SOLITUDE

AUGUST 2024

 May we take the opportunity to recognise for our readers in incarnation that life isn’t always easy, despite the overall sense that a truer, more enlightened age is on target for a new humanity to emerge.

So today we suggest that the way to look at these enduring difficulties – whether in the outer world, or even in your own hearts – is to sit down quietly and withdraw from all outer stimuli. So it is just you and yourself in communion at this time.

To sit with yourself, within yourself, is such a wonderful experience: when you can truly sit quietly, calmly, and trust yourself to do that – without any niggles that drop in from the mind.

Of course it is quite an art to do this; to let go the niggles of the mind – even when the intention is to sit quietly.  It is not meditation. It is not even mindfulness to sit and withdraw into your being; the being that is ‘who I am’. 

But it is, in fact, a solitude that you will find absolutely wonderful: when you feel this solitude, not as a loneliness or even a withdrawal from life, but, rather, as a communion with Life. And when you feel you are reaching this solitude; when you are sitting fully within who you are, there is such a recognition that solitude is hugely full, and hugely fabulous.

We suggest that to realise and understand solitude is to find more, not less of who you are. It is not just a comfort – especially if you feel you are alone in the world. It is a way to find a greater communion. The greater relationship.

 When you are able to trust that solitude has a much fuller life for you than even the most socially articulate of you could imagine, it is solitude that now brings everything into a perspective. Life is different; not what you imagined it to be. Life is first and foremost within the idea, the experience, the art of being alone with yourself.

Henry David Thoreau said: “I never found a companion as companionable as solitude.” It is a different way of being in the world. A different way of walking, acting, in the world. And when you walk and act and react wholly from within who you are, life is very different. Life speaks truth. Life even speaks truth to power.

In our view this is August.  Even as everything whirls around us, and still feels unresolved.

But it will be. It will be.

Why not sit quietly and listen to Annie’s latest audio meditation: