Loneliness Vs Solitude

Loneliness is the painful experience of disconnection, longing for love and companionship. Solitude is the nurturing and fulfilling experience of deep time alone and connected with oneself and the larger consciousness system. These are very different perspectives and feelings in the same circumstance of being alone. Introverts may crave time for themselves, while extroverts crave time with others. Renee talks about the vast difference between loneliness and isolation and contentment in solitude.

Transcript

Welcome to Spiritual Psychology.

My name is Renée LaValley McKenna and I bring my 30-plus years as a recovering addict and ex-crazy person turned therapist and shamanic healer to bring you snackable teachings on spirituality,

Psychology,

And all things personal growth.

And today I want to talk about loneliness versus solitude.

And loneliness is the universally shared experience of most of humanity of feeling disconnected,

Isolated,

And longing for camaraderie,

Friendship,

And to love and be loved.

And solitude,

On the other hand,

Is a very nourishing and fulfilling experience of being deeply with oneself and connected to the larger consciousness system.

And the thing that loneliness and solitude both have in common is being alone,

But the difference is our experience of that aloneness.

And this points to the idea that we can have exactly the same circumstances and it's our perspective on it that determines our experience of it.

And humans are social beings.

Everyone needs connection with other humans in one form or another and in one quantity or another.

And in the introvert-extrovert spectrum,

There's no right or wrong.

Extreme introverts need a lot of time in solitude and maybe only a small or moderate amount of social contact.

And extroverts,

On the other hand,

Need a tremendous amount of social and relational interactions and only a moderate or small amount of solitude.

And introverts tend to be fed or recharged by time alone in solitude,

And extroverts feed on or are replenished by dynamic contact with others.

And most of us are a mix of both.

And I know for myself,

I'm an extreme person in almost every area of my life.

And so I'm an extreme extrovert.

I'm completely recharged by giant social situations or really engaging interactions with others.

But I also crave time to myself to spend in nature,

In contemplation,

Journaling,

And cultivating my own interrelationship with myself.

And that solitude is also a really creative time where I get a lot of inspiration.

I don't do social media or watch TV.

I've tried and I find them both incredibly unfulfilling.

I'd actually rather sit with my own thoughts and feelings than watch crappy Netflix.

If anybody has any good show recommendations,

Please send them to me because I do love good drama.

I was a literature major in college,

But I gotta say most of the writing these days is shit.

One of my kids is a huge Netflix fan and every once in a while she makes me watch a show with her and I'm like,

Who wrote this?

It's like junk food.

I don't care about any of the characters.

The storyline is stupid and predictable.

My other kid is actually a literature major in college,

A voracious reader,

And ultimately turned to Asian literature and is completely obsessed with anime because there's all these obscure storylines that are unpredictable.

And I think there's a balance of novelty and wisdom that we need to take in as part of the nourishment for our psyche.

I tend to be a content generator rather than a content consumer.

And my perspective on people who experience boredom,

I have a lot of teenagers in my life and they're bored all the time,

Is because there's too much inflow and not enough outflow.

Solitude is unsupported in our culture and watching Netflix or scrolling Instagram reels is not solitude.

Solitude is really being deeply with oneself and seeing what wants to come out.

We're each like little radios taking things in and broadcasting,

And if we can turn up the volume on what wants to come through or out of us,

Boredom completely falls away as we can become fascinated with the portal that each of us is into the unmanifested.

And the unmanifested can manifest through us in our own creativity,

But we've got to make room for that to happen.

More than once my son,

Who is brilliant in his own way,

Was complaining of being bored and I took away all his devices.

Of course,

He was a video game addict as well,

And he screamed and threw a fit.

But ultimately he came up with all these really cool ideas.

There were things he wanted to do research on,

Things he wanted to write about.

Unfortunately,

I wasn't able to sustain that container.

The resistance was too great.

And I let him go back to playing Hollow Knight,

Which is this really beautiful and artistic video game with pretty soothing music.

But anyway,

I'm kind of a Hollow Knight fan.

And I've had a lot of experience with both loneliness and solitude.

I felt desperately lonely in my family because my mother and I were so different.

We really didn't understand each other and weren't able to connect.

And although my father was a really interesting person and we had a lot in common,

He just wasn't available.

And I'm an only child and I always had a best friend growing up.

But it wasn't until I started doing drugs and alcohol around 12 or 13 that I really socially engaged.

We had enormous parties on the railroad tracks in Weymouth,

Massachusetts.

And I found that I absolutely loved being part of huge social gatherings where I knew a lot of people.

It was probably the most painful thing about COVID for me was the loss of that larger social dynamic.

And thank God I've rediscovered it here in Manhattan through some of the spiritual organizations and meetings that I go to.

I had always fancied myself as a low maintenance chick.

It's a total lie.

Delusion.

I'm like a tropical plant.

I need so much water,

Special soil.

Being part of an ecosystem with little bugs and animals pooping on me,

I need a lot of inflow to sustain my outflow.

It took me a long time to understand my own needs.

Just like it took me a long time to find out how to eat in a way that my body really likes.

I spent a lot of time being overweight and constipated.

And it's so amazing to find a sustainable way of eating,

Nourishing myself,

That feels healthy and energizing and empowering and strengthening.

I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting.

I'm eating just one meal a day now.

And I'm actually going to experiment with longer fasts again.

I'm considering fasting three or five days a month.

I'm quite ready.

I'm preparing for that.

But we can think about our intake and our outflow in all areas of our life.

Physically with food,

Mentally with the information or content that we consume.

The words that we speak or the content that we create,

Which could also include our behaviors in the world.

How we treat others,

How we spend our time.

What's our inflow and outflow spiritually,

Whether it's through church or surfing.

Time spent in nature or in solitude to receive the life flow.

And what flows out of us in prayers for others,

Service work,

Good wishes,

Kind deeds.

And what's our social balance or dynamic of breathing in and breathing out.

How much contact and engagement do we need with others and how much time alone.

One of the best dating relationships that I've ever had.

We saw each other twice a week,

Pretty religiously.

And that time was completely dedicated to each other,

Deeply engaged.

Good food,

Great conversations,

A lot of sex.

And then we would have very little contact in between those times.

He's more introverted than I am,

So he needs more of that solitude.

Which was a little challenging for me at first,

But then once I got in the rhythm of it,

I really came to enjoy,

Again,

This deeply breathing in and breathing out experience.

I think that's very healthy in relationship,

Not dissimilar from the eating and fasting model.

And for me,

That cycle that's a little bit more extreme of deep engagement and retraction,

Actually feels super healthy for me in all areas of my life.

We live in a culture that's terrified of lack of anything.

A lot of medical people are horrified by the idea of going three or five days without food.

And there's tremendous evidence that that creates a natural cleaning,

Clearing process that can be very healthy.

You know,

California has been riddled by wildfires the last few years because the forest management tried to suppress all fires.

And there's a natural cleaning,

Clearing process necessary for the forest.

In fact,

Redwood seeds will not germinate without a fire.

And now all the unburned waste has overburdened the forest.

And what might have been small,

Natural fires are now giant forest fires,

As nature seeks balance in itself.

I tend to have a lot of inflammation in my body,

And there's a lot of research that fasting allows the body to consume dead or damaged cells.

It's called autophagy.

And because deeper wisdom tends to correlate across the board,

Time spent in solitude could be seen as similar to fasting.

And there's a difference between fasting and starving,

And it's not dissimilar from the perspective of loneliness or solitude.

My first period of intentional celibacy was six months.

The intention was to clear these really addictive,

Compulsive patterns around sex and relationship.

It was after the end of my really toxic first marriage.

In fact,

I had already met my second husband,

And I knew,

If I don't do something different,

Some iteration of the same thing is going to happen over and over again because I'm the common denominator in these relationships.

I need to change.

And it was a radical shift for me to actually spend time in solitude with no sex,

Not pursuing a relationship.

In fact,

I tried not to even masturbate during that time.

Really let my body cycle down.

And in the early weeks and maybe even early months of that six-month celibacy,

It was excruciating.

All of the unresolved emotional issues,

The fear,

Deep shame and unworthiness came right to the surface.

All of the fear and unresolved suffering I had been keeping at bay by constantly trying to prove my worth and value through being loved by a man,

Or at least desired by one.

And even earlier in my life,

It had been about being desired by more than one.

But taking that time in solitude changed and healed me in ways that nothing else could.

And a lot of time in meditation,

Deeply engaged with the Great Mother,

Feeling relationship with God and Goddess for the first time,

Facing and growing in compassion with my own deepest fears.

It was very clear that all the things that I thought were supposed to make me happy and that the culture told me would make me happy had not made me happy.

And I became really open-minded.

I've spoken before about the life-changing three-week retreat that I did with Thich Nhat Hanh and the monks and nuns of Plum Village,

A Buddhist center in the south of France that I still hope to visit someday.

It continues even though Thich Nhat Hanh has passed.

But I spent time with these monks and nuns who had nothing but two robes,

A bowl and a pair of sandals.

And they were,

Most of them,

Very happy.

And they were celibate.

And I thought,

Well,

There's something interesting.

And it actually spurred the first time that I intentionally experimented with letting go of material items as a way to make room for God.

And I just did this for the second time in moving to Manhattan,

Sold all my stuff,

Cleared the deck.

It's a very powerful process.

And I can tell you right now,

What's growing in the fallow field that I just cleared is pretty amazing.

I feel like I'm on the biggest adventure of my life at 58.

I was riding my city bike through Times Square the other morning when everyone else was asleep,

Thinking,

My God,

How did I get here?

And how fun is this?

Fun is very important.

And you can have fun in solitude.

So I've been communing with the life force and flow that is so present here in New York.

Everything's in motion all the time,

Surrounded by two rivers,

The subway runs underneath us,

And the streets are almost never empty except at 5 a.

M.

In Times Square.

But all the buildings and billboards are still shining and everything's a video.

It's crazy.

Times Square is actually way too over the top for me when everybody is there.

But I can go throw it on my way to Penn Station when I'm meeting visitors flying in.

I'm riding bikes everywhere and walking.

And that is a form of solitude.

Everything in the car can be solitude if you shut off the radio or your music and just be with yourself,

Observing our thoughts,

Making room for our feelings,

Listening to our own soul or spirit.

I was on Reddit the other day.

I'm on a subreddit,

Spirituality,

And someone posted how lonely they feel on the spiritual path that they don't have anyone in real life that they connect with.

Only online,

And they were like 25 answers of people concurring,

I feel the same way.

And there was some hopelessness in that.

And people suggesting,

Oh,

You just need to find fulfillment in loving yourself.

But there's something authentic about that loneliness,

Because again,

There's a balance of solitude and connection,

Of breathing in and breathing out that we need.

So we need to pay attention to ourself and the deeper truth.

Is this loneliness authentic?

Do I need more nourishing,

Engaging,

Loving connections with others?

Or do I need to turn this loneliness into a time of solitude and look within myself?

That's a question.

And like seasons,

There's a time for each of those.

And I responded on that Reddit thread and talked about the seasons and how instructive they are for us.

And although winter may be long,

Which would be the time of loneliness or solitude,

It is always followed by spring,

Even in the far north,

And how important it is to participate deeply in those seasonal movements of winter,

The regeneration of spring,

The fruiting of summer,

The harvest of fall,

Returning to winter again.

An infinite cycle,

And that cycle's within us as well,

Again in all these areas of our life.

And can we live each season deeply?

There are many plants that need the hard freeze of winter to bloom effectively,

Just like the redwood needs fire to germinate its seeds and new growth.

And the person responded back to me and they said,

Thank you so much for your perspective,

Because I told them I'm on about my eighth cycle of regeneration.

And they said,

I'm 15 years old and I've been on a spiritual path since I was 12.

God bless you.

You have a lot of time.

And trust me,

Winter will not last forever.

And what does it have to teach us?

And how can we be in solitude rather than loneliness?

And when does loneliness call us into the regeneration of spring?

Do we need to put effort into connecting with other more like-minded,

Elevated souls?

Do we need to let go of old friendships,

Outworn dynamics,

At work or with family,

And participate in our own growth?

I felt deeply lonely the last few years in San Francisco.

A lot of my old connections just fell away.

Some of it was COVID and some of it was just a natural progression.

And I didn't know what was next.

And that was my prayer for a long time.

What's next?

Show me my highest good.

And so I sold all my shit and moved to Manhattan.

And I got to tell you,

I'm killing it.

So happy here.

Spring has come,

As it always does.

And so I encourage you to face your loneliness.

See what it has to teach you.

Where is it calling you?

Deeper into solitude and communion with your own soul?

Or is loneliness calling you out to make positive,

Constructive changes in your life?

Blessings on your path until we meet again.

This is Renée LaValley McKenna for Spiritual Psychology.

Reviews

I've just found your channel. Your talks are inspirational. ❤️

I have listened to a lot of self help and talks, and this has got to be one of my very favorites. I feel comforted and empowered and curious.

I loved this and needed to hear this. Winter has come for me and what started as lonliness is now solitude for me as I reconnect with myself again.

Really good food for thought. I am a socially adept introvert so for a long time was confused as it looks like I'm an extrovert. It wasn't until I realised that I am easily overwhelmed when in a crowd and confusingly that overwhelm feels like lonliness, that i started to explore solitude. I know now that when I don't have enough alone time that things get off kilter. I will listen to this again, it is a very comforting piece. I like the notion of giving space to see what wants to come out. I also am inspired by the seasons analogy as I tend to be extreme - either seeing no one or being out in company all the time. Balance is what I seek! I recently stopped watching TV for relaxation in the evenings and the rewards in sleep, creativity and time are enormous. Thank you for your work 😊

Truly helpful and fun to listen to. Thank you 🙏✨️🙏 so many important questions to ponder and relatable stories. I feel extremely clear after listening.

I’ve been struggling a lot with loneliness lately, and searching for ways to tap into self-love and appreciation. This was a very helpful talk. Thank you.

Was nice to be reminded that feeling of loneliness is ever present and is ok, just as it is. Have been feeling better very lonely without family or friends I feel deeply connected to in the town I moved to alone. With a wave from a fellow Pluk Village practitioner .