The name of this blog – Mindful Loneliness – came to me one quiet afternoon, as I was having a cup of tea. I was deep into my mindful art training at the time, reflecting on how I might weave what I was learning into my therapeutic practice. That reflection naturally turned inward: How might I use this for myself?

I began playing with words: mindful + art, mindful + self-care, mindful + presence, mindful + breathing, mindful + pain… and then mindful + loneliness. When those two words came together, something clicked. It was like turning the right key in a lock. A quiet aha! moment emerged. It felt like a small but significant opening. A sense of purpose was born.

Though there are so many things to be said about purpose – how it gives direction in life, meaning and mental clarity – this post is really about those two words themselves: mindful and loneliness. For me, when joined together, they created something new. It contained the calming spaciousness of mindfulness, but also the dull ache or numbness that we sometimes feel with loneliness. Something alive emerged. Something real.

And that is the question that sits at the heart of this blog: What is this living thing that stirs when mindfulness meets loneliness?

When we hold a question with genuine curiosity, life has a way of answering in surprising places. Recently, I came across a book called: The Natural Way to Draw, by Kimon Nicolaides. It’s designed for those beginning a year-long study in drawing. I thought about this year-long study as a metaphor for any journey, but especially a journey inward. The writer accompanies artist-traveller from the very first step they take into this unknown, treating everyone as a beginner. That resonates deeply with me, both as a therapist walking alongside others on their path, and as someone beginning this blog-writing adventure for the first time.

The effort you make is not for one particular drawing, but for the experience you are having – and that will be true even when you are eighty years old.

If I replace “drawing” with “any personally meaningful work”, this secret wisdom can apply to any sort of creative adventure, from growing a plant on your windowsill, creating artwork, or even flying a plane. It all starts from a place of beginning, a place of now. And mindfulness, this ancient wisdom, reminds us exactly that: You can begin here, you can begin now. It gives the permission for a journey to begin any minute…

Once we begin, the next invitation is to notice. And Kimon Nicolaides speaks about it so beautifully:

Merely to see … is not enough. It is necessary to have a fresh, vivid, physical contact with the object you drawy through as many of the senses possible – and especially through the sense of touch.

To help his students connect with their sense [of touch], he suggests a simple exercise:

“Look at the edge of your chair. Then rub your finger against it many times, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Compare the idea of the edge which the touch of your finger gives with the idea you had from merely looking at it.”

I tried this. And something small, yet meaningful, shifted. As I ran my fingers over the chair’s surface, I noticed the ridges in the wood, the worn smoothness in places shaped by time and use. I felt something I hadn’t felt just by looking – I felt connected.

And isn’t that what loneliness truly longs for?

This moment of contact, of really knowing the chair – of seeing it not just with my eyes but through my fingertips – left me with a quiet sense of warmth. Of presence.

And perhaps that’s where the path begins: not in trying to fix loneliness,
but in learning how to touch it – gently, attentively, with care.