The biggest underlying cause of stress is the refusal to accept that which we have no control over.

Whether it is what we see on the news, other people around us or time disappearing down the plughole, most of the world is beyond our ability to control it.

And yet we feel that we should be able to control everything around us.

We want our lives to be managed and ordered. We want things to fall into place and people to do what we have planned for them to do.

When this doesn’t happen, we get stressed. We feel that we are out of control and that our lives are unmanageable.

The only way to restore order and peace to our lives is to accept that we have no control over anything except our own thoughts and actions – and even those to a limited degree, as much of what we do is habit and unconscious action.

I have used the verb Accept as the title of this post, rather than the noun Acceptance for one specific reason.

Verbs are action words and I believe that in order to accept what is, we need to work at it.

It rarely comes naturally to us to accept the world and people around us without trying to exert some influence on them.

We learn to accept, rather than naturally be able to accept.

The learning process can be painful if we are trying to control others around us, or futile if we are trying to change the world from our arm chairs sat in front of the TV.

It is, however, one of life’s most important and rewarding lessons that we learn to accept that which we have no power to change.

Learning requires effort. We need to put effort into accepting the world and people around us.

We need strength to not go down the rabbit hole of chasing thoughts that are control centred.

We need to be at peace with ourselves in order to be able to accept things that rile us or that we think should be different.

Meditation is a good way of learning not to follow thoughts down the rabbit hole.

Over time, a regular meditation practice can help us to be more at peace with ourselves.

But it takes time to see results and is a process that never ends.

This is why I talk of effort – it is not easy to reprogramme ourselves to accept what we cannot change.

But if we can do it, it will bring us peace of mind and comfort, freeing us up to work on the things that we can have control over – our own thoughts and actions – and how we treat and relate to other people.

The Serenity Prayer