Close your eyes kid. Close your eyes and begin to see.

What do you see? What colors are there? Where are you walking? Who is around you? What are you wearing? What are the smells? Where in the world are you? Are you in one place? Are you traveling to many? What language are you speaking? What do your hands look like? What is your body like? How are things moving around you? What……….

Close your eyes and begin to see.

Close your eyes and write what’s in your heart. Close your eyes and begin to feel. Take away your sight in order to truly experience everything that is going on around you. What do you feel?

As time goes on, I’m living less like a robot controlled by outside factors and more like a man who is surrounded completely by choice. I see more than I ever have before. I see peoples energies, their bodies reactions, their thoughts moving within them and how it all moves with me. When I close my eyes, these feelings arrive in their purest form…and in one way or another I can see a room and feel what is going on inside of it. I’m feeling the ripples these days…and now that I feel those for the first time as something that is truly real, I am working towards making larger and larger ones as the days pass.

Never underestimate the absolute tremendous amount of power you hold within you.

You are capable of much more than you could possibly imagine. If you asked me 5 years ago to predict what I would be doing today, it would not be this. I wouldn’t be doing anything close to this. Back then, I couldn’t really see what was possible for me. In fact, I was a stress reaction to just about everything in life. Then I got stuck in the land of goals and dreams…only to come out of it understanding that if it doesn’t fall in line with my deepest purpose – something I found when I actually exited the land of the future – then it had no place in my life.

It was a pretty surreal feeling as I tore up all the old goal sheets and washed the timelines off my chalkboard. I was literally erasing an old way of thinking and replaced it with living in the land of uncertainty and gaining depth instead of progress.

That wasn’t a small change for me. That was a monumental change.

When you are living on a timeline, you tend to see things as a straight line from A to B. If I do this, then I should get that. Life doesn’t work that way at all. Even if you can make some things work that way, it doesn’t mean that you should begin restricting your entire life to that process. That way of doing things only works for “those things it can work for.” When you start diving into relationships, spirituality, and mind work…those don’t function all that well with timelines. Trust me, I know…I’ve committed cardinal sins in this area and can speak from firsthand experience.

You have to allow things to fall together and fall apart at their own pace. I keep coming back to the analogy that you can’t yank on a flower to make it grow faster…which really is what we all want. But hell, you can certainly do many things to a flower to kill it off before it’s time. Why not just let it grow and die as it was meant to?

This brings me to attachment to situations going on in life.

There’s a fantastic tendency to try to hold onto the things that are going good when they are going well and to run like hell or literally sink into the mud when things are going poorly. We attach ourselves to these situations by overthinking them and literally yanking on the flower day in and day out. IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY! It doesn’t work that way with flowers and it certainly doesn’t work that way with life either. Once again, trust me, I’ve tried haha. The only thing you can do is really be present.

That’s it? You mean, I can’t do anything else to force myself out of a situation or prolong good things indefinitely?

Nope, you can’t. There are inherently many things that are out of your control and life just has a funny way of doing what it does best. Presence, and the ability to choose, are two things that you do have complete control over. When things are going incredible or horrible, remember to bring yourself back to this moment. This one right now. If you levitate for too long or sink low into the depths in similar fashion…you will get stuck there. Those places, both of them, are places where you are not living in the present.

Your mind is a wonderful thing but it can also be a gigantic pain in the ass.

Part of it being a major pain in the ass is that it wanders constantly. Here, there, the past, the future, ideas, complaints, inner critic, it really can go on and on and on. But it can also bring you back into pure presence…which despite the minds moodiness…is really a gift. It can take you from any place of judgement, fear, hatred, anger, pain…right to the other side to love, acceptance, courage, presence. Pretty miraculous how that works.

But…you have to made the mindful decisions to do this. You can’t beat yourself up because you are on the other side right now, but instead, make the decision to come back to where you need / want to be and act in accordance with that.

Sounds simple…it’s not…it takes some serious practice. But if you do practice, you are heading in an incredible direction.

There’s no telling you just how much you will discover when you actually start making decision for yourself that aren’t controlled heavily by emotion or scattered thought. You can dive into rabbit holes that never end and discover entire worlds that you never knew existed. That depth…is a gift in of itself. Use it. Cherish it. Go there…you never know what may happen.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project