InnerSelf.com

by Sharon Salzberg.

Throughout our lives we long to love ourselves more deeply and to feel connected with others. Instead, we often contract, fear intimacy, and suffer a bewildering sense of separation. We crave love, and yet we are lonely. Our delusion of being separate from one another gives rise to all of this pain. What is the way out of...

 Sadness can become a very enriching experience. You have to work on it. It is easy to escape from your sadness — and all relationships ordinarily are escapes; one simply goes on avoiding it. And it is always there underneath... the current continues. Even in relationship it erupts many times. Then one tends to throw the responsibility on the other...

Singing love songs to yourself may sound like something strange to do but it actually is therapeutic and great for one's self-esteem. The experience of singing love songs to myself first started when I was listening to the radio and hearing all those lovey-dovey songs. My "Self" started substituting...

Everyone has experienced a broken heart. Most of us have at some time thought or said, "I will never love again." In the wake of emotional pain, it is natural to want to protect yourself. And in many situations it's a good idea to retreat into a cocoon for a period of time while you regroup. The problem is that when you keep your heart sheltered...

A consciousness of abandonment may begin in early childhood with the death or divorce of a parent, the father taking a job in another town and seldom seeing the child, or perhaps feeling lost in a large family of brothers and sisters and not receiving enough attention. Other factors to consider...

Our fear of aloneness is so ingrained that given the choice of being by ourselves or being with others we opt for safety in numbers, even at the expense of lingering in painful, boring, or totally unredeeming company. While many Americans have their solo lifestyles thrust on them -- people die, people go away -- a huge and growing population is choosing to be alone...

Do you feel lonely because you do not have family around you? Have you made family a priority because you have a terrible fear of being alone? Let's put loneliness and being alone in its proper perspective. There is a key distinction between being alone and feeling lonely. Being alone is when you voluntarily spend time alone in order to heal your heart by entering deeper into it and discovering more about yourself...

A critical step in the embrace of silence and solitude is setting aside the notion that we have to be "doing something" throughout our waking hours. For most of us, this goes against what we have been taught since childhood: that being active and productive is the best way to proceed...

Can a man who longs for a woman to complete him really believe that he needs to do nothing more than lose himself in television sports and drink imported beer while he's waiting for his beloved to appear? If he then walked into a room, his head filled with alcohol and his mind distracted by home run statistics... would she really be attracted to him?