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Namaste and welcome. This is the sixth of a series and I have no idea how long it'll

go on called Sheltering in Love. And last week and this week the focus is on really facing

the pain of separation and loneliness. The Vech Murthy was our recent surgeon general

in the United States up until 2017, also a physician. And he did a road trip across the

United States talking to people, all different types of people, and now he's written a book

called Together. And I mentioned him because he's a key figure in bringing into our societal

awareness the huge, huge suffering, really how loneliness is a major public health concern.

And he talks about how for so many that he encountered, whether it was drug addiction or poverty,

or a range of physical diseases, that the root suffering was a sense of isolation, being

stuck in the struggle and all by oneself. He shared a number of stories, but one that struck

me, he met with a man several years after this guy had won the lottery. And this man told Murthy

that the day he won the lottery was the worst day of his life. And when Murthy said, well, explain

please, he described how he had been working in a bakery and he had, you know, he was needed there

and appreciated for what he did and he had friends in his neighborhood. And after winning, he stopped

working. He moved into a gated community. He got really, really lonely. He developed diabetes.

He felt pretty continuously angry at what he perceived as a snobbery of other people that lived

there. Well, for many of you listening, that this isn't hard to understand or imagine.

And what strikes so much is that loneliness is a disease that hits all classes, people in all

sorts of life circumstances. There's a really well-known teaching story that I love where a

student asks a spiritual teacher, what's the difference between illness and wellness? The

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