My 12 year old son Dylan and I were camping. After dinner we went for a walk in the dark along a winding dirt road. The night was warm and very still.

As we walked, slow and aimlessly along the dirt road, Dylan says, ‘This is weird, I feel like I’m not moving at all. My legs are moving but it seems like I’m not moving anywhere. There is just empty blackness’.

I love these opportunities to increase his ‘self intelligence’ by asking him questions..

I replied, “how do you feel when you look into the darkness?”
Dylan replied, “It feels a bit scary and weird.”
I probed, ‘What feels scary? What feeling does it create in you?’

In an instant he replied, ‘It feels like loneliness’.

Wow, I thought! How profoundly accurate. It feels like loneliness. At this point my hairs are standing on end with the simple truth being shared.

I then ask him the MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS.

After a few seconds of watching him enquire in silence, I went to the core and said,

“And as you look for the lonely one, notice how you ‘feel’ as you ‘look’.’

A few seconds later he starts laughing and says, “I can’t find the lonely one Dad. There’s nothing”.
“And how do you feel now” I ask?
“Fine, just empty nothing” he replied and laughed a little more.

Laughing often occurs when the ego has nowhere to land in you.

I went a little further still and asked “do you know why you feel fine?“ He wasn’t sure.

I explained, ‘Because that’s who you really are. You are that nothingness, you are looking into a mirror of your true self. If you can feel comfortable, even at home, when you look deep into that dark nothingness – you won’t create a world of pain for yourself.’

At this point he was over the conversation but he hugged me with the recognition something really cool just happened and we turned back to camp.

9 times out of 10 the fear of loneliness is behind the pain in most people’s lives. Recently I took a group of 36 people through a ‘trigger process’ (pain areas). One of the primary modules of Self Intelligence is to learn how to transform and heal the toxic emotions and trauma of personal triggers.

Everyone shared the trigger they were working on and each trigger was completely different for each person. After doing the trigger process the group was shocked to find that 35 of the 36 participants discovered fear of loneliness was at the core of their triggers. What was equally revealing was they had no idea this was a concern for them, if asked, “are you afraid of being alone?” most said they thought they were fine with it. This was a big revelation for the group and it’s what I see time and time again.