Evan Sanders's Blog, page 26

Well Into The Mountains

For two months I’ve hiked well into the mountains and found my deepest sense of truth.

Interestingly enough, a few years ago I had this vision of spending a couple of months in the mountains alone holding the questions I needed answered. While at that time I knew it would be a very beneficial thing for me to do, I didn’t understand just how amazing it would be.

There’s something about wandering in-between the trees that brings out the spirit in me. I think it’s the stillness that makes me resonate with my intuition on a deeper level. There’s nothing in the way. There’s no outside influence – just me. Me and myself and everything else that is.

That’s an extraordinary feeling.

In that place, everything becomes very clear. The constant chatter and white noise die down completely and you are left with who you truly are. There’s no need for a mask in this place. It’s just you.

This was liberating and challenging for me at times. I realized just how much work there was for me to do. I saw the path that I was meant to travel and all of the things I had to let go of. I saw the opportunities that were before me and what I could create with my life. I saw it all as plain as paper and for a quick moment…that clarity paralyzed me.

Is it really just like that?

But now, as the days go on, I realize that it is the way it has been seen. There’s no more to add to it or anything else to take away. As hard as it was I let go of some bad habits that have plagued me and started to open up doors of possibility.

Now everything has a very clear intention behind it.

Now it’s all in alignment.

Many things are going to change over this year. Last year with all of my traveling represented a opportunity for discovering the world. I know I’m not done yet but I’ve had a great taste of what that experience is like.

But now there’s this. 

All in. Chips all on the table.

Every time I’ve done this, my world has changed.

I’m ready for that again.

Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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Finding A Beautiful Truth Along The Way

The strangest thing has happened over the past few days.

For the longest time, something hasn’t clicked with me in my writing of my book The War Painter. I honestly had no idea what it was and found myself feeling like something was missing.

But the other day, it clicked. There’s been this draw for me to come back to the place where it all began, this blog, and to continue writing before I would do anything else. It was writing here that kept me grounded, honest, and continuing my journey no matter what was going on in my life. It was writing here that I put forward the greatest stories of my life and put them out there for the world to see.

What clicked was the fact that I had to come back and go through all of my writing here to find some of those stories that have been told. There was no avoiding it. I couldn’t produce my book and feel confident that I had poured my heart and soul into it if I was still feeling like something was missing.

My writing is the heartbeat of all of this.

It’s my most sincere form of self-expression and connects me with the deepest aspects of my heart.

That being said, there’s almost 7 years worth of moments that I have long forgotten by now that still hold a significant amount of truth for me. I think it’s time that I go back and rediscover that.

We all lose ourselves from time to time. I think a lot of things journey is finding our way back onto the path when we have fallen off just left or just right. We all have moments where we veer into other lanes and cause havoc.

But I will always remember that along as I keep my moral compass I will always come back to center.

I have spent the last seven years in this apprenticeship phase where I learned a lot of different skills and really started to discover what resonated with me. At times it felt like I was spinning my wheels but I think this genuine path of self discovery has done me more good than making any other decision I’ve made.

I could have gone into a desk job coming right out of college but something in my gut told me that it wasn’t the way. I knew that I was meant for more than that. As hard as this path has been at times and as lost as I have felt sometimes, I can now see that everything has worked out just the way it needed to.

I feel like I’ve gone through a very thick forest and am just starting to see a clearing.

This is not a feeling I’m used to. I’m used to thick dense brush and having to do a lot of manual labor to get through it all.

But now, as I’ve been talking about for some time, the path is very very clear. I know what needs to be done. I know how to do it. And now more than ever…I’m engaging with it daily.

There’s no telling how this is all going to pan out in the end. I think that’s the exciting part of journey’s. You might have a general idea of where you are going but you never really know for sure until you get there. I can see around the bend to a degree. That’s what keeps me going every single day.

Just around the bend. Just around the bend.

But how much of an impact will it all make? No idea.

I have no idea the size of the rock I am building and how big of a splash it will make when I throw it into the water. But I’m looking forward to it. And, above all, I know my intention.

That’s all I need.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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The Major Lessons Learned In Life

In every moment, there’s a lesson. You just have to look for it.

It doesn’t matter what it is. Take the deepest darkest corners of your heart and illuminate them with curiosity. What lives there? Why is this pain this way? What would happen if I bring light to it?

What you will find is what I have found all these years – that your own personal darkness is illuminated by the light within.

Everything that I have ever been terrified of, that I decided to turn straight into, eventually disintegrated into emptiness. There’s nothing there. But my oh my have I gripped onto stories in my life. Whether they were stories that made me feel that I fell apart or stories that I needed to let go of altogether, I have had a firm grip on what I didn’t want to change.

As time has gone on however, I’ve learned to let go more and more. With that came freedom. With that came everything I actually wanted when I was under the illusion of control in the first place.

Freedom wasn’t freedom from things. Instead, it became freedom to be with everything. 

The good. The bad. The ugly.

When I stopped wanting it to be any other way than what it was this huge sigh of relief came over my entire body. Everything starts to relax. What comes in to replace all of the fear, doubt and worry?

Faith.

With faith and action, you can do anything you want to do.

All of these moments that I have been hearing back into when I read the old blogs have reignited a fire in my heart. I’ve started to understand that this path of growth I have been on for the past 7 years has been something that has not only saved my life, but also given me a completely new one.

There are areas in which I read my old work where I can see very clearly that there were a couple of paths to be taken and things could have gone very very differently if I made different choices. That might sound quite obvious, but when you really go back to those times, things were very opaque.

(Project 1825)

My full commitment into diving headfirst into the world of video has begun. Project 1825 is a one year commitment to making 5 different videos a day. 2 shorts, 1 coaching video, 2 blog videos. With testing over the past month, I know that this is possible for me and that I can make things pop if I head into this.

It’s enough of a mix to bring a ton of different content and reasonable enough for me to be able to do while working every single day.

I have no idea what’s going to happen when I do this…just a gut feeling that it’s the right decision to make and another positive step on my path.

Here’s to finding out.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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The Promises I’ve Made

Somewhere, deep in the forest, I dug a small hole and buried a tiny wood box in the dirt.

What’s in that box? The promises I’ve made to myself for this year. Every year, I plan to go back to that tree, and revisit my little box and see what has come of me.

Year after year, I have devoted my life to stepping into the unknown and pushing the envelope. As life would have it, many unexpected things came up along the way and made me adjust my path. When I look back, I realize that at times I have vacillated too much. When the storms came, my roots weren’t deep enough to really give me the strength to dig in.

When the wind blew one way, I would bend that way. When the wind blew another, I would bend again.

But grounding…grounding taught me to be where I was no matter what.

And when the winds would come, they would bend over a mountain that refused to move.

I’ve started to go back and read the stories of the path I have taken. I have forgotten many of the lessons. It’s not that they aren’t rooted deep within me somewhere, but they aren’t at the front of my mind anymore. Going back and reading what I have learned has given me strength to continue moving forward.

Sometimes you need to go back to where came from to remind yourself of everything you’ve become.

As I sit here now, I believe that I’ve never given myself credit for achieving something that I set out to do all those years ago: be the master of my own fate.

I never wanted to work for someone else again. I wanted to be my own Captain. I wanted to man the ship and take it to wherever I felt like I needed it to go. I didn’t want to depend on someone to take me there. I wanted it all to be on me. At 28, I can say that I have done that. I can pick up and move to wherever I want to in the world. I can spend an entire day wandering deep within the forest if I need to. I can spend a year hunkering down and focusing on producing as much writing as I can if I really felt like that was the way to go.

I’m proud of that.

And, I learned a lot of things from that sense of freedom. One thing I’ve learned is that too many options without enough structure can cause you to lose track of the stars and your navigation becomes completely off.

But, in many ways, all of this time that I have been seeking answers for which way to turn has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. Asking the question in the first place held a great deal of value. So whether it was me laying on my board in the water in Portugal or running through the rainy streets of Berlin, I stayed committed to asking the question and seeing what would come up from the depths of my soul.

Those answers came (like I wrote about yesterday) and they felt like I had come back home again.

In each of us lies a destiny that is awaiting our commitment. 

But first, we have to clean up everything that covers that destiny from being seen. Imagine a painting that has had years and years of dust on it. Even the Mona Lisa would be looked over if it wasn’t properly taken care of. I think we all work the exact same way.

A lifetime of being fed stories, being told who we need to be and how to be it, and having narratives forced down our throats until we conform to them covers up what makes us unique inside. It has taken me most of my life so far to disintegrate all of these things. I know that I will be spending the rest of my life dedicated to discovering who I am and what walking this path is destined to unravel.

Day by day, I have discovered truths that remain deep within my heart.

At times, I have chipped away at the same rock over and over and over again seeking to get through. In time, I did. But without that relentless effort, I would still be in the same place I was all those years ago.

Recently, I’ve been reminded that writing here is where my center lives.

It’s not that I haven’t been engaging in this project…it’s just that I haven’t been writing as much. But in having been reminded of what made everything start in the first place, I know that coming here every single day for this next year is what will make my heart continue to bloom.

Everything…and I mean everything…comes from this place. Sitting here, writing, is 100% the reason why I am even the man I am today.

So back home I am.

Here’s to our adventure.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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Finding Angels Deep In The Trees

I’ve been holding a question in my mind for the past few years that up until yesterday has largely remain unanswered.

It’s not that there weren’t glimpses of the way to head. There were. In fact, there were many stepping stones that illuminated in front of me that gave me a sense of what the entire picture looked like. But never was it a fully complete picture. Never was it the combination of what I needed to do and also what I needed to let go of.

Then, in a flash, it was like the fog lifted.

It didn’t feel like a lot of work that needed to be done. It didn’t feel like it was going to be an excruciating path to travel. I just felt at peace. I felt like the way that had been shown was the way I had been traveling all along I just didn’t really know it.

Maybe the lesson here is that I was on the path, I just really needed to believe in that.

As I’ve wandered throughout the forest for the past two months, there’s been a sweet silence that has fallen upon my ears. No distractions. Space…enough space to learn to let go of the things that I needed to let go of. Peace. I’ve taken it upon myself to use this time to hold the question of “What do I do next?” gently in my hands and not force any answers. During this time, I also came into direct contact with some realities that I had been denying for a while now.

I realized, that without a shadow of a doubt, there were certain parts of my story and certain habits that I had that I really needed to step away from.

And so I have. I won’t say that the transition has been seamless because it hasn’t. I’ve had moments where I have fallen back into old patterns and then had to recommit over and over again to making the right choice with the day that was in front of me.

There are rarely moments where we engage in quantum leaps of change.

Rather, we hold these ideas in our minds of what we want to do and how we would like to change for the better and we are confronted by all of the old grooved ways of thinking that still afflict us. It takes the roll-up-your-sleeves type of work to really make long-lasting changes in your life.

If I go back and look at every since day of the past 7 years of writing, I see that clear as day. Sometimes it takes a lot longer than you wanted it to. But the silver lining in all of that is that with all that exposure to time and effort, you really understand why something means so much to you.

There are also moments when you have that clarity fly right into your mind that you wish you had known what you just found out so many years earlier.

But none of that serves you. Let that go. The point is you know it now. Of course looking back you wish you could have started something 10 years earlier because of all the possibilities. But truths don’t always hit you when you want them to. They hit you when you need them to.

These really large transitions aren’t ending with this clarity.

There’s still more to make. Big moves. New communities. Starting to really focus my attention on what has been shown to me for the next 365 days. But none of this feels stressful. This feels like it has been meant for me all along.

Me being here at 28 thanks the completely lost, directionless, hopeless kid in me at 21 who had the resilience to say “this can’t be it…there’s more for me” for starting all of this. Without that, I wouldn’t have become anything close to who I am today. I am who I am becomes I made that decision 7 years ago.

So me, sitting here at 28, is making another decision.

To believe.

To believe more strongly than I ever have before…and to put myself in the hands of my faith…knowing I will always be taken care of and will be shown the way to go.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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Why Self Love Is Important

Self love matters.

It matters more than anything else. If you can accept yourself finally for who you are, then you can allow yourself to unlock your gifts and give those to the world.

You can love others to the deepest capacities to which you love yourself.

But also you can see your flaws not as these terrible things that destroy you and that you should be ashamed of, but opportunities for you to grow and learn and love yourself and who you are even more.

So self love matters so much because it allows you to heal inside…and it also gives the rest of the world the opportunity to experience you just as you are.

People Change For The Better When They Want To

People Change For The Better When They Want To

As much as you try, you change change people.

You can’t turn them into something that you want them to be.

They are going to be who they want to be. They will change for themselves if they want to.

So the only thing you can do is guide them along the way. You can’t push them. You can’t pull them. You can just walk with them and support them on their journey.

They are going to go through the thick and the thin and learn those lessons on their own. All you can do is be there for them.

All you can do is support them.

People only change for themselves.

The Future Belongs To The Curious

So I close my eyes…and what can I see?

The future in vivid color. Flashes of moments. Scenes. Feelings. Opportunities. People. Friends.

I see these things and they move me. I feel these things run through my body. I know that they are far more than just figments of my imagination. They are things to come. They will be, if only I act.

Every step I have taken in my life has brought me to this point.

I am a complete product of the thoughts, actions, and results I have generated up until this time. The good. The bad. Everything I have generated has come from who I showed up in the world to be. For a while now, I have been asking a lot about who I wanted to be going forward. I knew that the last handful of years didn’t have to be like the next handful of years.

That question has been rooting itself in my mind for quite some time and in some moments of frustration felt quite impossible to ask.

But as time went on, I started to discover that with patience those moments of clarity would show up and I would find exactly what I was looking for. They came in pieces. They showed up and hit me like sacks of bricks. And, for the first time in a very long time, I reconnected with my inner desire to dream as big as I could ever dream.

There were a slew of things that have happened over the years that kept me out of dreaming big. I downsized because of the broken promises of others that left me stranded. I was 90% in on myself. But now, I’m all in. I am 100% doing my own thing without being dependent on others for income and that is the most liberating feeling in the world.

I can completely understand the feelings of those who are sent off course by tragedy.

I know that in my heart. I also know the terrible feeling of having to go through the growing pains to reconnect with your sense of self after you felt like you’ve had the chord kicked out of the wall for so long. These past handful of years have been amazing in many ways but they have also been incredibly challenging. In no way shape or form has it gone all according to plan or been easy.

It’s been hard.

But in many ways, that amount of difficultly has been a gift. It has been a gift to be able to grow from adversity and forge stronger ties with what I know to be true and what I stand for.

In many ways, I drifted.

I hit a series of doldrums and the ship just seemed to completely stop. That time, as frustrating as it was also served me…because the great big pause that was bestowed upon me developed an even deeper conviction that this is exactly what I want to be doing. The rushing blood going through my body wanting to head forward in a specific direction solidified my belief in the path. And when the winds came about again, I charged forward with a sense of purpose that I’ve never experienced before.

There have been continued challenges throughout this path.

There have been moments of relapse into old ways. There have been times when I have been completely thrown for a loop and didn’t see what was about to hit me. There have also been times of deep connection with this wiser sense of self that has brought me into a much better place.

All of it, every last step of the path, has given something to me as a gift.

Sometimes those gifts are disguised as boxes covered in mud and dirt. However, when you open them, you find something pure and gold on the inside.

Maybe that’s the entire idea of me coming here to write every single day: to find the gift in whatever comes across my path.

This isn’t about starting over or building myself back up from anything, but rather about continuing on the path that I know is true. I believe in the way I’m headed. I know it has heart.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project 

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Learning To Let Go Gracefully

With a soft breath, I’m learning to let go.

I don’t know what part of my blood it is that os viciously reacts to this process. My heart knows what needs to be done and when I step into that, there’s this violent reaction throughout me.

Words erupt in the surrounding silence. Everything in me tightens. I find myself pacing and reliving moments in full color.

And then something in me brings me back.

Back to the breath.

“Calm down boy…calm down.”

::sigh::

Letting go has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn. It’s the memories that get me. It’s the memories of the people, places, and things that continue to romance my heart long after they are gone. It’s not hard for me to take walks down memory lane and experience things over again.

Those moments will always be there. They will always be ready to be seen and experience if I choose. But often going back to those places doesn’t do me any good. I always have found it fascinating how we often remember the times of tragedy more often than the moments that have made us deliriously happen. I’ve been fortunate enough in the recent years of my life to have a wonderful balance of those things. However, I can still get ripped back into the mud from time to time.

There have been recent moments that have asked for a great deal of letting go. They have spoken wisdom to me that the way things once were is no longer.

Those times are gone.

Those ways are gone.

The universe seems to clear everything out of the way all at once. I’m sitting in a place in my life where I am about to make more big moves and changes and there have been tectonic shifts happening right in the foreground. I’m being challenged, but honestly, this comes as no surprise.

I asked for this.

I asked for whatever needed to come my way to keep me growing and changing.

There’s been a lot of that.

So here I am, learning to let go again. Learning to let go of what once was to make room for what will be. While there is a backdrop of sadness in these moments, there’s also the room for more life to come in.

More adventures. More opportunity. More people who will connect with me on levels I’ve never experience before.

So this is life.

A constant learning process.

I don’t want it any other way.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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I Believe Dreams Come True

It’s going to take everything you’ve got.

Dreams visit you in the most random of moments and spark something deep inside of you. Possibility awakens. And for that brief moment that they are there, you believe. You believe in something greater. You believe that whatever is happening right now isn’t just all that you are made for.

Dreams are fickle things.

Because with that same moment of possibility being awoken inside of you, if you don’t tend to that spark the moment is gone and you are left with this space of what once was.

While I do believe that some dreams have a time limit on them, I’ve found that most keep calling over and over again despite how much you may fail or try to ignore them. They are always there, singing their unique song, asking you to try for more.

I’ve had some trouble this year stepping into a few.

Old ways from old times kept on stepping in and sabotaging my path. I kept falling back into old stories of believing that I needed things to be a specific way in order for my life to move forward. But something has shifted in me lately. Something moved within me while I was sleeping the other night. Since that moment, I’ve been able to step forward effortlessly in ways that seemed to be so difficult before.

Funny how life works huh?

Belief.

Belief is such a vital part of the equation. But I am reminded that while belief is the foundation for everything that will come in the future, it’s commitment that glues it all together. Without commitment, the house all comes down.

I’ve been guilty of partially building houses for a long time.

I wouldn’t see things all the way through. Something would come along and I would allow for it to sabotage what I was creating.

Yet as I set out on Chapter II of this journey, I realize that there are a handful of things that I made attempts towards in the past that I have left undone…that can still be finished. I can finish those projects. I can complete those dreams. It’s not that they went anywhere, but have just been sitting there waiting for me to come back and finish the job.

I’m stepping into that.

I’m stepping into what has been meant for me all along. But that has come at the cost of some major growing pains. There are pieces of me that really want to hold on to things of the past and I know those must go. In order for there to be space for what’s mean for me, I have to let go of what once was.

So in this part of the story, I know I have to stay strong. I know I have to get through a week of this challenging time and then I will be able to shift into another gear.

Forward I go.

Forward I go.

-Evan Sanders, The Better Man Project

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