A Message on Loneliness and Retreat

I go through phases where I am super social and phases where I am super anti-social.  For a lot of years, after leaving my hometown in NC, I was anti-social out of necessity.  It was hard to make new friends b/c I’d had the same amazing friends for so long and had always been in situations where making them was easy.  When we moved to Florida I was determined to make friends and I did.  I became a part of the most wonderful group of fellow stay-at-home-moms I could imagine.  And then, as I’ve written about before, life began to get busy and schedules started to change.  I also found myself going inward more, reading books, and writing.  For over a year, I was very hermit-ish.  I’m not sure that I’ve fully emerged from that phase.  In ways I have through online relationships.  I’ve reunited with a lot of friends from way back and I’ve made a lot of new friends through Twitter and blogs.  But at times I feel lonely.  I used to talk on the phone regularly with a couple of my mommy friends, my sister, and my mom.  When schedules got busy and I went into hermit mode, those mostly stopped.  I feel this weird mix of guilty, sad, and peaceful about it.  I feel guilt because maybe I pushed people away, maybe shifting my priorities hurt people.  I feel sad because sometimes I think that Mark is the only person I have in this world.  And I feel peaceful because my life is pretty simple right now, and simple is good.

Anyway, lately I’ve felt the urge to retreat again and go inward.  That urge scares me though, because as much as I want to learn about myself and connect with spirit, I don’t want to lose or weaken anymore of my connections to people.  I tried something new tonight, looking for an answer to this dilemma.  I asked a question on paper and wrote down an answer as it popped into my head.  The following came to me in less than 5 minutes and what you’ve read up until this point took me about 45 minutes to get down. My question was:

I am seeking guidance about loneliness and a desire to retreat.  Do you have any insight on this matter for me?

You are never alone.  Surrounding yourself with people often makes you lonelier.  Your energy is merged with theirs and it is possible to lose sight of who you are.  Their wishes interact with your own.  The vision for your life can be left clouded.  What you want may not jive with what those around you want.  There is a desire to hold tightly and keep the river from flowing, dam it up if you will.  You must keep moving.  In moments of stuckness it is good to find your own space for quiet questioning of the soul.  The need to retreat can grab you and you can fight it.  Fight it with guilt and empty movements.  Avoidance.  Going inward signals the call to the energies waiting to assist.  Do it as often as you can.  Allow yourself to open and be a channel for the light that will illuminate the darkness, bring you to where you need to go and allow you to see who you can be.  Loneliness is a hypnotic suggestion.  It is the ego falsely demanding you to fill your time and life with more and more until it is so crowded that you’ve gotten lost.  People will arrive when they need you or you them.  You cannot call forth sadness by measuring the bodies in your life.  You have all you need in this now moment.  If you are feeling called to retreat than do just that.

I bought the book “Writing Down Your Soul” and hope to start a regular practice of soul-writing.  I may share it here regularly or maybe just once in a while.  This was my first attempt in a long time and as my friend Mildred would say, what you just read there in italics I am quite certain was written through me not by me.