The Power of Acceptance: How Embracing Life as It Is Can Bring You Peace
Photo Credit: Karolina Grabowska
As I’m writing this blog post, we are just over two months into the year of 2025. We have lived through so much individually and collectively. The first quarter of this year has been (and continues to be) action-packed with soul lessons, challenges, opportunities, chaos, and question marks. We are all, in our own unique ways, living with a lot of uncertainty.
It’s easy to practice acceptance when we have clarity or when we like or favor what is happening. It can feel very challenging to practice acceptance when things feel disorienting or confusing or when we don’t like or favor what is happening.
In this blog post, I want to invite us to call upon our wellsprings of spiritual courage. I want to encourage us to deepen our practice of acceptance. I want to define acceptance as I see, experience, and practice it; and I want to invite us to dig into the depths of our souls and experience the benefits of this simple and truly radical practice. My heartfelt intention is to encourage and invite us to release the false illusion of control and embrace the warm waters of acceptance in each passing moment.
WHAT ACCEPTANCE IS
I define acceptance as experiencing people and situations as they are. From a spiritual perspective, acceptance is “seeing” people and situations through soul-centered eyes. Seeing through the eyes of our soul means we can observe what is happening without the cloudy lenses of judgment, delusion, illusion, or control getting in the way, which can allow us to access soul-led insight and awareness.
HOW ACCEPTANCE CAN BRING YOU PEACE
Acceptance is still a truly radical way of being. Acceptance is not a core value of our society. We live in a society that values judgment, control, blame, and a right-wrong orientation towards people and situations. Ron and Mary Hulnick, founders of spiritual psychology, say it this way: An “I’m upset because…” orientation towards life is the way of life for most people. When we live our lives this way, we are outsourcing our power (i.e. how we think, feel, and respond) to someone or something outside of us, which causes us to experience unnecessary suffering.
Choosing to practice acceptance — to neutrally observe and “see” things and people as they are — alleviates unnecessary suffering because we are not layering a blame-oriented, right-wrong orientation on top of the situation.
I intentionally use the term unnecessary suffering because suffering is part of our human experience. When people we love die, we will experience suffering as we grieve their loss. Layering blame onto our experience of suffering adds extra suffering that does not serve a purpose and does not have to be there. Acceptance allows us to see people and situations through soul-centered eyes, which allows us to feel connected to our True Self, to Spirit, and to the inwardly-led decisions and actions we may be led to take.
HOW TO PRACTICE ACCEPTANCE
When things happen, we are taught to judge them as right or wrong. A spiritual-psychological orientation towards life encourages us to neutrally observe what happens when something happens. This is meditation in practice. Instead of judging what happens as right or wrong, you can practice neutrally observing what happens and, from that meditative observation, you are led from within to make choices and take actions that come from a soul-led place.
An In-the-Moment Practice for Cultivating Acceptance
A situation happens.
Notice the part of you that wants to judge someone or something as right or wrong. Notice how you feel internally as you judge and the thoughts that spawn from the judgment. (Don’t judge your tendency to judge. 😉 We’re human. It happens. It’s okay! Practice, not perfection here.)
Ask Spirit for assistance through prayer. Here is one of my go-to’s: “Great Universal Creator, I am willing to see this differently. Thank you for helping me to see [person / event / circumstance / situation / relationship] through the lens of acceptance with ease and grace.”
Look again at this situation. Practice neutrally observing it as it is. Notice how you feel inwardly as you do this. Notice if any insights, awarenesses, choices, or guided action steps spawn from neutrally observing the situation.
WILL PRACTICING ACCEPTANCE MAKE YOU CARELESS?
How can being in a state of acceptance help you or the world? Will acceptance make you “too soft” or turn you into a pushover? Will being a more accepting person make you a careless person? I wondered the same thing but, in my experience, none of these things happen when I am in an accepting place. When I am in an accepting place, I find that my own authentic insights and awarenesses come forward, propelling me to take actions and make choices that feel aligned with love and integrity. It’s not that I stand idly by and allow things to happen that aren’t okay with me…quite the opposite. It’s that I allow choices and actions to emerge from responsiveness, neutral observation, and prayer instead of from reactivity, blame, and judgment.
I’ll give you a personal example…
My mother is a very devoted Catholic. She believes that being queer, gay, lesbian, or bisexual is “unnatural.” I am married to a woman, my incredible wife Nicole. You can imagine this caused problems for us at first…and it very much did. I struggled to reckon with how I could maintain a relationship with my mother while she believed my relationship with my wife was “unnatural.”
Over time, by practicing accepting my mother’s point of view and engaging in prayer around it, I experienced an internal awareness that I actually didn’t care what she thought about me and my wife. I cared about her attitude towards me and my wife — that she was exhibiting kindness, generosity, and curiosity. And, gratefully, she was exhibiting those things. There was a duality here and a complexity: she reported not accepting or agreeing with me being in a same-sex relationship while also behaving kindly, curiously, and generously towards me and Nicole. Would I love it if she changed her mind? Of course I would. But she hasn’t and she may never. By accepting her point of view, I was able to access what was most important to me: that she behaved in a way that was kind, curious, and generous.
IN CONCLUSION…
I recognize this might be a challenging practice to begin. Be kind, gentle, and patient with yourself as you practice this. As I wrote above, this is a truly radical way of being in the world. It may not feel natural to practice because we are so socialized to blame, judge, and control others. I am really curious to hear about how your practice of acceptance goes and what happens within yourself in your relationships as a result.
With care,
Heather
P.S. — Did you find this blog post helpful? If so, I’d love to hear from you! Drop me a line here.
