I was walking one morning recently, and I caught myself thinking, “I’m lonely.”
It seemed like an odd thought to me, so I took a closer look:
“I am lonely.”
“Really?!?” I asked myself. “Am I really lonely? Who is lonely?”
My soul is not lonely. Souls are not lonely. Souls are connected and free and expansive. My ego may be lonely. My inner child may be lonely. My soul is certainly not lonely.
It would be more accurate to say that, “I am feeling lonely” or that “I am having the experience of loneliness in this moment.”
Because I was reminded that we are not our thoughts. We are not our feelings.
You know what else we’re not? We are not our experiences. We are not our illnesses. We are not our beliefs. We are not the roles we play.
So if we are not all those things we normally identify with, what are we?
We are a soul residing in a physical body. We are a center of consciousness.
This higher consciousness is sometimes referred to as the witness/observer. This is the aspect of our being that witnesses the events of our lives as though we were an actor on a stage.
When we are connected to this witness/observer, we can step back and see the fear, the drama, the events of our life playing out before us. And we realize that this situation was created by us for our highest growth and learning as a soul.
Our soul agreed to have this experience.
The witness/observer helps us see the bigger picture and trust the inter-connectedness of all. It helps us remember exactly why we chose this body, this family, this set of experiences in this lifetime.
We create suffering for ourselves when we forget about our higher consciousness and identify too closely with our fear, our pain, our illnesses, our beliefs, our feelings and our stories. All of these are part of our ego. The ego wants to keep us safe (and often very limited) at the expense of our soul.
In my story from earlier, my initial thought, “I am lonely” was created by my ego. There’s a saying: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” If I had identified too closely with my feeling of loneliness, it would have lead to suffering.
But when I shifted perspective to say, “I am experiencing loneliness in this moment,” that helped me connect with my higher consciousness and its energy of connectedness to all.
The question to reflect on is this. Who do you want steering your life? Do you want your ego (with its energies of fear, doubt and separation) guiding you? Or do you want your higher consciousness and its expansive energies of connection, love and freedom guiding you?