Being Alone With Oneself Vs. Community

[Anonymous]

I’ve been pondering this for a while. How I can feel one way when in the company of others, and another when left alone. What I mean by this is, without the companionship or interaction of people, can we find peace and self-love? I’ve been separated from friends for about 3 weeks now and am practicing mindfulness, but seem to be finding myself getting increasingly annoyed, angry and confused. I try to accept my feelings and move beyond them, but they are getting darker and deeper. So then I start thinking that we’re humans and meant to interact with others in a community.

Can being a solitary individual be healthy, both spiritually and physically? Is it possible to work through my feelings and get to a place where I’m okay with being alone without friends?

Side note: I used to enjoy being alone and never really cared to socialize. Then I started to look at my conditioning and understand that that was a product of feeling fearful of rejection and feeling less than others and began to want to open up and want to meet people and be around others. So what might have once been comfortable for me, no longer is.

[Matt]

Maile,

Buddha taught that the sangha is one of the three pillars of development, much like a three legged stool that requires each leg or it falls over. That being said, I don’t think its the solitude that is producing the agitation, it seems more like an imbalance within your practice. Do you share time on your cushion between mindful meditation practices and metta meditation practices? Its great to develop concentration and mindfulness, but it is also important to use what you’ve learned to produce happiness for yourself. Then it becomes a much more simple thing… we socialize when we want to and don’t when we don’t. These absolutes and deep looking at what we “should” or “should not” do aren’t really that necessary, and are more about emotional hunger than “the nature of the path/humans/etc”. Namaste.

With warmth,
Matt

[Anonymous]

Matt,

Thank you for that perspective.

Since I haven’t had a “sangha”, nor a community or really any friendships to share with recently, I feel like a stool with a broken leg. I also feel like the learning/experience/growth of the practices are useless without anything to apply it to outside of myself (I know that’s not true, but practice felt much more meaningful when I did have a community to interact with and growth could be measured much more easily). I guess I’m having a hard time understanding what I’m feeling since I haven’t really wanted to be around people this much since I was a teenager. 🙂 I used to think that people who couldn’t be alone and always wanted to socialize were needy and lacking self-knowledge.

After typing that, I’m seeing that there’s a balance there, too. To know oneself, to know others, to know them both together. I think I got it.

Thank you!

[Author]

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