A reader asked: "In my day-to-day life, I often feel lonely. It seems like there's not a lot of genuine connection. What is real connection? What are some qualities of it? And how do we nurture it? "

First we should talk about the source of this feeling of loneliness. From a Buddhist approach, the main issue here is that we fundamentally start with a sense of lacking. In Buddhism, the word is thirst (Sanskrit: tṛṣṇā). In English it is often translated as desire, but desire comes much later, after the fundamental problem. Desire is a reaction to thirst. It's like searching after something or someone to take up the space where the thirst is. The thirst actually goes back to the original vulnerability we felt as a baby, in the early stages of our existence.

If you want to have a reference, Jacques Lacan, a French philosopher, talks about this a lot. We start with a sense of lacking, and from that lacking we come up with various kinds of desires. We look into our environment to get our needs met and then we begin to perform to our environment to get our needs met. As we begin to develop a narrative later in life, the narrative is “How do we perform to get attention?” And that tension is actually our existence. Getting attention is our existence.

In a modern world when we try to resolve that, there's basically two ways.

There's the spiritual, meditative way, which I’ll get to later. And then there's the connection with others—through actually paying attention to them, listening to them, and attending to them beyond their form and all the accidental elements of the surface. Buddhism would call it the bodhi nature. You're actually relating to their deep source of experience, listening carefully and paying attention. You suspend your own judgment, and you suspend your own projection. And if you suspend your own projections, something emerges—an actual sentience emerges. And it will always be surprising, because it's not your projection. Each person lives in their own universe. It's about actually engaging another universe and being open to that. But that's vulnerable. It requires intimacy. It requires time. It requires careful listening.

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We would have to get rid of that dull buzz of that social media around us to open up the space. Ironically, you almost have to be more lonely to solve the problem of loneliness.

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