Something in you dies when you bear the unbearable.

Loneliness screams that you used to have a better life.

Loneliness boasts that you loved and lost.

Loneliness doesn't like you to practise choice. It would rather you die having not learned to turn negative thoughts into positives.

Loneliness would love to keep you prisoner forever.

Yet when you were growing up you avoided loneliness for years and years. You must have been very creative to miss falling into its trap.

So if we reflect on our past strategies to overcome today's loneliness pit, you can teach yourself to become free forever.

BEGIN TO LISTEN TO LIFE'S BEST TEACHER - YOURSELF.

For some, maybe you know something is not mentally quite right and haven't given that uncomfortableness a label or a diagnosis.

To overcome loneliness we cannot blink it away.  It's like an illness or hungry diet that we have to overcome and do not know how long it will take until we are freed.

How much loneliness can you bear before the unbearable takes you over completely?

If you have got this far in reading this blog, well done.

This shows that change is becoming possible, you are already making baby steps which will lead to big long lasting changes.

Like any dark addiction/illness, we have to own it and accept that we have it.

'I'm lonely.' Saying this out-loud is a real wake-up call. By being honest with yourself you have become outwardly aware of your mental state. 

Now I suggest that you try day by day to begin to make changes.

Instead of sitting all day, walk around, bend, stretch when indoors. This will increase your happiness hormones.

Shower daily.

Choose trainers over another day of wearing slippers.

Open the front door and take a step outside.

Walk to the gate.

Text someone, or call someone you haven't communicated with for ages. If you have no-one, phone the library or Sainsbury for opening hours.  Start talking to yourself in the house. Sing along with songs. Listen to your voice become less croaky.

Stand at the gate, walk up the road.  Repeat.

Now pat yourself on the back.

In just these few days, you'll smell better, feel better, have exercised, become braver.

Next week you can choose to repeat these steps, and maybe the following week you can go into shops, ask someone for the time, where are the butter beans? Get on the bus, give a little wave or a little smile and say hello to the driver, or a passer by, or someone at the bus stop. 

Then it'll click, that with your new found little bit of confidence, you are not missing out on something.

You'll be having a bit of a better life.

You may have loved and lost but are becoming more confident to love again.

Naturally you will be practising choice, because you will not be choosing to stay loneliness's prisoner forever.

You will still have to avoid loneliness for years and years but with these simple steps, you'll be able to stop yourself going over the pit's edge.

If you feel like coming to the Chitter Chatter Clubs and meeting others who have completed these steps, please come along.

If you don't fancy it and want to follow by the free monthly newsletter, do that.

Baby steps can turn loneliness on it's head, and in time you will realist that you have you beared the unbearable and come out the other side, stronger, wiser, more grateful and you will love and value yourself more, and it will returned ten-fold.

'Something in you dies when you bear the unbearable. And it is only in the dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves. ' Ram Dass.

Many thanks for these images supplied by Greg Rosenke and Gabriel Manzo

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