Isolation. Quarantine. Distance.

We're all being asked to live in a new place that's way outside of our comfort zone, thanks to our COVID19 #pandemic. This new place is a station of solitude. We've pivoted overnight from a group-hugging, fist-bumping, Agile-scrumming, carpooling, and happy-hour reveling wonderland to a disquieting work-from-home, distance-teaching, virtual-meeting, and Zoom-concert limbo.

And the pivot is clearly taking a toll on our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.

Yet like so many phenomena we're coping with right now, our necessary solitude is in many respects just an escalation of a sickness that's been plaguing us for decades.

Dr. Teri calls it Left-Brain Loneliness.

"We're living in little pods," she notes. "And that intensifies our sense of separation, the us-versus-them, the otherism."

So what's the left-brain connection? Dr. Teri reminds us that this feeling of loneliness comes from the place in our minds dominated by linearity, binary modeling, manipulation, and materiality.

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“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
– Honoré de Balzac
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Our perception – our attitudes – create our experiences, which influence the way we react to people. Our reactions in turn influence the way they perceive us, and the ways in which they interact with us, in an ever-widening ripple effect. In this insidious spiral, left-brain loneliness marks the start of our descent into a dark, calculating, manipulating mindset.

Moreover, for all the ills that come with commodifying our friends, colleagues, and even fellow family members – reducing them to mere units of value and risk – the real damage comes from the way this mindset leads us to dehumanize ourselves. Whether positive or negative, what goes around comes around.

How do we free ourselves from this damaging cycle of loneliness and self-loathing?

"Connect with the core of your being and the loneliness goes away," Dr. Teri assures us, "no matter how isolated you are." She describes a simple exercise she uses with clients  coping with left-brain loneliness. "Try to see yourself moving from 'alone' to 'all one.' Just by adding that 'L,' you not only take comfort in the fact that you're not alone; you embark on your personal journey to becoming an altruist."

In other words, by embracing the humanity in others – in real life or on Zoom meetings, at a distance or in close quarters – we grow into the richness of our own, vital humanity. We can thus become our own best friends.

Listen to Episode 11: Left-Brain Loneliness now on:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Google Podcasts

[Graphic credit: Photograph by mikoto.raw. Used under Creative Commons CC0. Source: Pexels.]

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