Acceptance is one of the most misunderstood qualities on the spiritual path. It’s often confused with passivity, weakness, or even approval of things we fundamentally disagree with. But true acceptance isn’t about condoning harmful behaviour, pretending everything is okay, or spiritually bypassing. Real acceptance is about acknowledging reality as it is—without overlaying personal judgments of good or bad, right or wrong. It’s simply recognising, this is what’s happening. This is what exists right now.
Acceptance in Practice: A Personal Story
One of the greatest teachings in acceptance for me has come through Vipassana meditation. During the 10-day silent coures, while practicing body scanning, Goenka repeatedly instructs: “Observe the sensations. Accept them as they are.” However, there have been moments during the courses when the pain in my body became so intense. On one occasion, I genuinely wondered if I was having a heart attack and considered having to call for an ambulance. How to accept that kind of pain? Thankfully at that stage of the course, I was wise to how pain was manifesting in the body, overcame the fear of feeling like having a heart attack and the sensations subsided.
Nonetheless, I spent many hours willing myself to accept pain without really accepting it. Still thoughts in head circulated like “when will this end”, “I can’t bear it any longer”, “this is too much”. I learned that intellectualising acceptance was not the same as experiencing in the body. I found the more I resisted pain, the more tension I created for myself. By rejecting the reality of the moment, I only served to perpetuate the cycle of my suffering.
But something magical happened when came into genuine acceptance - the dense, all-consuming pain dissolved. From a highly concentrated gross sensation, in an instant, the sensation fizzled out into nothing. Gone. I realised that in full acceptance of reality as it is, suffering ceases.
Radical Honesty with the Present Moment
Acceptance is a kind of radical honesty. It is a softening into what is already here, not as we wish it were, not as it used to be, and not as we fear or desire it to become. A willingness to acknowledge reality as it is, even when it’s uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean we ignore the pain or the injustices of the world. We can—and should—honour the grief, the rage, and the heartbreak. But we don’t need to create extra suffering by resisting what’s already happened or pretending it isn’t real.
When we fight reality, we become exhausted trying to control the uncontrollable. But when we accept, space is created. The space to to witness from a neutral perspective and to respond from clarity.
The Fear of Acceptance
Some things in life just seem too awful, too horrifying, too shocking to accept. There is a total rejection that humans could be so terrible to one another or that such a level of suffering could be possible. The mind recoils and says, “how could this happen?”, “why me?”, “people shouldn’t have to suffer like this.” Due to this lack of comprehension, emotions are buried deep within the psyche and stored in the body. The weight of unresolved emotion settles into the body—leading to stress, anxiety, and deep inner tension.
Maybe at this point you wonder “but how on earth am I supposed to accept war, violence or personal trauma, doesn’t that mean I’m accepting it?”. No. Acceptance is not approval. It’s not about agreeing, condoning, or enabling. It’s about acknowledging, this exists, this happened. To deny reality is to live in illusion.
And yes this can feel terrifying, because instead of burying feelings, the invitation is to feel them. To feel the rage, grief, shame, guilt and to cultivate a deeper acceptance for those feelings too. This is how we integrate into wholeness, by accepting all facets of ourselves and all facets of the world at large. As within and so without.
Practically practicing acceptance?
So how to cultivate this kind of acceptance? First consider, when encouraged to accept reality as it is, what is reality…? Reality can only ever be the present moment, the now. The past no longer exists, it is a memory, and the future is yet to happen. The past and future are intangible, the only thing that is truly real is the now. The fleeting and eternal
If we strip away the mind’s catastrophising and narrative loops, the present moment is actually okay. If you’re lucky enough to not be in a war zone or a place of direct conflict, for most of us, most of the time, we are not in immediate danger. Yet we carry unresolved emotional pain from the past or project fears into the future, creating suffering that doesn’t serve us. We can compassionately thank these parts of our programmed selves for trying to protect us. Now with this new found awareness, discern as to whether they are acting as support or hindrance.
I’ve had moments in my life when even in the face of danger and dire prospects, acceptance has anchored me. Like crashing my motorbike in Laos or once, lost deep in the Vietnamese jungle—no food, no water, no phone signal, not a single soul how knew where I was. I lost control of my bike just before needing to cross a bridge which was broken and my motorbike was now out of fuel. I felt panic rise and I had to use all my self-control to not let my mind spiral. I kept coming back to the present moment, “Right now, I’m okay. I don’t know how this will unfold, but right now, I’m okay.” Had I allowed my mind to take over, the situation might have gone very differently. Acceptance kept me centred.
Moral of the story, the reality of the present moment, void of the mental narratives, is a nice place to be. There are layers to which we can surrender to presence, and a bliss awaits that is hard to fathom. That’s a journal for another day.
The Role of Impermanence
Furthermore, impermanence is key to acceptance. Impermanence is the wisdom that everything arises and passes away. No sensation, thought, emotion, relationship, or circumstance remains the same forever. Life is a continuous unfolding of beginnings and endings, cycles of growth and decay, pleasure and pain, gain and loss.
Most of our suffering comes from clinging to what is pleasant or pushing away what is unpleasant. When we try to hold onto joy, youth, health, or loved ones as if they’re permanent, we set ourselves up for inevitable disappointment. Similarly, when we resist pain, change, or endings, or believe that these feelings will last forever, this creates more challenges.
Goenka explains:
Through Vipassana practice, I learned to observe this truth directly—through the sensations in my own body. The practice of noticing sensations arising and passing away, again and again, transformed my relationship with life.
Even in life’s hardest moments, the awareness of impermanence reminds us this too shall pass.
Goenka taught that by observing impermanence, we break the chains of attachment, "If you observe reality as it is, with equanimity, you will understand the nature of suffering. And when you understand suffering, you will be free from it."
A Practical Gateway: The Body Scan
How to connect to the tangible reality of the present moment, to accept reality as it is and observe impermanence? Through the gateway of sensation in the body. Anchor yourself with a body scan: gently move your attention from your toes to the crown of your head, noticing sensations as you go. Tingling, warmth, coolness, heaviness, lightness, tension, pleasure, numbness—the feeling of fabric against your skin or the ground supporting you. Whatever you find, try not to judge it. Let it be, exactly as it is. Try not to label a sensation as one that you like or dislike, try to remove any story or narrative you have around the sensation, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant.
This practice teaches us to accept life moment by moment, as it unfolds in real time. Accepting is acknowledging what’s happening, I may not like it, I may want it to change, but this is what’s here.
Acceptance Leads to Wise Action
Once we have come into acceptance it doesn’t mean we stop caring and it certainly doesn’t mean we stop acting. In fact, it brings us into clearer action because we are no longer operating from denial or fantasy, but from truth and grounded presence. Reaction leads to misery, but response rooted in awareness leads to wholesome action. For example, if you witness injustice, you don’t passively accept it, you act, but without hatred or fear clouding your judgment.
