I have written much here about acceptance – including particularly Tara Brach’s concept of radical acceptance – and it seems to me one of the keystones of any contemplative practice. To accept the circumstances of our life, the time and place of our birth, our age and our state of health, the changing seasons… this is a way of being that underlies whatever peace and stillness we uncover.

Integration, the goal of so much psychotherapeutic theory and practice – most obviously in the Jungian tradition – is the core process of individuation, where hidden, unconscious parts of the mind – the shadow, the anima or animus, repressed or concealed complexes – are brought into conscious awareness to create a unified, whole self: the endpoint of healing.

Acceptance is key to integration, also: it is not possible to bring into open awareness these intensely charged unconscious materials without acceptance. To accept oneself, all of oneself, as at its heart given (see Martin Heidegger’s Geworfenheit for instance) is the beginning of our inner work, and its fruit.

All that we are is given to us, in its iridescent, changing beauty. The necessity of what is remains, but it is in a sense a contingent necessity. Our response is ours to make: to remain still and watch is the beginning of radical acceptance – Heidegger’s Gelassenheit if you will – and a fundamental surrender to isness itself. In hesychasm the principle of synergia – the cooperative working together of free will and grace – is perhaps the deepest human level of integration.

To sit still, just that, is the beginning and the end of practice. There is nothing else to do, nothing else is needed. The ground opens in this moment: there is nothing else, nowhere else to go.