Notice, Accept, Embrace
Hi friends, Tony here.
Earlier this year, I was sitting on the beach watching the sunrise in Tulum with a dear friend and lover just after our annual “Love & Relationships 5-day” retreat on Valentine’s day. We were talking about love, anger, quantum tunneling, sex, superposition, and self-acceptance. She told me about an author who introduced to her a path to enlightenment consisting of 3 simple steps: Notice. Accept. Embrace.
In the months since, I’ve been seeing all of the work we’re doing in Radical Honesty through that new lens.
Notice
Most of us don’t realize how much of who we are and what we do is just automatic, reactive machinery. We swim in the water of our environment, our filters, and our avoidant patterns and triggers and we don’t even notice that water. Building the ability to focus the spotlight of our attention on the ways our mind skews our perception of reality is the first step in the practice of Radical Honesty.
It is much harder than most people think to separate our stories, biases, and associations from the basic facts of the world around us (and inside us). Until you notice the difference between your subjective experience and the objective world around you (and inside you), there is no opportunity for free will or deliberation. The power and depth of this first step is profound. To truly notice is to step-out of the matrix, and staying out requires constant practice at noticing.
Accept
The second step is to accept. This means accepting the ills of the world, accepting the pain we’ve endured and created in our lives, and hardest of all, accepting our shadows as integral parts of ourselves. Acceptance is not a mental or philosophical exercise, it is a full-body experience that comes from sitting with the discomfort of resistance, denial, sadness, shame, and self-hatred.
Before we can accept, we must allow others to be disgusted by us and notice our disgust with ourselves. There’s no way around it; we have to go through the discomfort of looking at the parts of the world (and hardest of all, the parts of ourselves) that we least want to accept.
Embrace
The third step is hard to talk about until the first two steps are taken. It may be hard to believe that you could actually embrace the most painful parts of your world and your psyche before you’ve fully noticed and accepted them, or that there could be any value in doing so. But, like the first two, the power of this step cannot be overstated.
The paradox is that once you’ve actually embraced these things that used to repulse you, the opportunity for transformation appears in ways it never has before.
It's a long path (I am a long path), but the easiest way to get started on this path of truly knowing and loving yourself is a Radical Honesty Weekend Workshop. See below for my upcoming events.
Tony Shawcross is a Radical Honesty trainer, leading workshops, intros, and co-host of the Radical Parenting Podcast. In his coaching work, Tony specializes in couples, relationship and family coaching. He also leads the Radical Honesty Denver Meetup.
Upcoming Workshops Led by Tony:
