Q&A – What can I do when I feel lost?

Many people have that feeling regularly in modern society, and it begs the question of why. Understanding the workings of our inner world can shed light on this gloomy topic. 

What the sensation and suffering of feeling lost is asking of you, is that you restore the balance within your soul and reconnect it with your Self as well as with reality. What you experience here on earth, you experience in the soul, which is the intermediate, intermediary, and glue between your spirit and your physical body. There is a need for the soul as a liaison because your spirit and your body are incompatible. They currently live in entirely different dimensions and ‘can’t be together in the same room’ so they need a conduit to connect.

Losing the connection

Whenever you suffer, it’s a signal that your soul is somehow ‘lost’ and moving away from your spirit. When you feel joyful and free, you know your soul is getting closer to your spirit. When the soul is sucked deep into the mind by identifying too much with it, it has to let go of the connection with Self partially. Part of (the connection with) your Self is sacrificed for the identification with your false sense of self (ego), and you suffer as a result.

Feeling lost is just one of many ways in which you can recognize losing this connection. Other indicators can be strong fears or desires, stress, anxiety, addiction, all kinds of so-called negative emotions, etcetera. The list is endless, but feeling lost is the one that makes you experience most the emptiness that comes with being too far away from your Self.

You may feel empty, without hope, and lose your lust for life. The saying ‘losing your spirit’ shows that there is still some small awareness of this phenomenon in our society and language. There is an evident lack of something, and some may even feel that death is a better option than to continue living with this painful emptiness. But why does it result in feeling lost?

When you lose someone

The way that most people grasp this easiest is with the example of losing someone close to them, either because of death or for other reasons. In our mind and ego, we identify most with the people close to us. We see them as part of who we are and when they leave or pass away, we are not only deeply connected to this attachment in our mind (and therefore disconnected from Self), but because of the loss, we are also deprived of the ‘object’ of our attachment. In other words, there’s a disconnection on both shores, and we start drifting in between the two, resulting in the (almost) unbearable feeling of being lost, drifting on a wild river of mixed emotions and fear of the unknown.

So how do we connect to Self in such a moment? Your own death would bring you to your Self, but in the case of suicide, it would be at the cost of all the learning opportunities you opted for when you chose before birth to incarnate and live out this particular life. It’s even said that suicide leaves you with more suffering than life itself because a part of this life would remain un-lived and unfulfilled. This un-lived part now has to be lived through without the body which leaves the soul suffering them like ‘itches that can’t be scratched’, so to speak. So this is not the answer, and it is also entirely unnecessary because there are more natural ways to connect to Self.

Relationships and jobs

The example of losing someone abruptly is just one way to experience feeling lost. The sensation can also grow little by little until it can no longer be denied and ignored. This often happens when relationships go south slowly over time. A slow-moving separation takes place between two partners, which leaves a discrepancy between what was and what is but, more importantly, between what is and how the mind thinks it should be.

Only when the relationship grows into something else than what you think it should be, could you become aware of your ideas about the relationship that you may be attached to. You don’t want to let go of them, but reality forces you to feel the lack of ‘what should be’ according to your mind. The mind’s ideas about how things ought to be can cause an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.

Another common theme among those who feel lost is a job that doesn’t meet their expectations or perhaps even kills the initial passion for it. Many people feel lost because they have occupations that don’t fulfil them, or so they believe. There’s a lot of talk about doing what you are passionate about, but the truth is that this approach often doesn’t work. It is based on a misunderstanding about how passion works and what the actual source of it is. Common belief says that something outside of you makes you feel passionate, but on closer examination, it’s evident that it comes from within. (I’ll write an article on the topic of passion soon. Subscribe to the newsletter if you wish to be notified.)

A different dimension of consciousness

As I said in the intro of this article, all this feeling lost points towards, is that you need to restore the soul’s balance and connection between your Self and reality. The spirit or Self is also known as ‘I am’, because that is where you are truly ‘found’, or where you find your true Self, higher Self, Consciousness, or whatever other indication you find appropriate. I mention these different terms, because someone that is strongly attached to his or her false sense of self, the ego, will often get cranky when the ‘higher Self’ is mentioned as it seems to challenge the legitimacy and value of their (false) sense of self, or so they interpret.

You can experience the first level of your higher Self when you become aware of your thinking. 

When you read through all Eckhart Tolle’s work, you will find one central theme, namely that the mind is misused by most people today and that it is cause for an incredible amount of needless but contagious suffering in the world. It’s no different with feeling lost, because that too is self-inflicted, although unconsciously done, of course.

Restoring the balance

You are asked to reconnect your Self and reality and restore the balance in the soul. This balance was disturbed because you are attached to your mind in ways you never imagined. But, once you start experiencing the difference between the mind and the Self, and learning how to keep connected to the Self, you will find that there is no actual need for this attachment to the mind and ego. Of course, it’s not quite as easy as just letting go of those attachments. You have been creating and nurturing them since childhood, and their roots go very deep (for more on that, also read “You can be the Guru!”). But still, you can do a lot about feeling lost, and improve your existence in many ways relatively fast.

Through the reconnection with Self, you automatically create a more healthy relationship with reality. You may need some time to find your bearing, but luckily there’s hardly a question that hasn’t already been asked and answered online by Eckhart himself or in Eckhart Tolle discussion groups on Facebook for example, so there is always help available. For those who are not yet familiar with Eckhart Tolle’s teachings, here are some indications to help you on your way.

One of the major issues with feeling lost is that a sensation of hopelessness makes the world look grey and dark because, unconsciously, when lost you are not looking at the world but instead at how you tell ourselves that the world should be. The mind puts a dark filter impregnated with negative emotions between your consciousness and the world, and you believe that something so important is missing that life doesn’t make sense anymore. It has lost its meaning.

The first dimension of Self

So the world has to have meaning? Not just that, but it also has to be precisely the way the mind says it should be. Only then will life have meaning again, or you will drown in sorrow. That is what attachment looks like (although it takes other forms too). So, how do you let go of that? By finding and reconnecting with your true Self.

The first dimension of Self can be recognized as the one that ‘listens’ to the voice of your mind, the one that ‘sees’ the images on your inner screen. It’s the observer. You can not observe your Self, only experience it, become aware of it, as Tolle says in the quote (“When you listen to a thought, …”). Listening to your thoughts and becoming aware of your core consciousness is one way of freeing yourself from the attachment with your mind’s beliefs. 

For people that suffer feeling lost, that is often not the easiest way, because they are still too firmly attached to the content of their mind to observe their thoughts. For those, I recommend using the bodily senses as a gateway to ‘presence and awareness’. While your mind keeps you trapped in a past that should come back, or a future that should become, the state of presence and awareness draws you into the here and now, which is the only moment that you can actually live.

The Power of Now

Sound and vision get much more attention in our society than touch, smell and taste, and they are also dominant within the mind. That makes them almost too familiar to do the job. Smell and taste can easily trigger memories and take us to past events within our mind unless we can find some that we have not experienced or linked to specific emotional moments of our past. That leaves touch as the outsider and perhaps the best candidate for the job, but there are other, related options.

Gravity is something we seldom experience consciously. Even when we jump, it is hardly ever more than routine where the subconscious mind rules. Another way to shift your attention to the now is through the sensation in your body that help you feel that you are alive and conscious. Perhaps a tingling feeling in your hands and feet, or your arms and legs. Whichever one you choose, try to focus on it for a while and then see if you can experience the consciousness that witnesses this sensation. 

The centre of your awareness is the before mentioned “different dimension of consciousness” that needs to become your inner home. How do you know if you are doing it right? If you still feel lost like before, you are not there yet …