The fear of "being alone forever"

A fear that dictated my life in the past was ‘being alone forever.” What I didn’t know at that time was; that fear was actually repelling and keeping me from the one thing I was seeking, a relationship an intimate connection with another. Most of us live with this fear, yet we want love at the same time. They can’t coexist and result in a harmonious relationship. As human beings we crave connection. We are designed to relate. What becomes difficult or causes dysfunctional relationships is the relationship we have with yourself. If we feel alone within, nothing outside of us will ever be able to fill the void. The relationship with ourselves is the most important relationship we have, yet we tend to seek outside of ourselves in partners for what has been within us all along.

The journey back to myself was not an easy path. It has been riddled with fear, grief, depression, sadness and feelings of abandonment. When we set off on the path of self discovery we are essentially traveling parts of us that are unfamiliar. There’s dark terrain that we cannot skip over or pretend doesn’t exist. We have to slowly step into the unknown one baby step at a time and stop whenever we need to rest. It’s less about bulldozing a path and more about uncovering and creating a path with delicacy and patience. As we begin to rediscover parts of us, we begin to relate to ourselves in a new way, a more profound and compassionate way, thus making us able to relate and connect with others the same. When we are authentic to ourselves we are able to attract and interact with others in a more authentic way.

When we are hiding from parts of ourselves we will see those parts trying to make themselves known in the relationships around us. Whenever we react strongly to another it’s teaching us about the parts we keep hidden in ourselves. If we have not uncovered these pieces of ourselves, we become fragmented, leaving us with the feeling of disconnect. It’s that feeling of disconnect from ourselves that begins to create the illusory fear of; “I’m going to be alone forever.” When we set off to find the missing parts of ourselves we begin to feel whole within. We begin to realize that we were never alone all along. We just left pieces of us scattered along the way because they became too heavy to carry. What we learn along the way is how strong we are and we go back and we pick up those pieces of us that we abandon long ago. When we find them we hold on tightly to them and tell them how much we missed them just as we would a child. It’s these pieces of us that are our inner child. These pieces of ourselves that we’ve left scattered are like the breadcrumbs we left to help us find our way back to ourselves, back to our soul, back to our divinity.

The path to our divinity is a lonely one. It is filled with doubt and uncertainty. It makes us extremely uncomfortable, but it’s who we become in the process of finding ourselves and what we come to realize is; when we know ourselves intimately we are never truly alone. When we discover that God has been dwelling within us the entire time, that it was only our mind keeping us from the love and protection we so deeply crave from another, we no longer fear that we will be alone forever, we no longer feel scared or unsafe because we know deep in our soul that we are never alone and that we are divinely protected with God in our heart.

There's a difference in having faith and practicing faith. We can have faith, but practicing faith requires us to trust. If we have trouble trusting God, trusting others or trusting our path, we are not trusting ourselves. We are not in touch with the part of us that is God. The part of us that is God is our soul, we communicate with our soul via our intuition, via our feelings and our heart. When we rely too much on the mind to make decisions we lose touch with the part of us that wants our highest good. Our mind wants comfort and familiarity, but our soul wants depth, it wants intimate connection, it wants growth and expansion. When we abandon the part of us that wants what is best for us we make choices based from fear not from love and we begin to divert from our highest path. When we divert from this path we begin to experience situations that will ultimately bring us back to ourselves, back to God. God will never abandon us, He will only ever try to guide us back to Him. The path God wants us to take may not look like the path that everyone else is taking. Each path is unique, we are made in His image and for a purpose. When we work for God, He will ask us to give up things, especially material comfort in order for us to focus on the work He has for us. We must trust that if we take the path He wants us to take He will provide. He will not provide what our ego wants and it will not be what we are used to or want we want it to look like, but it will always be what we need. If we can believe that, then we’re practicing faith. We are extensions of God, in order to trust Him we must trust ourselves. When we trust God, when we trust ourselves we begin to trust and see others as God does, purely and unconditionally.

When we find our divinity we come to love ourselves unconditionally and this makes us feel whole and the fear of being alone forever begins to dissipate. When we love ourselves unconditionally we can love others as God does. To me that is the ultimate lesson on Earth, to be so centered in God that all you see is Him in all things, in all places, in all situations. Behind all is God. When we see Him in all, we will connect with others and the world in an unconditional way and never feel alone again.