Power Of Solitude

We all need solitude and silence, and we all need social connection. We are vastly connected to everything in the universe, and we forget it, most of the time. We can be so consumed with the busyness and the fast pace of life we can lose the connection with ourselves and others and live on auto-pilot, missing the connection we all long for. One way we can come home to the heart of our connection with everything is the practice of solitude, or I like to call it "soulitude," where you connect deep within your heart. Just taking 20 minutes a day to spend some time in solitude can work on many levels, and you will see the benefits first-hand of the sound of silence, leading you to live more freely and peacefully.

Solitude helps with quieting the busy mind in many ways. It helps us put things into perspective and gain clarity. We can see things more clearly and it helps us through our confusion. When we quiet our minds, the critics and judgments fall away. When you connect to yourself, you can better know your likes and dislikes, connect to your desires, explore what you are interested in and clearly know what you no longer want in your life, and let go of things that no longer serve you. You can clean out the clutter and confusion and become more empowered and confident in learning to listen and trust yourself to see yourself through any situation that arises. Through clarity, we are more confident and courageous to take the next steps in our lives and to live more freely as we are.

It can also support us to not be reactionary and instead be responsive, open, and more flexible in our thinking. By no means is it our fault that we are creatures of automatic patterns and behaviors; it is how we learned to survive in this world. When we don’t have a clear mind or perspective, we may react to others from a place of defensiveness, fear, and separation, especially when we are at our limit. When we take some time and a pause, we can become more responsive and act and communicate with compassion rather than fear. When we act from compassion, it can be compassion for ourselves and even compassion for others. We begin to listen with more of an open mind and see that multiple perspectives can co-exist. When we are responsive, we are open and more caring, and we feel connected because we see we are in this together. It’s no longer an I or Me; it's a We. This is a doorway to peace.

Solitude can help tame our emotions. When our emotions feel strong or intense, this quiet time can help us put things into perspective. Often, our emotions run amok because we are all over the place trying to manage a number of things. When we take some space, our emotions settle and balance out. Emotional balance is the key to feeling connected with others. We build positive and healthy emotional states and can better regulate ourselves so emotions don’t cause us to act in a way that can be harmful to others or ourselves. When we act from a place of love and emotional equanimity, we have more internal peace and create more connection and peace with others.

Something that you may already be familiar with is that solitude can calm us when we feel overwhelmed by others' energies so we can find more peace. Solitude is necessary to connect to inner peace. In daily life, we can get caught in a web of the many energies that surround us and get pulled into reactive patterns and ways of being. When we take the time for ourselves to be in solitude, we can cultivate more peaceful states and release judgments, energies, demands, and the critiques of others. When we let go of energies that no longer serve us, we become more peaceful and invigorated with new energies focused on things that inspire us.

Lastly, solitude supports us to become more open and flexible in our thinking. As we practice being in solitude, it’s possible to quiet our minds, as well as all surrounding energies, and train ourselves to listen to our hearts, allowing ourselves to be guided by our souls into a new way of being where the conditioned and reactive patterns loosen and slowly fall away, allowing us to be more responsive, open, flexible, and adaptable in our thinking. When we are responsive, we are thinking with our highest and most calm self and can connect with others more freely and honestly.

- Psychology Today