When the coached woman was guided to feel her loneliness fully — to be intimate with it rather than run from it — she discovered something startling: it felt enormous. “It’s so big,” she said. Joe’s response: “Love is really big.”
The sensation labeled “loneliness” had been run away from because of the story attached to it — “I’m alone, I’m disconnected.” But the raw sensation, when fully investigated without the story, turns out to be longing. And longing, when you’re intimate with it, is love.
“It feels like if I connect to it like it might absorb me whole.” “It will. That’s what love does. It rips away our identity.”
This is why we avoid it. Not because the feeling is painful, but because love at that depth dissolves our sense of separate self. The woman said she’d feel like a helpless baby. Joe confirmed: “That’s how it works.” The fear isn’t of loneliness — it’s of being consumed by love so vast it obliterates the boundaries of who we think we are.
Related Concepts
- Heartbreak is expansion
- Shame is love in disguise
- Closing heart from confused love
- Longing and loneliness are love in disguise
- Dissolution of self is what love requires
- Aloneness without loneliness is a sign of authentic self-discovery
- Self-pressure suppresses the love and awareness underneath
- The expansiveness underneath resistance to love is overwhelming and amazing