Do you want to see your entire life change?

Do you want to reach the next stage of your Pokemon evolution?

In evolution of the self, the KEY thing is to ACCEPT your life and yourself for what it is.

Ok hear me out, fam. This one’s an 11 minute read.

— What is Acceptance, forreals? —

So you’ve gotten your hands dirty working with the material of your life.

The heartbreaks, hurting other people, death, divorce, failure, recipes gone wrong — all that fun stuff.

You’ve been through it, bathed in it, drank from it… shit, you’ve BEEN it.

WE HAVE ALL BEEN HOT MESSES.

And I’m sure that only compounded onto the trauma you had in childhood (No one survives childhood unscathed, although some people have it easier than others).

There is no way of denying the losses, the pain, the suffering you’ve undergone.

And you may be undergoing shit currently too.

Either way, the only option in the present is to accept it.

“But why?” (Says the perfectionist part in me)

“Why accept that crap sucked, and maybe you fucked up, and maybe your mom didn’t do XYZ, or you feel guilty for that person you failed? Why accept that right now shit is rough and you’re not where you want to be?” (Says my perfectionist part and TBH, she’s right in some ways).

BECAUSE being right or negative or complaining or controlling or judgmental, doesn’t change shit. It doesn’t heal any of the hurt.

If there is one thing I had to learn as a late bloomer adult (which I accepted I might be) is that acceptance is a HUGE facet of love.

And love is the result of acceptance.

The ONLY thing I know that TRULY heals people, is unconditional love.

Unconditional love of yourself, your journey and ALL your stuff.

And if the word unconditional makes you cringe, just trade it for the word “acceptance” instead.

Acceptance love [ ak-sep-tuhns ləv]:

Verb

1. A Love rooted in acceptance.

2. Love that feels freeing.

3. Receiving and valuing someone as they are.

Acceptance FREES YOU to be that cat-mom, start that business, love who you want to love — WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO is only possible when you accept yourself.

It is a fucking gift.

You get to be authentic & the external world gets to be what it is: Everyone is living in truth.

Acceptance is up there in peak-spiritual-skills-to-learn-before-I-die right alongside consciousness.

— Accept the truth about shit —

Throughout life you’ll use this skill. Not just in accepting ourselves, but circumstances outside us too.

Sometimes, you’ll just have to accept that you have a hard time accepting shit.

Sometimes acceptance means being ok with not knowing answers to shit.

Acceptance is a high-level self-mastery skill because you are threading a fine line between recognition of something and choosing what you want to be in relation to it.

It is learning how to handle the truth about shit.

There is a three step process to this:

1. Acceptance means recognizing whatever the circumstance is and allowing it to continue being whatever “it” is.

2. It also means you’ll have to recognize how you’re feeling towards that “thing” and allowing yourself to feel the way you feel.

3. Choosing who you actually want to be in relation to it.

“There’s a medical condition for people who are constantly forcing shit to happen! It’s called hemorrhoids.”

Curtis Tyrone Jones

This shit is HARD (no pun intended) but I believe in your ability to do hard things. (See what I did there Glennon?)

— It all started in (insert birth year here) —

Acceptance is a skill we are often not given the opportunity to learn consciously as children.

Usually control, self-blame, withdraw, perfectionism, somewhere in the fight, freeze or fawn reactions, is where we choose to function from.

When bad shit happened growing up, we all had to choose a coping mechanism.

Growing up we got to practice these coping mechanisms day in and day out for like 30 years before we became aware of how much they sucked to use as an adult.

After enough times, we realize that there is no FREAKING WAY our coping mechanisms work anymore!

SOOOOO the game changer here is to just allow it to be what it is, the way it is, right now.

Don’t LIMIT it or judge it, but just recognize it is what it is right now.

You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to love it, but you just have to understand that the only option is to acknowledge it.

Then you can move forward with whatever you decide to do next.

Look…. no one said self-mastery was easy. Refer back to my first newsletter where I mention only 2% of the population actually practice these high-level skills.

— Reinforcing the skill —

Practicing acceptance is a skill like any other and one way to practice that skill is to do something I like to call “zoom out”.

I have an AMAZINGGGGGGG spiritual mentor and coach who I’ve worked with for the past 3 years.

Over my time with her, I’ve recognized my EVER-SO-HELPFUL tendency to either judge or control shit about myself and my life circumstances.

I realized:

I cause problems for myself by simply NOT accepting things the way they are.

I cause problems for myself by using coping mechanisms like control and judgement to handle said “problems”.

I’d say shit like “I keep thinking that if maybe I do XYZ it will get better. Or if I DON’T do XYZ then it won’t happen.”

“You’re not in control of what XYZ will produce or do”, she’d say.

“But then this really bad thing will happen”, I’d respond.

“Don’t assume you won’t get what you want. Your decision to exclude the good is worse than just accepting it for what it is and seeing what will unfold”, she’d say.

Let’s repeat that again:

YOUR DECISION TO SEE SHIT IN THE MOST NEGATIVE WAY POSSIBLE IS WORSE THAN JUST ACCEPTING IT FOR WHAT IT IS AND SEEING WHAT WILL UNFOLD.

Acceptance can bring you PEACE.

“Zoom out” means you remain far away from the subject at hand, you look at the big picture and the truth reveals itself every time: That I don’t know it all, I can’t predict the future, and I just have to accept things as they are in the present and watch them unfold.

The same way my coach was doing to me.

— What’s preventing your peace? —

Why is acceptance so hard sometimes?

Let me count the ways:

• You’ll have to face hard truths.

• You will have to experience bad emotions sometimes.

• It means you may have to practice patience.

• You have to live in reality. (Sorry, Pisces).

• It means you have to actively choose a different pathway in your brain to utilize instead of your usual reactions.

I have found that in order to truly accept things, I have had to use a different part of my being.

It isn’t just about changing your thoughts: It is an energy-in-your-body deal.

Whenever I find myself having a freaking lump in my knickers about something and I can’t swallow the damn pill of REALITY, I stop. I breathe. I take five minutes and I drop into the sensations of my body.

I just pay attention for a while to the different sensations of my body, Focusing on the follow areas of my chest and abdomen.

And then I picture myself alongside the thing I cannot accept.

My sensations about it, the energy and emotions I feel about it are what’s important, not my thoughts.

THOUGHTS ARE A STORY WE TELL OURSELVES.

The body doesn’t lie or tell stories. It just sends signals.

If you can work with the signals within your own body, you refrain from reacting to every damn thing in the physical world and acceptance becomes that much easier.

— “I AM A BADASS MOFUCKA AND I ACCEPT IT” —

So now that you’ve practiced acceptance, what happens next is you get to choose.

You can choose who you want to be as a result.

You get to start using the powerful Words “I AM” and meaning that shit.

“I am a bad ass. I am an awesome human being.” Mantras only go as far as the extent you ACCEPT them to be true.

Practice this every step of the way and you’ll level up to your next phase in evolution in no time.