The story of how I found Acceptance

The heavy, suffocating fog in John’s mind hadn’t arrived overnight, but it had settled in like it owned the place. For years, he treated his anxiety and intrusive thoughts like an invading army. He barricaded the doors. He bought every self-help book, tried every breathing exercise, and went through a carousel of prescriptions.

Some pills numbed the edges, but the core of the problem remained. John was locked in a perpetual, exhausting war with his own consciousness.

Every morning began the same way. A tight knot of dread would form in his chest, and John would brace himself. “Okay,” he would tell himself, jaw clenched, muscles tense. “I’m just going to Accept this today. I’ll let it be here until it passes.”

He thought this was Acceptance. He lived this way for over a decade believing he was practicing the ultimate spiritual discipline. But he wasn’t healing. He was just kidding himself that he was Accepting, but instead he was just enduring it which left John totally exhausted.

One evening, sitting across from an old mentor named Clair Weekes John broke down. “I’m doing everything right,” he choked out. “I’m accepting the pain. I’m letting it be there. Why isn’t it fixing it?”

Clair looked at him with profound gentleness. “John you aren’t accepting it. You are white-knuckling it.”

“What’s the difference?” he asked, defensive. “I’m not fighting it!”

“You are enduring it,” Clair said. “You are tensing up, holding your breath, and waiting for it to go away. You’re letting it sit in the room, but you’re staring at it out of the corner of your eye, treating it like a bomb that might detonate. True acceptance isn’t a strategy to make the problem go away. If you are ‘Accepting’ it so that it will eventually leave, you are still resisting it. You are still trying to fix it.”

John sat frozen. He realised that for over ten years, his “Acceptance” was just a sophisticated form of waiting out the storm. It was a fake truce. He had made the ultimate mistake: living a life thinking he was Accepting, while secretly demanding that his mind would change if he just held tight and gritted his teeth.

“How do I stop it ?” John whispered.

“You practice a peaceful surrender,” Claire said. “You take everything exactly as it is right now, without any desire to fix a single thing. If the dread is there, you let it be there forever if it wants to. You stop treating your mind like a broken machine.”

To do this, Claire explained, John needed to shift his perspective. He had spent years with a hyper-focused, laser-like gaze on his problems. You need to ask yourself:

“ Would it be ok to stay like this for the rest of your life?”

If the answer is truly “YES” Then, and-only-then, are you truly Accepting.

“Think about your vision,” Claire instructed. “When you walk down the street, you don’t stare intensely at every crack in the pavement or every single leaf. You use your peripheral view. You are casually aware of the buildings, the sky, (She mentioned this because John had a phobia of the blue sky) Claire went on to say: You don’t pay attention of all the people, the cars. You are just casually aware without obsessing over any of them. You must do the same with your mind.”

John began to practice this subtle shift. He realised a fundamental truth about human nature: What you pay attention to, becomes your life.

When he gave his anxious thoughts 100% of his spotlight attention, his entire reality became anxiety. But Claire’s advice introduced him to a more subtle, beautiful mechanism: Casual Awareness.

The next time the familiar knot of dread appeared, John didn’t brace himself. He didn’t try to “fix” it with a breathing technique. He simply acknowledged it, like a cloud in a vast sky, and widened his mental gaze.

He took a peripheral view of his internal world. He let the anxiety sit there, but he casually brought his awareness back to the taste of his coffee, the sound of the wind outside, and the warmth of the sun on his face and hands. He didn’t force the anxiety out; he just gave it permission to exist and just be there while he attended to the rest of life.

For a long time, John had falsely believed that fighting his mind was a sign of strength. He thought surrendering meant weakness—a total defeat.

But as the weeks rolled into months, he discovered that peaceful surrender is a strength to be reckoned with.

Fighting a ghost only drains your own blood. Walking away from the fight takes supreme courage. By refusing to engage in the tug-of-war with his thoughts, John dropped the rope. The thoughts still pulled, but they were pulling against nothing. They had lost their leverage.

No pharmaceutical drug could ever achieve this. Medications could chemically alter his brain’s receptors, but they could never teach his soul how to be at peace with reality. True Acceptance became a permanent fixture in his life because it wasn’t a chemical state—it was a profound shift in understanding.

In John’s later life he found Jeff Warren who showed John how to meditate properly to free his mind of all anxiety, which John thought was ironic because Claire Weekes was telling John to face his anxieties and Jeff was telling him to free himself of them? But in reality John realised it was the same thing Jeff was telling John to let his anxieties be there because if you try to push them away you only bring more ATTENTION to them.

When John stopped the fighting, the constant, low-grade friction in his soul vanished. The troubled mind healed itself, not because it was finally “fixed,” but because it was finally allowed to just be. Then in that quiet, unresisting space, John started to live again.

The dense, choking fog of anxiety has receded from John’s mind now, leaving behind a fragile mist of Acceptance. The mist lingers like an echo and a reminder, a quiet monument to the days he spent lost in the dark fog of anxiety.

THE END.

If reading this has inspired you to start the practice of Acceptance always remember to give yourself permission to just be, and enjoy that wider, peaceful view of life.

Whenever you need a sounding board or another creative spark, you know where to find me. Here on Substack John Edwards or on my website:

Chaotic Rambling.

Or in my ebook that I have wrote on the subject:

Acceptance Change the way you are thinking

Thank you Dr Claire Weekes for all your help in learning me how to truly Practice Acceptance.

Thank you Jeff Warren for your guided meditation lessons.

But most of all Thank you to my dear wife Paula for being by my side when I was at my worst.

To learn more on how how John recovered from THE ANXIETY STATE in particular OCD Please click HERE.

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