I saw an interesting post on Facebook yesterday that had to do with acceptance. The person who wrote it was upset at the spiritual teachers who teach acceptance, and their point of view was that people in spirituality are numbing themselves by accepting everything and refusing to see what is happening in the world. They even called it brainwashing.

Many people have opinions and views of spirituality, and it’s not my first time seeing a comment like that. But they often come from people who are not practicing themselves, and this appeared to be a spiritually active person who was tired of the bypassing in some spiritual circles.

I wouldn’t take it as far as that person did, but I have also come across people on the spiritual path who use acceptance as a kind of bypassing, as a way of escaping the difficult things in life that they are not ready to deal with. So, instead of taking responsibility for what is happening in their lives, they use acceptance as a way of saying that “it’s not in my hands” or “that’s just the way the world works.”

But acceptance has nothing to do with being okay with what is happening or saying we will not do anything about it. Or about giving up or giving in. 

Acceptance simply means that we accept that, at this moment, this is the way it is – whatever that means in our particular circumstance.

What is already is, and we can’t change what has already happened. So, acceptance means that we see and experience things as they are now, because they already are.

If we don’t accept what is, we are fighting against reality. And many people do that. They do it by complaining about or denying what is, wishing things were different, or numbing themselves in different ways.

But that doesn’t change the way things are. It just adds more suffering and resistance toward it. And a lot of precious energy they could use to take action or change the situation goes into fighting against or covering up the way things are.

When we accept, we stop resisting or escaping reality. We come back to this moment.

When we do, space opens up. New perspectives can also arise that we didn’t have before.

And then, we can take effective and powerful action from a place of non-resistance.