Loneliness: spiritual meaning and where it shows in the body

What loneliness is

Loneliness is the painful feeling that your need for connection is not being met. It is not the same as being alone: many people enjoy time on their own, and many feel lonely in a crowd, a family or a marriage. Loneliness can follow a move, a loss, retirement, illness or a change in a relationship, and it can also be long-standing.

Lasting loneliness is linked to low mood, anxiety and poorer physical health. It is common, it is nothing to be ashamed of, and it can change with support.

Spiritually, loneliness is looked at as a question of support: who holds you up, and whom you let in.

The emotional meaning of loneliness

In the emotional approach, loneliness often sits beside bitterness, timidity and the feeling of carrying everything alone. It is less about the number of people around you than about whether you let them see inside.

The pillar who can only count on themselves

The lower back is described as part of the body's support system, tied to security and to trust in life. Pain there is linked to feeling you are the pillar, able to count only on yourself, and to doing everything to be loved while worrying about what others think. It often appears after a loss of work, a retirement, a child leaving home or a separation, when the structure that held you changes.

At one lumbar vertebra in particular, loneliness and bitterness are tied to a marked shyness. You are prisoner of your emotions, not knowing how to live or express them, so you wear masks to keep others from seeing inside. You may want to numb the discomfort with drink, drugs or work. You may need closeness and solitude at once, and the clash between them brings frustration.

The middle back carries a related sentence: the impression that everyone is "on your back", that you are alone in doing everything, and that you are not supported enough emotionally.

The way through is support that starts inside: the recognition that your first support can come from yourself, and that this makes it easier to ask others for help.

Drinking to forget the feeling

Like every dependence, drinking too much is read as an attempt to fill an emotional void. Loneliness, isolation, guilt, incomprehension and a kind of abandonment come together with a sense of being worthless, in a cold place where no one understands. Instead of building solid relationships with people, the bottle becomes "my best friend". For a time, drinking takes away the feelings of solitude, of not being like the others, of rejecting yourself. When it wears off, reality looks harder, and depression can follow.

Underneath is a feeling of being different, out of step with a world that seems materialistic, and a longing to be loved without conditions. Alcohol dependence is a medical condition, and help works best when it covers both the drinking and the loneliness.

A cough that pushes something out

A cough is read as a way of releasing an irritation or an emotion you cannot speak: loneliness, bitterness, sadness, incomprehension, frustration or boredom. Something seems caught in the throat, usually a thing you hold back for fear of how others will react. You feel stuck in a situation, and the cough says in small pieces what you would like to say clearly.

Loneliness is close to withdrawal, the pause that can turn into a closed door, to timidity, and to abandonment, the feeling of having been left.

A gentler way to hold it

The aim is not to blame yourself for being lonely. The emotional perspective invites you to look at where support is missing and where it could come in.

• Notice the pillar. If you are holding everything up alone, ask what one thing you could hand to someone else.
• Take off one mask. Let one person see a little of what is happening inside.
• Make room for both needs. Time alone and time with others are not opposites. Plan for each.
• Look at what numbs it. Drink, work or screens can quiet loneliness for a while and deepen it afterwards.
• Say the thing in your throat. A clear sentence, even a small one, can do what a cough cannot.
• Start with your own support. Recognising that you can hold yourself up makes it easier to ask for, and accept, help.