I am here to tell you about my journey.
Not about how you should do it.
This is no instruction manual. There’s no 10 steps to this or that. It’s just me here, speaking to you about my life as if you were sitting right beside me. If I say something that speaks to your soul, that makes me happy. If it causes you to chew on an idea for a while, I’m just as happy.
Throughout the years, I lost my way a bit with my writing.
The audience grew and I started writing for other people. I forgot though, that I’m actually writing for me. I’m writing here because this is my place, my sacred space, to talk about what I’m learning, what I’m going through, and just about everything else in between.
It’s not so much of a place for me to teach but rather for me to hear how I am moving through everything.
It’s a chance for me to expose myself and how I’m really feeling…to me…so I can understand better and work through some things that shouldn’t just be left in my head.
It’s not about recapturing some sort of passion or motivation, but rather a return to what made all of this possible.
The journey.
That’s what all of this is about.
Stepping into the metaphorical forest has time and time again been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. In fact, when I really think about it, I’ve had a few major moments in my life where I’ve really had to leave the life I knew behind and go on a journey into the unknown.
But nothing has compared to traveling. The first 4 months of my journey I stepped into new countries, did new things, met people and everything around me was full of this sense of anxiety. There often came up the question of “Am I doing this right?” That perpetuated the anxiety.
I wasn’t just in it.
I was trying to create it. I was trying to manufacture these experiences and wondered why everything wasn’t hitting me as hard as I had thought it would. I was forcing it in many ways. I was pushing for something and it wanted to be something else entirely.
When I came back and then left again, I showed up a completely different version of myself. I started to enjoy it more. That was only after I spent some time quieting down my mind trying to see if this was the right thing or the wrong thing way too early into an adventure.
The judgmental part of my mind was going off.
Good day? Bad day? Let’s judge the whole thing so far.
Tragedy strikes and I had to come back to the states in the passing of my grandmother.
So here I’ve sat or a week trying to figure out what to do next and along comes Joseph Campbell and his stories of heroes and adventures…pretty much the exact thing that I needed to dive into.
I think a lot of my sense of panic in continuing to move forward has been because of not understanding that everything that was happening is simply part of the story. So that’s how I’m going to write it. As a story. As Campbell would write it.
There’s a Tibetan prayer that I love that goes something like this.
Grant that I may be given appropriate difficulties and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion may be truly fulfilled.
I know it to be true that out of every major difficulty I have had in life, I’ve been given the ability and courage to continue to open myself up. I’ve cracked open and times and in other moments I’ve simply unfolded like the petals of a flower.
Truth is, I wouldn’t change a thing about this process.
It never happens the way you think it’s going to but it always pans out in the end.
So what now?
Journeys.
Adventures.
Expansion.
Moments of contraction.
And doing it over and over and over again.
Thing is, the greatest journey I’ve ever taken is going within myself to understand what’s there. That’s going to continue forever. That can’t stop.
I feel good about reconnecting with my purpose of all of this writing.
It’s a mirror in a way. I couldn’t ask for more.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project