Dear Friends, I thought I'd share this. Its a teaching I came across for Buddhist monastics, but the excerpt is about loneliness so I took that part of the teaching which can apply to lay people.

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"Often what we do when we're lonely is like putting a Band-Aid on somebody who has a cold. It's not going to work. That's not the right antidote for loneliness.
At those times, we need to work with our mind. "Okay, I'm lonely. What is loneliness? What's going on?" We feel, "Why doesn't anybody love me?" I used to remember my teenage years when I constantly wondered and wished, "When is somebody going to love me?" This made me realize that feeling I wanted to be loved was not a new problem, it's been going on for years. So I had to look at what's going on in my mind. What's behind the feeling of "Why doesn't somebody love me?" What is it that I'm really seeking? What's going to fill that hole?

We just sit there with these kinds of puzzles and questions. In our mind we keep trying on different solutions to see what will help the loneliness and the wish to be loved. I've discovered that the lamrim helps a lot in this regard. It helps me to let go of fantasies and unrealistic projections. In addition, the bodhicitta meditations help me open my heart to others. The more we can see that everyone wants to be happy, the more we can open our hearts to have equal love for others. The meditation on the kindness of others helps us to feel the kindness others show us now and have shown us since we were born. And even before that! When we see that we've been the recipient of so much kindness and affection, our own heart opens and loves others. We stop feeling alienated because we realize that we've always been connected to others and to kindness. When we experience this, the loneliness goes away.

We need to work with our difficult emotions instead of running away from them, stuffing them down, or acting them out, let's say by thinking that we'd be happier if we got married and got a job. We just sit and work with our own mind, take refuge and start developing a heart that loves others. The mind inside of us that says, "Why doesn't somebody love me?" is the self-centered mind, and it's already made us spend a long time feeling sorry for ourselves. Now we're going to try opening our hearts to others, extending ourselves to others, and letting a feeling of well-being and connection arise inside of us.

The other day at the conference, His Holiness was talking about the bodhisattvas of the first bhumi, which is called Very Joyful. At this stage they have just realized emptiness directly in the path of seeing. His Holiness said these bodhisattvas have so much more happiness than arhats. Even though arhats have eliminated all the disturbing attitudes and negative emotions that had kept them bound in samsara while the first bhumi bodhisattvas have not, these bodhisattvas are still millions of times happier than the arhats. What gives these bodhisattvas so much joy is the love and compassion they have cultivated in their hearts. For this reason, the first bhumi is called Very Joyful. They are joyful not because of their realization of emptiness -- because the arhats have that too -- but because of their love and compassion.

He then said, "Although we think that others experience the result of our developing compassion, in fact it helps us more. Our developing compassion is for everybody's benefit, including our own. When I develop compassion, I benefit 100%. Other people only get 50%."

It's true. The more we recognize that we all equally want to be happy and to avoid suffering, the more we feel in tune with others. The more we recognize that we and others equally don't want to be lonely and want to feel connected, the more our own heart opens to others. When we start opening our heart to other people, then the love we feel for everyone, including ourselves, fills our heart.

From the site by Ven Thubten Chodron -A Monastics Mind http://www.thubtenchodron.org/BuddhistNunsMonasticLife/a_monastics_mind.html