On being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation, harnessing the power of the sciences

to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind. Learn about the latest

discoveries in the study of hope and optimism, intellectual humility, and free will at Templeton.org.

Strangely and interestingly, one of the great challenges of a life is to learn to be alone

peaceably at home in oneself. The pandemic has forced many of us at best to work out the

difference between isolation and loneliness or to find ease within the aloneness inside ourselves,

which is how Stephen Bachelor defines solitude. He draws on his life from monasticism to marriage,

with teachers from mundane to the Buddha to Rilka to remind us why solitude has always been

and will always be an element of well-being and even the richness of our relationships with others.

And how to turn that into graceful practice. We can learn to actually create a solitude in which

we feel at home and ground it. I think crucially it has to do with refining our capacity to see where

our impulses are coming from, to what extent those impulses are just driven by conditioning and

habit and fear. And to what extent we can somehow open up a non-reactive space within us.

So solitude, the practice of solitude, is the practice of creating an inward autonomy within

ourselves, that inward freedom from the power of these overwhelming thoughts and emotions.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Stephen Bachelor is a teacher, scholar and writer. He grew up in England and after high school

left for India, where he took vows for a time as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. I interviewed him once

before about his practice of secular Buddhism and reached out again after he wrote a wonderful new book,

The Art of Solitude. This conversation took place just before the pandemic and has only gained

in resonance. Stephen Bachelor lives in France with his wife of several decades.

I wonder how you would think about your earliest memory of or sense of what you now name and reflect

...