JOURNEY. 12. LONELINESS. HOW CAN WE FEEL CONNECTED? A VERY SIMPLE FORMULA.

LONELINESS. A BIG THING FOR MANY OF US, INCLUDING ME.

Recently I’ve come to a SIMPLE FORMULA which got me, and the others in the group, to feel connected with each other.

I’ve had a few other groups over the years, all good. A frequent focus has been taking steps to get past blocks. Very good. Very effective. Lives changed.

This time I wanted something different - more closeness in my life. And there was a little formula I wanted to try out.

That was three months ago.

Now I can report back. The little formula has worked.

So I’d like to share it with you.

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I’m not going right to the formula. For that, skip to the end.

I want to start with something else - how so often I’ve felt lonely, or anyway disconnected, when with people.

I’ve recently been to a get-together. I met about ten super-nice people. Caring. Aware. No one injected.

I was very happy to meet the people, but once I had talked a bit with everyone, I had had enough. I didn’t feel connected to anyone. My feeling: I was bored. I wanted to get away.

I say that I want more closeness.

And I do.

At the get-together it soon felt like the talk was what I might call “cocktail party chat.” My guess is that most of the others felt the same way.

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I’m remembering a walk up a mountain with a group of people. Again, super-nice people. Again, caring, aware and uninjected. And once again, the talk felt, for the most part, like “cocktail party chat.”

Except with one person, with whom I felt really at ease.

We didn’t talk about anything extraordinary, didn’t say anything particularly deep or insightful, didn’t discuss, for instance, the meaning of life.

But I felt seen and listened to. And I really listened.

I don’t know quite what it was, the sense with most people that everything we said was trivial, irrelevant, and the sense of connection with the one person.

Or actually, I do have a sense of what happened. He noticed that I did not feel part of things. I agreed. And from that, I felt “in my skin” while we were talking.

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Three months ago, I started Talk Time, a weekly group, one hour a week. It’s ended up being a small group, four to six core people. We have all felt a sense of connection, recently a sense of deepening connection.

In that group we used a formula for our interactions, much of the time.

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Here’s the formula. You’re very welcome to use it.

For the timing, someone is the time-keeper. I’ve used the timer on my cell phone.

Each person has two minutes to talk about their week, about what’s going on with them.

Then the others in the group have a total of two minutes to respond, either with “What I heard was,” or with “That resonates with something in me.”

Then it’s the next person’s turn.

And on until everyone has had a turn.

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Sometimes it’s taken the full hour to go around the group.

But what to do when everyone has had their turn and time is left over? Sometimes we’ve had a second go-round. Sometimes we’ve just talked. Sometimes we’ve talked for a bit and then had a second go-round.

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It doesn’t have to be two minutes each. It can be three minutes, or even five minutes.

If just two people are doing this, they can choose to have it be ten minutes each, and two or three minutes for “What I heard was,” or “That resonates with something in me.” And then the other person.

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Note: no commenting, no advice, and definitely no criticism.

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And then I come to the question: Why has this worked, why is this continuing to work?

Here’s my sense of things:

• It’s partly the focus - what’s going on with you right now, what’s been happening this week? In other words, what’s alive in you right now?

• It’s partly that each person is heard by the others, which can both bring someone more alive and also deepen the sense of connection.

• It’s partly that there’s space for everyone - each person is heard with no struggle, those who might take more space as well as those who might otherwise stay silent.

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Coming soon. Another formula I’ve recently come across.

JOURNEY. ALL THE CHAPTERS ... UP TO NOW

Posted February 9, 2025