Travel Tips and Guide.

Everybody, it seems, is out there having fun with family and friends, and here you are, alone, reading articles, desolate, despondent, filled with despair, hopeless, reaching out in urgent need of anyone who might listen to your forlorn longings in this joyous of seasons. Woe is you.

So, to keep your mind off all the fun you are missing (by the way, all those supposed people having a ball are an illusion; attend a large family gathering sometime and see what really goes on!) let's dive into this loneliness for a change instead of merely escaping from it, and find out what loneliness is all about. At least it will pass the time.

Okay, so we are going to explore our loneliness. First of all, we have to really get into it, we have to really get lonely. Desolate, despondent, filled with despair, hopeless, reaching out in urgent need of anyone who might listen to your forlorn longings in this joyous of seasons; thats where we have to remain.

Please, encourage those awful feelings of dejection, and don't escape from them. Don't look for someone to talk to or something to occupy your mind. Stay with this claustrophobic emptiness and dont allow it to fade. We are going to face this thing down once and for all.

It's easy to find comfort in a new relationship, new surroundings or a new hobby that keeps your mind engaged and busy, but we will forgo all of that now and allow the loneliness to overwhelm us. Let's see who's boss.

Come on loneliness! Is that the best you can do? Loneliness knows that you can't depend on a relationship or a situation to keep you supported, because things can easily change. But no matter what changes, this time you will defeat loneliness without escaping from it, and this time you will know that you will never be lonely again. Aloneness? Yes. Loneliness? No!

New friends and new situations can be nice, but what if they collapse, as they tend to do? Then loneliness would again raise its persistent head as if it were a latent illness lurking in your body, just waiting to finish you at the first opportunity.

You know how loneliness works; it is always there, hiding in the wings. That's why you try so hard to keep yourself busy and engaged. And that's what's so scary, knowing that no matter what you do, loneliness is just a less few friends or circumstances away. It's always waiting in ambush, and it's very patient. You may be married for fifty years, but at the end, there it is. No road is long enough to beat it by running away. So turn and face it this time, and pummel it!

Don't allow this dreadful psychological thing to intimidate you one more day. Enough is enough!. Beat it into the ground by not escaping from it this time and facing it dead on. If you begin to get ideas about how to have some fun, or start to feel good; stop it! And immediately go back to feeling lonely, dejected, forlorn and hopeless (until you begin to laugh a little at yourself).

Loneliness is a terrible thing to have hanging over your head, so let's cure it so that no matter what happens you will never be lonely again. That is a gratifying thing, because one of our most terrible fears would disappear, and we could live life freely for a change.

What if you surprise yourself and defeat loneliness? You can you know. Its not hard; just get to know loneliness instead of running from it. An easy way to begin is by watching your thoughts, because there is no loneliness without thought! Since you were a baby, you have been thinking continuously, right? So let's do something different and break those thought patterns for a moment.

Observing your thoughts so that you can get to know your loneliness instead of fleeing from it like a week-kneed, sniveling social reject, however, can be tricky in the beginning. Thoughts are fast, and there are a gazillion of them. It's like attempting to catch a runaway horse – we have to somehow slow the horse down.

One way is to keep a LARGE thought in mind, instead of the many little thoughts that plague you, like loneliness. This large thought is one that you have with you all the time, which is your breath. Thinking about your breath replaces all those small, troublesome thoughts because when you think about you breathing, (I'm watching my breathing”) all the little lonely thoughts can't get in.

This easy replacement of one LARGE thought in place of little thoughts removes the hidden fear you may have knowing that your loneliness could come back, or all the many other scary and frightful thoughts you have been storing up – they all disappear. And when they all diminish for awhile, you will finally have some space, and who knows what will result from that space. Maybe something quite wonderful where you will never be lonely again.

Few people who do this ever feel lonely, or afraid of being by themselves. This is what facing our fears and understanding the power of our thoughts can do, as a starter! This can lead to other things, such as freedom from fear, and to, actually, complete total freedom!

Okay, let's begin; “Woe is me. Poor me, I am so lonely”. Wait a minute, thats just a thought! I am going to watch my breath now!

(Okay – you got the hang of it).

Anagarika eddie is a meditation teacher at the Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation Retreat Sanctuary www.dhammarocksprings.org and author of A Year to Enlightenment. His 30 years of meditation experience has taken him across four continents including two stopovers in Thailand where he practiced in the remote northeast forests as an ordained Thervada Buddhist monk.

He livedatWatPah Nanachat under AjahnChah, at WatPah Baan Taad under AjahnMaha Boowa,and at Wat Pah Daan Wi Weg under Ajahn Tui. He had been a postulant at ShastaAbbey,a Zen Buddhist monastery in northern California under RoshiKennett; and a Theravada Buddhist anagarikaat both AmaravatiMonastery in the UK and BodhinyanaramaMonastery in New Zealand, both under AjahnSumedho.The author has meditated with the Korean MasterSuengSahnSunim; with BhanteGunaratana at the Bhavana Society in West Virginia; and with the Tibetan Master TrungpaRinpoche in Boulder, Colorado. He has also practiced at the InsightMeditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, and the ZenCenterin San Francisco.

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