Many aspects of our lives may be for us to choose and change. Some of what we may experience as problems are able to be prevented or redressed by us. For example, when we are feeling cold, we can make warm clothing and wear it, or install heaters and run them.

Yet no matter how much we do, or how rich, smart, and influential we may be, there are also certain inevitabilities which we cannot avert or change.

Having been born into this life, we will also die. Pain, disease, old age, and death are unavoidable as parts of life. They are not so much problems to be resolved, as realities which we can learn to accept and live with.

Despite pain, disease, old age, and death being inevitable, we tend to approach them with resistance and hostility. When we hear about someone having died, what is commonly said is she or he "lost their battle" against their illness.

Especially from a modern medical view, death and pain have come to appear as failures in our very efforts to avert them, while acceptance has come to be seen as tantamount to our giving up all hope and accepting defeat.

This way of discriminating between fighting versus capitulating is not necessarily helpful, and can sometimes further exacerbate our level of suffering.

Acceptance can easily be mistaken for what it need not be. It does not mean giving up hope, becoming apathetic, and doing nothing to alleviate our situation. It certainly does not mean having to accept suffering needlessly in situations where it can be alleviated. It also does not mean having to accept unreservedly all that we may be being told about our future or lack of it.

With severe pain, for example, we can obviously utilize prescribed medications to help reduce our level of discomfort, but we usually still have to come to terms with not being completely free of pain. Acceptance in this case is about learning to live with, rather than trying to fight and resist, our pain that remains.

Healthy acceptance recognizes that it is futile and needlessly stressful to fight against unwanted realities when they are not able to be changed. Rather than keep fighting them, healthy acceptance is to allow ourselves settle with these realities in the present moment.

Rather than being defeatist, healthy acceptance of our pain, disease, old age, and dying can actually be medicinal in terms of helping to reduce stress levels. Paradoxically, when we accept the limits to what we can control, our condition can often seem more bearable and become more manageable for us.

Acceptance as "good medicine" necessarily focuses on what is here and now, rather than on ideas about our future or our past. As such, it is not a one-off decision we can make, but a continuing process of renewing our acceptance moment by moment and day after day, just like having regular medicine.

Ways of being accepting over time involve more than just forming the intention, and then setting out to maintain one fixed mental state, or else indulging freely in every mental state that arises, and calling this "acceptance".

To practice acceptance sustainably usually requires that we adopt a framework and a regular routine of directing and redirecting our attention from our changing thoughts and feelings onto more stable aspects of our being, such as breathing or ways of moving. Most effective ways of doing so are known as meditation.

With severe pain, for example, practicing acceptance might involve allocating regular times for a gentle stretching of our joints and muscles, allowing our pain to ebb and flow more freely, and perhaps redirecting our attention to our breath and allowing it to remain relaxed and regular ...