You have been told that in order to get rid of something painful, you have to accept it, not to resist it.

It can be a pain-inflicting emotion, a physical pain, a distress, grief over the lost of a loved on.

So you accept this painful something, whatever it is, hoping to get rid of it in this way.

But it does not go away.

It does not go away because your acceptance is not real. It is just a trick of the mind, a resistance disguised as acceptance: you accept it in order to get rid of it - your aim is to get rid of it which merely means, in other words, that you actually resist it, you are not truly accepting it. This is not a true surrender.

Real acceptance means that you are willing to accept the POSSIBILITY that this underlying painful thing might stay here FOREVER, and meanwhile you are willing to live side by side with this painful thing.

In other words, in order to apply a real acceptance, you must adopt a totally different aim, a new radical state of mind of not minding what happens with this painful thing. Sounds confusing? It is more simple than you can imagine.

Then, after this true surrender, this painful something may indeed disappear and it may not. But in this new state of mind, you do not care. This is the beauty of this system of creation.