How Not Living in Your Body Creates Loneliness

I hear the term in my community get thrown around a lot, this whole topic of “extreme loneliness.” After it became the point of conversation in a lot of our coaching sessions, I started to see a theme developing.

The women in my community who were experiencing high levels of loneliness, whether they were in a relationship or not, were the women who were most disconnected from their bodies – the same women who felt numb when I asked them to get “into their body.”

Loneliness vs Being Alone

There is a massive difference between loneliness and being alone. Loneliness is the feeling of disconnect – disconnection from yourself, your feelings, your truth and who you are.

It’s impossible to feel loneliness when we are viscerally connected into our bodies, when we are honoring our inner calling, healing our needs and not numbing our emotional experience. Loneliness occurs when we feel the need to numb all the negative emotion we are experiencing, when we label it “bad” or we think we shouldn’t feel it. When we are in this mindset, we do whatever it takes in order to shift ourselves out of the current state.

Actions taken to numb our experience may be gambling, drinking, taking drugs or eating. Using food to numb is a way to feel connected; when we eat, our brain fires neurons and we are reminded of past experiences when we felt connected. Most would refer to this as “comfort food,” however when the only comfort we gain is from the intake of food, we need to look at the deeper reason.

We are meant to live in our bodies, we are meant to honor our needs, heal our pain and celebrate our joy. We cannot experience high levels of joy and bliss when we aren’t willing to experience the pain in our bodies as well. Binge eaters have a desire to completely disconnect from their bodies; there is a pain deep within that they aren’t willing to face, therefore it’s more comfortable to deny that part of them rather than embrace it fully.

Loneliness is an Internal Issue

People think loneliness is due to lack of connection with other humans, an external issue. When the body is experiencing the feeling of loneliness and the mind doesn’t look within to make the inner connection, the mind will think it’s because the person is unlovable or not worthy or deserving of obtaining intimacy with others. This isn’t the case; the cure for loneliness is connection with self. Once we are embodied and connected with ourselves, it gives us the confidence to create the same intimacy with others. This is common in relationships.

When someone is feeling lonely due to disconnection with self, they assume the answer to heal the feeling is to obtain a relationship that will meet their needs for connection. The relationships that people obtain from this place are generally destructive to the individual, as they are searching for someone to heal their wounds rather than add value to their lives. This is a common pattern in relationships. Unless the individual has awareness over this pattern, it will repeat constantly.