Acceptance is what we call clarity as it dawns in a person

Acceptance is your most potent ally in meditation. It’s not a beginner’s experience on the way to something better. It still shows up to teach me every day, after 18 years of practice.

Acceptance is not a slide into passivity. Instead, we see how we’re already actively resisting parts of our experience—pushing away nagging thoughts, clenching against unpleasant emotions.

Acceptance is the dawning realisation that we can let go of that struggle without the world imploding. We can even lean into it—noticing, as Mark Manson put it, that facing the negative is a positive experience.

Meditation is your arena to explore this. You put everyday life aside for a few minutes to observe your inner world in action. You begin to glimpse suffering as something you do.

Oftentimes, we’ve built struggles on top of struggles. Beliefs on top of beliefs. So when acceptance arrives, whole structures start to topple, like a bridge falling into the sea.

In the toppling, we taste something different. It requires no outward change—only a renewed relationship with what’s already here.

Struggle lets off smog. Letting go of the struggle allows the air to clear.

Acceptance is what we call clarity as it dawns in a person.