There are magic in these moments.
And I’ve got to start off with this amazing passage I found in one of the books I’m reading called A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield
Practice is like a roller coaster. Each new high is usually followed by a new low. Understanding this, it makes it a bit easier to ride with both phases…there is in addition to the up and down cycles an in and out cycle. That is, there are stages at which you feel pulled into inner work and all you seek is a quiet place to meditate and get on with it, and then there are times when you turn outward and seek to be involved in the marketplace. Both of these parts of the cycle are part of one’s practice, for what happens to you in the marketplace helps in your meditation, and what happens in your meditation helps you to participate in the marketplace without attachment. At first you will think of practice as a limited part of your life. In time you will realize that everything you do is part of your practice.
I think one of the biggest pieces of all of this for me was beginning to understand that every piece of what is going on for me is actually part of the practice. It has been easy for me in the past to think that what was going on, that was going “wrong” was me falling out of practice. But that’s really the farthest thing from the truth.
There are these ups and downs to everything.
But even more, expansion and contraction.
Things are not concrete. They are fluid. They are ever morphing. They are changing. My only job is to go with them.
As I settle more and more into everything that is changing and shifting, I start to understand that it has actually been every experience that I’ve had in the past that has been my greatest teacher. I’ve learned from the best and the worst. I’ve been able to take a lot of those experiences and turn them into something that could serve me instead of ruin me.
There’s still a lot more for me to go though.
And the greatest one of all?
Healing.
That’s something I’ve seen very clearly. I’ve seen that there’s a need for space and time that will help my heart begin to heal. There needs to be a deeper reclamation of my heart. In many ways, I denied myself that and tried to “better” myself throughout the years in an attempt to prove that I was worthy.
I now realize, that my worthiness existed already.
It wasn’t about anything that I ever tacked onto my life that helped me. It was about all of the things that fell away that eventually allowed me to open up to who I truly was.
When fear began to soften…courage ignited.
When judgement fell…compassion arose.
This went on and on and will continue as I keep writing here every single day.
I think one of the strangest things that has happened for me as I have continued to step more and more into this moment is my abandonment of constantly thinking about the future. I used to live there…forgetting about this moment completely. But now, as things have changed for me, I find myself thinking about it less and less and being more into the idea of showing up in a full expression of myself in the here and now.
I’ve left it up to “if it will be it will be.”
A lot of us have plans. Most of us. Most of the time, those plans don’t ever work out in the way we thought they would.
I truly believe that if I show up planting the seeds of love, compassion, patience and kindness that I will land myself in a garden full of that one day. But those seeds are to be planted now. I can’t sit around and speculate how they will show up later. I can only show up here and now.
I’m letting go.
And what’s coming as I let go?
Peace.
More and more peace.
The attachments are softening.
The ideas of how it should be are loosening.
And as I go through the phases of anxiety of letting all of these things go, I find myself feeling better and better.
It’s not that a beautiful future couldn’t happen in holding onto the way things should be…but the truth is…you really don’t even know if that was your path to travel in the first place.
It may have turned out good…but was that really your destiny of who you could have become?
So further out of the water go my oars.
No more rowing to that island.
Just enjoying what’s going on now.
Fingers pattering away on the keys.
Happy.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project