7

ACCEPTANCE

The Fifth Principle of Perseverance

ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL moments of my professional sports career was when I erupted and scored twenty-nine points in a second half after I’d been scoreless in the first. I remember walking into the locker room at halftime, going through my own self-abusive routine of replaying all my mistakes in the first half. “I missed my first seven shots. I am playing like garbage. I can’t miss the next shot.”

In that moment, a small voice came into my head saying, You are only as good as your next shot. I tried to reason against it, but continued, You missed those first seven shots because that’s what was supposed to happen.

That’s stupid, I said to myself. Why was that supposed to happen?

Because that’s what happened.

I accepted this and went back out and gave them twenty-nine points, knowing I was only as good as my next shot, knowing I was only a good teammate if I was present for my teammates. That moment of pure acceptance got me back into the present moment, where I was best able to perform.

DEFINING ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance is the powerful yet feminine act we take toward complete transformation into the New Alpha male. Because it is passive, we have mistaken it for weakness or quitting—it is anything but. Acceptance is the act that often appears as the only rational option after we have resisted changing our behavior long enough yet keep living the same painful patterns and experiences. Learn to recognize acceptance in its many manifestations:

»Acceptance becomes your new reality when the discomfort of the old reality is no longer acceptable.

»Acceptance is not just shrugging your shoulders and walking away from a challenge or responsibility. It is the graceful act of allowing yourself to see your challenge through a new lens.

»Acceptance is the acknowledgement of what you can and cannot control.

»Acceptance releases the pressure of resistance that has us caught in a feedback loop of frustrating patterns. It gives us clarity and empowerment in the present moment to make the best decisions moving forward.

»Whereas quitting is a state of reaction, of giving up out of frustration, acceptance is clarity in the moment, knowing the limits and breadth of your control and empowering yourself with the accountability of choice within those boundaries. When we accept a current circumstance and allow it to be what it is, we develop clarity to make the most informed decision in the present moment with no stories clouding our judgment.

True acceptance is accountability in the present moment and not repeating the same pattern or mistake. Not being present, which is living in the past or the future, is not being accountable. Wallowing in past guilt, wishing you could change an outcome, is false accountability. It is nothing but a distraction from facing the consequences in the present, where accountability resides.

When we accept our reality, it is not because we are complacent or quitting. Rather, it’s the opposite. Acceptance is key to perseverance.

HINDSIGHT IS NOT 20/20—IT’S A CHAIN REACTION

There is a cliché in the sports world that says you are only as good as your last game. I push back against this. I used to do this thing where I would go home at night and replay an entire game in my head. I would gnash my teeth with irritation: Oh, if I had made that easy little hook shot in the second quarter, I would have had twenty points tonight and not eighteen. . . .

One day, as I was turning thirty, I had an epiphany: If I had made that easy hook shot in the second quarter, the opposing team would have had to stop and inbound the ball and the next play would have been completely different and then the next play would have been completely different, and it would have gone on along a completely different chain reaction, so who is to say I would have even ended up with eighteen points? I might not have touched the ball for the rest of the game and only had eight points.

So, when people say “Hindsight is 20/20,” this is incorrect.

Hindsight is a chain reaction.

When you think about it for a moment, every day we are living in a chain reaction of sequences far greater and beyond our power than any of us want to admit. We do not have as much control as we like to think we do. To think our reality would look a certain way “if only” something in the past had gone differently is even more naïve than wishing we could change the past.

As I’ve matured, I’ve had to accept that I have little control over my life, especially over things that have already happened. As I accept this truth and I flow in those present moments in which I am aware I have some control, I can find the clarity to make the best decision in that moment, which gives me the most control I can possibly have in my life.

Acceptance is empowerment.

That is how I matured as a basketball player in my later years. I no longer worried about the last shot I missed. The moment I accepted that I had little control and was clear where I did have a choice was when I had the most control over my life.

Repeat: When you accept that you have little control, you gain control.

This allowed me to play basketball for six more years around the world, and every year in my thirties I played, I was an all-star wherever I went because I knew what I could control. (Except, of course, for the occasional referee who was blatantly biased. Hey, I am still human!) The fact I could let things go and tell myself I was only as good as my next shot, not my last shot, allowed me to be consistent.

You are only as good as your next game. The past is gone. Let it go. Accept it. Learn and move on. Empower yourself with the clarity of the present. When you do you this, you will find yourself keeping your beat, not too high, not too low, able to acknowledge the outcome of a situation and detach your self-worth and learn from it and grow.

My self-worth is in the consistent beat I keep. Not in the event horizons or deep valleys. I have done “awesome” things and I have done “bad” things. I have triumphed and I have failed in endeavors. But that is not who I am—I am the person who keeps the beat through all the highs and lows, accepting those fleeting outcomes to be what they are and release them.

Sometimes the timing or bounces don’t go our way. Sometimes the shots won’t fall. Talk about discomfort. Contrary to New Age philosophy, it doesn’t necessarily mean we have unresolved baggage. And contrary to the western masculine mind-set, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone was more deserving than us. With acceptance, we learn to be happy when others find their success, knowing ours will come, too.

That is empowerment.

That is Alpha.

Ask Yourself

»Think about a situation or experience that you struggle to let go of. Why is it so important to you?

»What do you think it will mean or say about you if the situation were to magically go your way? 

»Think about dreams you had that were never realized. What did you tell yourself about yourself when those dreams didn’t come true? Or when they didn’t look exactly like you expected them to?

»Do you understand the difference between acceptance and quitting?

»Can you write two scenarios in your past when you accepted versus when you quit?

Acceptance means learning to be conscious and self-aware, not self-absorbed, asking and acknowledging where you have power and where you don’t. This will allow you to navigate life far more smoothly despite the problems and challenges thrown your way, allowing you to save your energy for the battles that are winnable, and more importantly, worth fighting.

»Write down all the things you are trying to control in your life right now.

»Separate the items on your list into categories of what you can control and what you cannot. Simply seeing them in front of you, not in your head, will give you the permission to allow and accept your energy to be best applied to things that you can influence.

GRIEVING

The New Alpha male understands and accepts that energy is everything. Not just the mental energy of our emotions and what we put our physical efforts into to make our lives enriched and fulfilled, but, furthermore, that absolutely everything is energy. This is not simply an expression.

The space between a neutron and electron within an atom is so vast it may as well be empty space, and the only thing holding it together is energy. The illusion of those atoms rubbing together when we rub our hands is exactly that, an illusion, and what we are feeling is the friction of energy. As everything is energy, we must understand the sacredness of it.

Letting any organism that means to harm, control, or manipulate us invade our sacred space, mentally or physically, is a self-sabotaging act. The human brain and heart, as science has shown, emit electromagnetic waves. As they do so, they also receive energy as we move about this vibrational grid that is our dimensional reality.

»When we take the time to breathe and focus on our breath, we are grounding ourselves, charging up our senses, like plugging a phone into an outlet. We align with the energy in our body.

»When we exercise and put our body through resistance, we are building our energy reserve like water friction within a dam generating electric power.

»When we stretch, sweat, or cry, we are purging ourselves of stale frequencies and energy that needs to move.

»When we eat well, we are keeping the wirings and mechanics of our body clean and functioning at optimum ability. Just as food intake is crucial to the maintenance of your body, the energy you choose to carry in your heart is as crucial. You can be a healthy vegan, but bitter, angry, or condescending, and your health will suffer. When you choose to operate in the higher emotions, with gratitude being the highest energy level we can vibrate at, you are keeping your frequency pure—not to mention balanced in masculine and feminine—which is preemptive healthcare and maintenance, not damage-control maintenance.

Energy has to move. And while some people might be more skillful than others at moving energy, it is important to have a Swiss Army knife of possibilities. The universe, life, and even the game of basketball do not suffer one-dimensional folks well. If you are easy to guard and predict, you will be discarded. If you have a go-to outlet like meditation, yoga, or gym workouts and you suddenly can’t do it that day and then your entire day is ruined—you have fallen into the one-dimensional game and you have become easy to guard—as you have no other coping mechanism to self-soothe. You have become dependent if not addicted to your one coping skill. Develop an array of skills and coping mechanisms and you and your body will not only adapt more easily to curveballs thrown at you, on the court and in life, but your brain will be happier as well. If you’re hard to guard, you’ve developed coping skills that cover all dimensions of you—mind, body, and spirit.

For the first year after I retired from basketball, I was not kind to my body: I didn’t exercise as much. For years, basketball itself was the main stressor in my life—the political and financial pressures that came with it. I made the error of connecting basketball and exercise itself as stressors. When exercise was my life for twenty years, I burned out on it. Yet over time, while I was going through my transitions, my health and happiness were on a serious decline. The stress of divorce and being a single father was taking a huge toll, my back and neck were aching, and a slouch was appearing in my posture—my entire structure was crumbling.

It doesn’t take much to take care of your body, especially if you focus on its core. Furthermore, working on your core, through plank holds, balance drills, and medicine balls, rather than focusing on the vanity muscles, you are centering your body, which brings mind, body, and spirit into balance. Disease and dis-ease have come into my life when I have fallen out of that balance, especially when I did my best to avoid grieving.

Men are not often given permission to grieve. We are shamed at the earliest age for tears. In my community growing up, such outward grieving was viewed as a sign of lack of faith. I had to learn to how to grieve as a thirty-five-year-old man. I needed to give myself permission to cry, not with anger, but with acceptance that crying is a process of purging energy.

Breathing is possibly the most powerful tool for aligning with our acceptance of what is. It is the great conduit of grief. I began recalling some breathing techniques I had used before games, but this time in my quiet basement apartment, which became a cocoon for my metamorphosis.

When you accept that you have little control, you gain control.

Meditation doesn’t make your problems go away. It simply puts them in perspective, with the clarity on whether you act or allow them to resolve themselves naturally. Not all meditation is silent and still. Any act of getting out of your head and into your heart-space, to walk the path of the heart, is meditation. Heart drumming is meditation. Painting or carving or any artistic pursuit is meditation. Playing basketball fully present is a form of meditation. Again, meditation is any practice that gets you into your body and centered in the present.

My path of struggling with Buddhist meditation led me to shamanic, or Native American, meditation, where drumming beats helps your mind go into a deep state of Theta consciousness. My brain responds much better to the drumming, with the permission to allow my consciousness to go where it needs to. Upon asking a sacred medicine woman, who was my neighbor in Montana, about meditation, she suggested that there is often great importance in what geographic region you were born in this life, in regard to the type of meditation that is best for you and what you will most respond to. Having been born in Montana, in the Bitterroot Valley, the legacy of Chief Joseph is strong. I remember as a little boy the first time I saw his picture at the museum; I was entranced. I loved him. His energy was there. I read all the materials, stories, and plaques. I went home with a book, in which I got to read all about Chief Joseph. To this day, Chief Joseph is my greatest hero. Although I am of Anglo descent, my connection to the land of Montana, where I was born, has always been stronger. I still feel the energy of the soil and the Bitterroot River. Even in all my travels across the globe, I can still feel Montana—it is my stargate.

Connecting to my early geography and becoming disciplined with a modality of meditation allowed my grieving and acceptance of reality to come full circle. I took up a guided meditation that begins by facing in the four cardinal directions:

North for Clarity and Ancestors

East for New Beginnings

South for Manifestation

West for Endings

As I face each direction in meditation, I call upon one of the elements:

Fire, walk with me as we purge what no longer serves me.

Water, carry me through the depths that few dare to tread.

Earth, ground me as I walk in beauty through all these illusions around me.

Air, carry my words and intentions to all directions.

Each of the elements holds a great sacred power to help transmute energy—especially fire. In the sacred fire ceremony, you write a letter to someone you need to forgive, even if you feel they don’t deserve it. You let the letter sit for a day, and the following evening, you burn it. During the grieving process for my divorce, I can’t tell you how many letters I wrote and then released as I watched the fire carry my words to the stars. This is one of the most cathartic things I know, and I recommend you call upon the elements to help you move into acceptance—the completion of the grieving cycle.

The New Alpha male is brave enough to learn the sacred art of grieving, because grieving is the journey into full acceptance of what is. When we are in a place of acceptance, we can move and grow; when we do not accept reality for what it is, we get stuck.

In the acceptance of what is comes the clarity to see the collective ego and fear that drives most avatars and their stories in this world. Yet the New Alpha male does not judge, knowing that any false superiority is the same sin as what they would be judging: ego and fear. Instead, he only wants to help others release themselves from the illusions of this upside-down world. He learns to do so through allowing his heart to be a limitless source of unconditional love in the pure acceptance of what is—personal and impersonal at the same time, as it discriminates against none, knowing we are all children of the Great Spirit, as he walks the path of the heart.

Walking the path of the heart is living in constant meditation, in full acceptance of the world as it appears, always present as you respond gracefully to each maneuver around you with ease and acceptance rather than resistance.

This is Alpha.

ACCEPTANCE PRECEDES SURRENDER

Acceptance precedes surrender. True surrender. And I waited until halfway through this book to introduce the word surrender, as it is a word most men fear, believing it means “defeat.” This false assumption about surrender could not be any further from the truth; there is great power in surrender, if we actually know what it is.

It’s important to understand the distinction between acceptance and surrender:

»Acceptance is a place of being in allowance of what is, so that we may best understand and utilize the current situation to gain the best possible or preferred outcome.

»Surrender is complete allowance of what is and, furthermore, complete alignment with the truth of “whatever will be will be.”

When I was in a place of acceptance on the basketball court and in my life, I still allowed myself hope and expectations of what the future was going to be. Like most of us, I thought I could twist God’s arm and say, “Okay, God, I am surrendering, you can see me being a good boy now. And now you can give me what I want, because I am behaving well.”

This false surrender is a child archetype that many of us still possess toward God or the universe or a Santa Claus figure: good behavior to receive an incentive like well-being, virtue, or presents. True surrender has no incentive other than peace and clarity. Ironically, true surrender gives you the greatest power.

I did not know true surrender until I found myself living in that basement apartment as a thirty-seven-year-old man. It was a winter night, and my son was up with a cold. I was worried about paying rent because money had stopped flowing even though things had gotten better in my life: my TEDx talk was doing well, and I was being booked for speaking engagements. However, my reality was severely clashing with my expectations, with the added insult of my single-dad-minivan being totaled from a spinout on black ice.

That winter night, while Simon was coughing his lungs out, I sat at my table watching my bank account bleeding dry from all the various business expansions I was trying to pull off. The only control I had (and I crave control myself) was to go to my little woo-woo corner, the fireplace where I kept my sage and oracle card deck.

I drew a card and it said, “Speak clearly and state your truth.”

To which I replied, “You want my truth, okay . . . Fuck you!” And what followed in my temper tantrum only escalated from there, to whatever gods would hear me. If you are gasping shock at the sacrilege, don’t worry. It’s okay to have a temper tantrum when talking to your higher power. It already knows who you are. One hundred percent reverence is false reverence, which brings us back to the principle of integrity.

After I had cussed and raged for more than ten minutes with angry tears streaming down my face, I was exhausted. I lay down and began sobbing. Once I had voiced my true expectations, exposed them, no longer playing coy, I could finally release them. I was so tired. I wasn’t sleeping at all due to the stress of my expectations.

True surrender has no incentive other than peace and clarity.

In that moment, once I had nothing left, no more resistance to give, no more expectations of what it was supposed to look like according to my terms, I finally found a place of surrender as I said out loud: “Not my will, but yours.”

Without being a victim or a martyr, I remember saying, “If you want me to go teach high school history and be a basketball coach, I will. If that is where you want me, I will go.” And I meant it.

In my grand according-to-Lance/Machiavellian scheme, I was going be a popular life coach and climb the corporate speaking ladder. And in said grand scheme, once I became “successful” enough, I would slowly show my true colors. I would unveil my spiritual side, my woo-woo side, but only after I had the voice of credibility to do so. It was a ten-year plan in my head.

Life had other ideas. Rather, it said, “You will pivot now. You will be authentic, and you will show your true colors, now. The world doesn’t have time for such charades.”

As I lay on the floor, I recalled a painting I had seen as a boy in a museum in Montana. It was of the Heyoka Warrior, the Sacred Clown of the Lakota, who rode into battle seated backward on his horse. American soldiers thought he was being a ridiculous clown, but they failed to see that the joke was on them, for while they were playing checkers for land in this dimension, the Heyoka Warrior was playing inter-dimensional chess. He was a living symbol of absolute trust in a higher power, a Great Spirit. Not a naivete that things will go their way if they wish hard enough but absolute trust and surrender that everything that will be, will be.

I saw the Heyoka, in my mind in that moment in my basement apartment, asking me to surrender in the bravest possible way: to get out of my own way with no expectations of reward or blessings.

To allow things to work through me.

To truly surrender to Creation, to be used however it wishes.

To surrender to the truth that, yes, I am a thirty-seven-year-old single father living in a basement apartment.

To surrender to the truth that, according to the cultural image of “success,” I was a walking hypocrisy of a motivational speaker.

To surrender to the truth that, if I truly wanted to help others, I had to get myself out of the way.

To surrender to the truth that, if I truly wanted to inspire and help others, I had to take off all the masks.

To stop trying to logic and reason through life and allow mysticism room to enter and lead the way, which was more difficult than running a thousand suicide sprints.

To acknowledge that without a higher power, basketball trophy or not, I was nothing.

When you meditate and pray, do you truly accept and surrender to the message you receive, or are you only foolishly thinking you can twist God’s arm to get your way on Sunday, like I did for far too long?

This is not to say we do not move about the world with intention and manifestation. We do. We are engineers. We work and we strive for our goals and our dreams, but then we bravely and completely, and I mean completely, detach from the outcome. We surrender all expectations of what the end result is supposed to look like.

Why would we work so hard in creating the life we desire without the promise of reward?

Because the greatest reward is the journey of self-discovery into those vast inner dimensions we travel while simultaneously walking this outer world, the upside-down world, in search of those fleeting material treasures that always lose their value, like trophies gathering dust on shelves, as opposed to the self-worth we find, or better yet, recover in places we least expect.

Always chase the dream. And somewhere along the way, you will learn that you are worth more than the dream itself.

Work and strive. Labor after your dreams. Always. Work until the work is done. When you can’t work anymore, work a little more. And then painfully let it go, surrendering the outcome to be what it will be.

In truth, true surrender must be earned.

Many people, especially of the New Age modality, flippantly commandeer the word surrender without earning it, as a way to stay inside their comfort zones. While men are culturally coded to fix all the problems, the New Alpha male is challenged to persevere with the heart to help others, and then, after he has done all that he can truly do, surrender completely, unconditionally, with accountability and humility rather than expectations, so he can then watch magic reveal itself in new ways.

You may wonder why I don’t call the fifth of the Seven Principles of Perseverance “Surrender,” as basically that is what I am setting up acceptance to be.

Here is the answer: Because most men recoil in terror when they hear the word surrender. They believe surrender is synonymous with defeat. And so, as in this book and in coaching and keynotes, I have to gently guide them into surrender, allowing them to feel safe initially within the concept of acceptance. Then we can go deeper into surrender, aligning with the deep mystical force of all that is and what will be, to work through us.

Acceptance still allows the narrative to be about you.

Surrender allows the narrative to work through you.

True surrender is bowing to the greater good of Creation. This grounding peace of bowing to something greater than yourself, surrendering to Creation with clarity that everything is not happening to or even necessarily for you, but rather through you—that Creation is happening through you—is the most powerful space we can hold. This is the true standard and sign of winning, in the eyes of the Alpha male.

Surrender is aligning with oneness within you. This peace of oneness is established in the daily discipline and skill of always being in acceptance of what we can and cannot control. People will be drawn to that peace, some thinking they can buy it or take shortcuts to get it, but there are no shortcuts. Again, true surrender is earned, experiencing the painful loss of letting go after you have worked so hard. It takes great courage, possibly the most courageous thing a person can do, to surrender. Acceptance is a demanding daily discipline, a principle of perseverance, and only those with the gritty skill of self-reflection know how to dance with it, as they merge with the deep power of surrender, allowing all that will be to channel through them—wielding true power.

This is Alpha.

THE KNOWING FIELD

What does wielding the power of oneness to work through you look like?

It looks like the moment when you see athletes find themselves in the magical place of what we call “the zone,” where things just are, and you are flowing with all that is, never forcing it or pressing it.

How can you get there?

Well before I understood what meditation was, I adopted a routine before games where I would look for a dark corner where I could lay on my back, usually while the other team’s starting lineup was being announced. I didn’t care if other people noticed. Sometimes I did it at the end of the bench, in front of the entire arena.

Once I found a spot, I began doing a breathing technique where I would slowly breathe in for ten seconds, hold it for ten seconds, and then breathe out for another ten seconds, taking thirty seconds each rep. I would envision an energy bubble around me as I touched my fingertips together and whispered, “This is my energy.” I called it my “10-10-10” breathing.

I did ten sets.

While I simply was trying to ground myself, I was unaware of all the other mechanisms I was triggering—most importantly, just getting me into my body and out of my head:

When we are in our minds, worrying about the future or the past, we are not present, we are not in acceptance.

When we are in our bodies, we are fully present and in acceptance of all that is in this moment.

If time was limited, I would take thirty “power” breaths, where I would intentionally focus on my breathing as I inhaled and exhaled as quickly and forcefully as I could, for thirty breaths. This got me out of my head and into my body quickly.

There were times in my career where I was angry and depressed and every game was a psychological battle, such was the state of the fear and culture of the team. And while it might have felt nice to react in the immediate short term and tell an official “what was what” and get that technical foul, it sucked in the long term when we lost the game. Unable to see the forest for the trees, I sabotaged myself many times, unaware of how much energy I was bleeding and giving to other people when I was in a state of reaction instead of peaceful action and response.

To cope and mature as a player, and most importantly, adapt, I began to do the breathing techniques before the game. When I did so, my body more than likely was going to play the game in the zone, a meditative state, from the heart, as we have been learning and practicing thus far with the “In the Zone” segments.

I couldn’t play totally from the heart, and not without any logic, or else I would not have executed the set structured plays when the hand signals were called from the sidelines. Nor could I play totally from the head, because I would have detached from my body and begun to play from a place of fear and analysis rather than confidence and flow.

It takes both masculine and feminine.

While the head—logic, reason, and intellect—has its purpose and is essential, playing from the heart is far more important. When you hear players talk about playing in the zone, it is a magical place where you are so present in your body that you do not even think—you just are. Your brain has taken a back seat to your heart, intuition, and instinct. You do not aim your shot—you just shoot, trusting your body and physics to go where it will go. You observe everything with soft focus where you do not analyze, you do not critique, you just respond. You are “being,” as you play from the heart, where things just “are,” in full surrender of all that appears as a challenge, able to gracefully maneuver around it, in full trust of your own internal intuition channeling through you to counter in peaceful response. This is when you have stepped into what I call the “knowing field.”

The knowing field is the true aim of meditation—being fully present, able to see your true soul self with clarity. Further, it is the presence to see your soul self as one with an entire grid of energy that makes up our matrix and the universe beyond. When we are balanced and present, we see with clarity that the defense of the opposition always has to give you something. Just like life always has to give you something. And with peaceful action, you take what is offered, and you move into a space of surrender—peaceful response, never with reaction.

The knowing field is the place Buddhist monks speak of when they refer to higher consciousness, stepping beyond the simulation, detaching our brains from the digital grid of ones and zeroes. It is a state of pure awareness: no past or future, just pure present awareness of all that is, where we know that each shot will fall in its perfect place, make or miss. A state where we see such knowing and flow that we do not miss a step, as we gracefully dance in rhythm to the tune of life, accepting what is and responding in perfect timing, pushing in one moment and surrendering in the next with seamless ease between masculine and feminine. This is true flow, which goes beyond merely not resisting. True flow is attacking and defending, taking and giving, struggling and relaxing in perfect synchronicity with the rhythm of life, ebb and flow, because you are life.

The knowing field was what I experienced when I stepped onto the stage to give my first TEDx talk. With logic and reason—the masculine mind—I had prepared all the words I needed to say. But once it came time to speak on that day in front of those thousands of people, my heart took over. I didn’t even have to think. I had no fear about remembering the words, for if I had been remembering the words, it would have meant I was speaking from my head. Instead, I got in my body and let my body flow and tell the words to match its dance on the stage. Being in the knowing field meant logic and reason were no longer driving, but rather the heart carried the words. Whenever people paraphrase parts of my talk they enjoyed, they don’t necessarily remember the words, but they remember what I helped them feel, via speaking through my heart, not the mind.

The zone is the beautiful space of seamless balance of taking what is offered and surrendering what is asked, knowing that for everything life takes from you, it has to give something back. The defense always has to give you something, and in that clarity, you find the zone, the place of no-thing, where nothing is permanent and everything is fluid. Where nothing is lasting, and everything is eternal.

Finding and playing in the zone is stepping into the knowing field, where things just are. Where you cannot truly put things into words, where you cannot try to logic and label, where you cannot aim your shots, for to try and do so, you would lose the knowing in your bones and the connection with the knowing field. Only in surrender—in full acceptance of all that is and what will be, in a beautiful balance of masculine and feminine from the heart—can you play in the zone of the knowing field. And that is power.

That is Alpha.

SURRENDER IN ACTION

One of the most graceful moments of my life came on a March day in 2008. I was in the NBA minor league, and I had built an incredible body of work. I was ranked the most efficient player per forty-eight minutes in the league, as well as leading the league at the time in double-doubles, where I averaged sixteen points and ten rebounds a game, in twenty-seven minutes. It was the most efficient season of my career. And yet I still had not been called up to the NBA. I felt great frustration and irritation—fear that I was never going to be enough, as a basketball player or as a man. I had done everything I could do and felt like I had hit a glass ceiling and couldn’t break through.

It was a Sunday afternoon in Boise, Idaho, when Coach Bryan Gates gathered us on the practice court to talk about how we wanted to finish the season and what were our goals and expectations. We were the best team in the league, having set a recent consecutive win-streak record, and many of us were feeling somewhat burnt out because none of us had been called up to receive an NBA contract while many other players around the league on lesser teams were getting opportunities.

As we went around the group, each one of us articulated what his goals were for the rest of the season and what he wanted to accomplish. When it came time for me to speak, I said, “I realize I haven’t been the most present teammate. I have grown frustrated. I have been focusing so hard to get this call-up instead of enjoying my time with you guys and all the things we have accomplished together. I am coming to the truth that if my path does not show me making the NBA, I am truly at a place where I can begin to accept that, because I know I have done everything I could possibly do. No regrets. I know I deserve the call-up, like many of you do, but maybe my lesson in all of this is to see that my worth isn’t attached to making the NBA or not. And so, if that is my lesson, to see I am worth more than an NBA job, then I accept it.”

I got emotional as I said this to my teammates. I accepted my present situation and I surrendered.

The next day, I was called up to the Cleveland Cavaliers.

There is tremendous power in the feminine energy of surrender. This is not to be abused, thinking we can again twist God’s arm into getting our way through false surrender.

The New Alpha male truly surrenders and allows for whatever new developments arrive in the place of a lost dream.

Whether it is a lost game, a failed relationship, money owed to me from teams that never paid, a departed loved one, or a failed business, it is hard for me to let things go. I’ve had to learn to accept a lot of loss in my life. Many deaths of many dreams.

Yet, the sooner you can accept and surrender to an outcome, the sooner you can allow new and even greater things to come into your life.

I know this is hard to hear, and to trust.

This does not mean it is okay when someone does us wrong. No, we can still hold people accountable with compassionate boundaries and accept reality and let it be what it is.

We were made to let go, to allow new opportunities to come into our lives.

Let things go. Accept the outcome. Let new things come. And find beauty in the detours that seem to take us so far away from our dreams. If you do not accept the detours as they appear when a path has closed, you will become truly lost.

There is sacredness in detours.

It sounds oxymoronic, but looking back on my life at the points where my path deviated from my expected plan, what I thought at first was failure or disappointment, I can see with clarity that not only did those detours take me to interesting places around the world, physically, but more importantly, places inward—emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually—that challenged me, that forced me outside of my comfort zones, to reassess my priorities and my values.

Those deviations from the plan allowed me to empathize with so many people from so many different walks of life. And that is connection, that is intimacy, which I would have never been able to truly experience had my life gone according to my plan with ease.

If you are looking at your life, wondering, “Why do I have so many detours and disappointments,” you are on the right path. Be grateful for this. The discomfort and eventual acceptance of and surrender to those detours opens the doors for intimacy.

Like the intimacy I found with my teammates on that championship minor league team from Boise, Idaho, who went on to win it all after I signed with the Cavaliers for the rest of the season. That’s how good we were as a team. That’s how much we trusted each other and had each other’s backs. We were bonded together, so much so that when we see each other ten years later, our heart frequencies immediately spin up and conjure the “buzz” we held together in the knowing field that was the sacred space of a basketball court, where we spoke a language that could not be spoken, only felt.

Those detours, spiritual and physical—like the time our bus broke down in the middle of nowhere in North Dakota at two o’clock on a January morning, when we played poker through the night with Sour Patch Kids as chips to keep our minds off the cold—have created some of the most cherished memories of my life.

Surrendering to sacred detours has taken me all over the world to bond with teammates from all walks of life and cultures, as we chased a dream together. And in that chasing of a dream, we saw each other as our most vulnerable selves, in our deepest fears. In that space, if we were brave enough, we shared compassion, a deep, sacred bond that can never truly be expressed in logic and stat sheets.

Surrender takes us on sacred detours. It creates a space of magic, to let new things come. Surrender requires that we let a dream die. Yes, dreams die—but sometimes they come back. And sometimes they resurrect from the ashes into something far different yet far more powerful than you ever imagined. That is the power of acceptance and surrender—it positions us for transformation.

Do the Work

»On a piece of paper, write a dream or goal that never came to pass: a career, a relationship, etc. Make it a letter to whoever or whatever you are grieving.

»Once you are done writing, sign it. Let it sit for the day on the windowsill.

»At night, when it is dark and the stars are out, take the paper outside and light it with a match. You will transmute the energy of loss, and send it back to the stars, the earth, the universe—whatever energy you ask to take your loss.

»Do this again the next day and the next day, each time noticing how it is less painful than the time before. There is great power in the healing alchemy of fire.

As you release all those dreams that have died, watching them convert through the flames into the ether, you are creating a space of acceptance, and in that acceptance you are creating space for new things to come. And sometimes those dreams come back, bigger than you ever imagined.

During the grieving process of the divorce, I did this fire alchemy dozens upon dozens of times, sometimes writing a letter to Simon’s mother, sometimes to myself, sometimes to Simon, and sometimes to the dream itself that was our marriage.

I cannot emphasize enough the power of this ritual.

It is possibly the greatest gift I am sharing with you in all of this book.

In the Zone

»Take a seat with your back straight against a wall. You may sit cross-legged or with legs straight. For seven minutes, sit with the focused intention of your shoulders being pushed against the wall. Do not let them slouch.

»Begin heart drumming.

»Once you have settled into centeredness, take thirty quick, heavy breaths.

»When you count to thirty, release a slow exhale, noticing the burn in your chest, neck, and shoulders.

»Feel the weight on your shoulders. It will be heavy. You will want to slouch. But you won’t. As that weight builds, you will think of all your current stressors, obligations, responsibilities, and duties. All the people who rely on you.

»The weight will become heavier—but you aren’t finished.

»Begin to think of all your hopes and dreams that never quite came true. Especially the ones that hurt, that still haunt you with “What if?”

»Let those accumulate.

»After about five minutes, your shoulders and back will be sore and heavy. With all the pressure and weight of expectations and broken dreams, taking a heavy breath will be a struggle, but you can do it.

»Hold it until you can’t hold it anymore. (You may begin to cry.)

»Exhale.

»Let your shoulders drop in acceptance and surrender.

»Feel all that weight slip off your shoulders.

»Take as long as you need to gather yourself. When your breath has calmed, notice the peace in the room. Notice the power of clarity that you wield when you embrace acceptance and surrender.

RECAP

Acceptance gives us clarity in the present moment to make the best decision going forward. It moves us out of the past and the future, into the present where we abide in power. Only then can we take true action. As we continue to accept our place in what is with accountability for our contribution to it, we learn that we only control so much, which leads to surrendering to forces greater than ourselves. In that surrender, which again must be earned, there is freedom to let go of old stories and dreams so that we may remain on our path. More importantly, we allow life to work through us, not for us, and especially no longer against us, as we step into true empowerment. It is normal to feel sadness and grief when you step into surrender, as you are now squarely in the energy vortex of death and rebirth, which is the great and powerful catalyst that drives transformation.