What is the difference between solitude and loneliness?
A beautiful answer to this question comes from “Touching the Eternal,” a recording of a seven-day retreat in India led by spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle.
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At the end of each daily talk, Tolle addressed some of the participants’ most pressing issues that had been passed to him on small sheets of paper. In one of those anonymous notes, a woman shared her desire for a spiritual love relationship with a man.
This longing, she revealed, came after 25 painful years of marriage during which she could not give herself or her ex-husband the love and acceptance they were both looking for. The newfound feelings toward a different man made her uncomfortable and kept her from being fully present in the Now. And she wasn’t sure about what to do about it.
Tolle answered her question as best as he could to resolve her inner conflict and then offered this short meditation on the difference between solitude and loneliness:
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Solitude is beautiful; loneliness is not.
Solitude is to be alone and to be surrendered into that aloneness. Solitude is beautiful, even sacred. Loneliness is to be alone and hate it and not wanting this.
When you surrender into aloneness, it becomes solitude. And solitude even becomes more than that. It becomes a deep sense of connectedness with Being itself, because you had really been looking for God through somebody else. And it’s only through surrender that you can find God.
Complement with 10 reasons why solitude is important in our life.
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. I started my meditation practice in 2014, and in 2017 I launched this website to share what I learn with others.
