ACCEPTANCE. Yes, a stance of active acceptance and this is the most important aspect that lets your mind stay calm and peaceful.
Active acceptance and not passive acceptance. Active acceptance means accepting “what is” in the here and now. Let us take someone who over thinks all the time and wants to change this habit of overthinking and enjoy some peace of mind from time to time. For this person active acceptance would be to acknowledge that they are habituated to overthinking, bring awareness to what is happening right now in their mind and note that “I am overthinking right now and am unable to stop it”. Active acceptance is accepting whatever is happening right now, because it is already happening. This empowers us to initiate action to have a different experience in the future.
On the other hand, passive acceptance would be “I am a overthinker, I always overthink, I don’t know how I will ever be able to stop this”. Passive acceptance is accepting the future. One feels doomed because in their mind they have given up, named themselves and identified themselves in a particular way and concluded that there is now way out. This leads to a restless mind which is the opposite of a calm mind.
Another possibility is “Non-acceptance”. People assume that holding a stance of non-acceptance is better than passive acceptance. But it is not so. Non-acceptance is equally unhelpful in effectively changing a deeply ingrained habit that keeps the mind restless. It may help in temporarily changing the habit but such change is always shortlived. In our above example, non-acceptance would look like this, “I don’t want to be overthinking, I don’t accept my habit of overthinking and I am not going to let myself keep overthinking”. They would most likely end up overthinking on the topic of how to prevent them to overthink!
Active acceptance leads to a state of gratitude. Read the following article and listen to the guided meditation therein to experience this.