we are. For in doing so, the path from loneliness to aloneness will become illumined, and we will provide safe passage for love in this world.

Perhaps love is not something you need to seek any longer. That it is not something you will finally get more of one day, just as soon as you pray enough, meditate in the right way, forgive better, accept more deeply, finally ‘let it all go’, rest as the ‘witness,’ stay in the ‘now’, and become a perfect spiritual person.

Friend, you will never find more love, for love is what you are. It is what your organs, your nervous system, and the cells of your heart are crafted of. It is forming as your arms when you hold another, as your words when you speak kindness, and as your tongue as you taste the honey-nectar of the beloved as it arrives by way of your sweet lover.

Allow yourself to receive the benediction of pure presence, for it is your birthright. It is wired inside you and longing to erupt from your totally out of control heart. For when it does, an avalanche of grace is unleashed, sending love stories, wild music, and sweet poetry into the stars and supernovas, seeding the galaxies with your unique light.

In your willingness to take the risk of love, to feel it all, to truly allow another to matter, and to expose yourself to the joy and heartbreak of this life, you come face to face with the most devastating fear that you’ve ever known, but have never been able to articulate: that you are loved.

For when you are truly loved, when you are entirely seen, when you are fully held, it is the end of your world as you know it. Things will never be the same. You will never again be able to pretend that you are other than precious and whole as you are. The implications of this are dizzying if you let them all the way in.

It is so exhilarating to be seen and held in this way, but it is also terrifying as you are fully naked now, utterly raw, and achingly wide open. Your life is no longer your own in a sense, and it has been given to your raw, shaky tenderness. This is your refuge now, the golden bridge through which you will connect with hearts everywhere. Give everything to know this bridge!

Even the soft spring breeze feels as if it might be too much, for it goes right through your skin to touch your heart. A sunrise, the longing of a little baby to be held, the spring wildflowers, the honey-infused ice coffee you just spilled on your laptop, the blue eyes of your sweet lover—you may never be protected again. Ah, that’s fine—it isn’t what you really wanted anyway.

The particles of love are interpenetrating your entire sensory world and you are just not sure your heart and nervous system can take it. Oh, friend, you are on the right track.

You are free to be who and what you are now—no longer tied to a past you thought you wanted, no longer bound by the limited and that which is less than whole—willing to risk it all for love, and free to be the fearless wildness that you are.

Gorgeous photography by Robert Maschke – https://www.robertmaschke.de/