It’s been an interesting week plus. It’s been, challenging, painful, happy, transformational, full of growth, full of anxiety, beautiful, heartbreaking, and many more things. In fact, it’s probably been the full spectrum of life itself. And for all of the struggling I’ve gone through, somehow I can still keep that smile on my face. It’s not fake, it’s real. But still, dang some of this stuff is hard to work with.

I feel like I’ve had something torn out of me. Not exactly the best feeling in the world. Not exactly what you plan out to have happen. Despite my ability to continue down my path and to focus on my purpose, there it is still functioning inside of me I know anxiety well – it’s something I am working through these days. That feeling lives in your gut. But this is about 6 inches higher up than that. This is living in an entirely different place, another place I know as well.

Nights, when my creative mind starts to come out to play are the toughest. When my mind goes from work mode into creative mode, I can play colorful tapes of memories in my mind. I feel through them. I feel into them. One of the greatest gifts I’ve been given is to be able to paint a scene in my mind. In full detail I can describe it – the more profound the moment, the more detail I have in my memory. The landscape, the lighting, the smells, the feelings…it’s all there. It’s all living and breathing in the back of my mind ready to be accessed.

I used to avoid this place like the plague. I used to run from it because I didn’t want to create any more hurt for myself. Now, I’m really trying to live a bit differently. I go back, and as tough as it is, I sit in my big red chair outside and breathe through it. In any moment, there exists an abundance of light – you just have to be willing to tap into it. For me, learning to let things go has been one of the toughest and hardest lessons for me to learn. It goes against everything inside my body. Every single cell says fight and yet I know this isn’t where I’m going to grow. Life is a constant coming and going of things and the only way I am going to be able to express my deepest love for this life, for the people in it, and for myself…is to be able to give fully and let go just as hard.

So like I said, I’m feeling through some things right now.

As empty as some moments feel inside, there’s almost always a presence of being full. I’m learning to nourish myself. I’m learning to be home wherever I am. I’ve been working on going into any space, whatever space that is, and allowing my heart to come out to play. First I let it occupy my body, then the area around me, then throughout the walls of the room, and sometimes I work with even trying to fill up the mountains surrounding me and then blanketing the rest of the world. This process is an ongoing process, one that takes me moment after moment to come back to and try again and again.

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea where I am really going with this post. This happens once in a while when I am just sitting here and then all of the sudden…blank. Maybe that’s the point. Free. Present. Breathing.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project