Brando Yelavich, NZ explorer and writer, aka Wildboy, shares his personal experiences and insights on mindfulness and self-discovery.
Who are you? Why are you …? Ahhh, I don’t even know what to say. I’m sitting here behind my screen feeling blocked, unable to write the words I desire, so stuck in my head.
Why can’t I do this? Is it because I forgot to eat breakfast? Maybe it’s my sore back?
Most likely, it’s the guilt from the unrest I directed at my wife 10 minutes ago that was entirely a product of my stress and nothing to do with her.
I feel terrible. What am I lacking? What in my life is limiting? Why am I struggling to be the best
version of myself?
It is Presence, and, in this moment, my lack of it.
Life is full of action and reaction, thoughts and feelings. It is a constant struggle with good bits
along the way. Life is full spectrum. We experience the highest highs and lowest lows and all that resides between. But what is it that creates the ‘moment’?
It is Presence.
I had a label before it was cool. For some context, ‘ADHD’ (as the psychologically educated call it) is the brain difference I have. In this modern world where we feel the need to identify as something, I have been categorised already as having ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’.
For a while I identified as Wildboy, but the one writing is the most present version of my current
self. I identify as everything and nothing. I identify as human.
One of the times in life I remember everything changing was back in 2020. I was deep in the
outback of Australia, during my 133-day crossing on a push bike.
My world had just turned inside out. I had run out of my meds, my Ritalin was gone. I started
becoming so intensely over-stimulated I could hardly manage. My thoughts had become
thoughtless. I was pushing on with the journey unsure what the purpose of the journey even was!
That night I lay under the stars, time travelling in my mind, exploring the world inside my head.
This, like all my journeys, was about seeking answers.
So much pain, so much suffering. Tears ran down my dusty face as I sat with my open emotional
wounds from the past.
This wasn’t the first time I had explored In this inward way, I could see the familiar pattern that I
have lived in for my whole life. I realised I was in a cycle of cataclysmic scale. The big journeys to prove myself to the world because I felt like I was broken and could never fit the mould. Followed
by the self-destruction upon completion of my objectives because, I don’t know how to exist in
the world of everyone else. I wasn’t okay without running away.
As I gazed into the night sky, I knew I needed mental action to create change. So I started telling
myself ‘despite everything that has happened and is yet to happen, I am of my own liking, I am the hero in my story and I deserve love’.
For the next 14 days in the driest, most gruelling section of desert, I got up and I told myself
exactly that. Every time I found a mind story that was limiting me from being of my own liking, I
would do what needed to be done to move past it, to overcome it.
You can’t remove the past but the future is dictated by the actions of the now, the present. The power of Presence isn’t just about being in the moment. It’s about consciously applying your
focus to where it needs to go, when it needs to go there. Life is constant and your Presence is
your power.
It’s time to acknowledge the parts of yourself that have been put aside or forgotten, because the
only way to truly be of your own liking is to apply Presence to all your versions, not just to how
you identify.
Words by Brando Yelavich
Photos by Ben Savage
