It has been my heart that has guided so much of this path for me.
A big, loving, compassionate heart.
My struggle came from not knowing how to let go of things. It could have been he smallest of things to the biggest of events in my life. But my lord I have not done well with goodbyes. Because of this, my attachments remained strong and events would play over and over in my mind, sometimes for years, as my grip on life wouldn’t soften and my imagination ran wild with me.
But the heart has always known better.
The heart knew when to let go. The heart knew when to go for it.
It has always known…and this is what I’ve truly come to learn.
All of the freedom…all of that joy, laughter, happiness…all of that was already here. Btu I was so focused on improving and perfecting that I completely dropped out of contact with my loving heart.
A lot of that dropping off was caused by pain.
I suffered through a great deal and that pain cut me off from who I really was. As I’ve continued farther and farther down this path, I’ve come to understand that getting in touch with those events, not running from them but running to them, and allowing myself to finally heal was the thing that was actually going to unlock me from that old story that I kept telling myself over and over again.
I’m not saying this practice is perfect. Far from it. But it is real.
The more and more I step into my work, my reading, my studying, my writing and my practices the more that things begin to unfold for me. I connect. The chord plugs straight back into the wall and all the energy that I could possibly want is there…because I’m finally connected.
I think one of the blocks I’ve had in going back and re-reading a lot of my old work is seeing how absolutely disconnected I was and not wanting to fall into that place again. But that’s just a fear. And that fear instantly dissolves when I realize how different I am as a person today than I was 6 years ago.
Night and day.
I can also see, however, how those aspects of myself that I love being in contact with now existed all that time ago. They were just covered up with a ton of dirt and it took some shoveling to really start to see what is there.
I have a lifetime left of this.
I have thousand upon thousands of days of sitting and practicing.
I’m actually excited about that. Being 27, I hear a lot of people around me starting up conversations as if they were old and grown up. But me…I feel like I’m getting younger and younger by the day. There is more joy in my life. The way I work with my pain and suffering is far healthier and it leaves me faster and faster. I’m answering the callings of my heart. I’m doing the things I love. I’m being more adventurous. And whatever that internal judge is screaming at me most of the time when I’m about to do something that will make me grow, well, I’ve learned to shut that up as well.
Life is changing.
I am changing.
That’s a wonderful thing.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project