One is the loneliest number…

So, you have a great life, right? Full of meaningful work and the joys of good family and lots of friends…right? :-)

OK, so maybe you’re like the rest of us. You’ve got some things to be happy and content about in your life, but there are also some things that just don’t exactly sit well. Maybe you’re not happy with the job, or some of the people you call friends. Maybe there’s just something off in your life and you can’t even pinpoint it.

So what DO you do? Spend more time in the things that you DO enjoy and hopefully carry enough happiness with you to get you through the trying times? Do you try to drown yourself with your friends? Keep your life SO busy with things and people that you might not feel any disappointments?

What about taking some time just to be with you? Do you even LIKE spending time with yourself?

I think that most people don’t like spending time alone. It becomes a time when your inner fears and demons tend to come out of hiding and play around in your mind. Sometimes things seem SO much worse when it’s just you and your own imagination.

But…it shouldn’t be that way! Everyone NEEDS to have time alone. Every great Hero takes time to just be alone. It’s a time to recommit, refreshen, and realign your own life.

When you take the time to isolate yourself from all the distractions in your life…yes…even and sometimes especially, family!...then you can actually get to the business of YOU.

And what is the business of YOU? Do you know it? Have you tried it?

The business of YOU is simply a process of looking inside, reevaluating, and organizing yourself. You need to be able to look at the things that happen to you and your own responses to it and see if you’re living in line with your own core. You can examine the things you believe and accept as fact, test them for accuracy, and either put them back or throw them out as needed.

More importantly, it is a time for you to just spend time with YOU. Most people, I think, are afraid to spend time with themselves. (NO! not THAT kind of time!) It’s funny really. If you think about it, most people don’t have a real good grasp of the person they spend the most time with. They don’t know everything about a person that is with them through every second of every day.

If you ask the question, “If you could do anything, right now, but for only the next 10 minutes, what would you do?”, most people will tell you, “I dunno” and leave it at that. They don’t have any idea what they would do with time, just for themselves. In essence, they don’t really know the heart of the person closest to them.

The only way to figure that out is to spend time with yourself. Uncover some of the places inside that we hide from everyone else. Open that box where you stuff the things that have hurt you, clean that shit out! Most everyone has SO much extra, unneeded baggage that they lug along with them, that sometimes, it’s amazing that they can even walk upright. It doesn’t have to be there.

Think about this…we spend billions of dollars on “Therapy” and “Counseling” each and every year. Hell, I even went to a counselor for a while myself. And you want to know what happened there? We talked about things that were going on in my life, and she would tell me, at the end of each session, to think about something that I really needed to discuss with someone. In other words…I needed to spend some time with myself and uncover some of the things I kept hidden inside and deal with them.

You don’t necessarily need to spend tons of money in therapy. You need to spend some quality time with yourself. Don’t get me wrong…I totally believe that therapy and counseling have their place. Some tragedies are simply too big to handle alone. But most of the issues that we hold on to and the hurts that we mould our lives around, we can really deal with ourselves.

So, before you spend another night out with family or friends…do yourself a favor. Take yourself out for a nice dinner…maybe a movie…some wine afterwards. And get to know YOU…from the inside out.

Just remember…don’t put out on the first date! :-)