Many of us carry a picture of inner peace that looks like a calm lake: no waves, no storms, a person sitting cross-legged with a soft smile. Then real life happens. We feel sad, angry, scared or jealous, and we conclude that we have failed at being peaceful.
This article looks at a different idea of inner peace. Peace in this sense does not erase pain or emotions. It can include them, and sometimes it begins exactly with accepting what is. If you would like an introduction to the topic, see Inner peace: how to make peace with yourself.
When the ideal of calm becomes a burden
Wanting to feel good is human. The problem starts when feeling calm becomes a rule, and every unpleasant feeling becomes a sign that something is wrong. Research on happiness points in this direction. In a series of studies, people who valued happiness very highly were, in situations that should have been pleasant, less happy than people who valued it less, probably because they kept measuring their feelings against a high standard and felt disappointed (Mauss et al., 2011). The same can happen with peace. If you are constantly checking whether you are calm enough, it becomes hard to be calm at all.
Pushing feelings away: what psychology calls experiential avoidance
Psychologists use the term experiential avoidance for the tendency to avoid, suppress or escape unwanted inner experiences, such as painful emotions, thoughts, memories or bodily sensations, even when this causes problems in the long run. A recent review describes it as a central process in many mental health difficulties: avoiding a feeling brings short-term relief, which reinforces avoidance, while the feeling tends to come back stronger and life becomes narrower (Wang et al., 2024).
Avoidance can be subtle. It can look like constant busyness, scrolling, overthinking, drinking a little too much, or a calm smile that hides a storm. It can even look like spiritual practice, when meditation is used mainly to make difficult feelings disappear.
What Buddhist psychology says about aversion
Long before modern psychology, Buddhist teachings described aversion as one of the main roots of suffering: the reflexive pushing away of what is unpleasant. In this view, pain itself is part of life, but resistance to pain adds a second layer of suffering on top. The Buddhist scholar and monk Anālayo describes how early Buddhist mindfulness practice can help people face anxiety and fear by staying with bodily experience, rather than running from it, so that difficult states can be known and allowed to pass (Anālayo, 2020).
From this perspective, an image of inner peace as a state free of all pain can itself become a form of aversion: a wish to get rid of everything that does not feel peaceful.
Accepting emotions is good for us
Accepting difficult emotions does not mean liking them or giving up. It means letting them be there without fighting them or judging yourself for having them. In three studies with students and adults from the community, people who habitually accepted their negative emotions and thoughts had better psychological health, partly because they experienced less negative emotion when facing stress (Ford et al., 2018). Fighting a feeling often makes it louder. Making room for it often lets it move.
Research on mindfulness supports this. According to one influential theory, mindfulness works through two skills together: paying attention to what is happening in the present, and meeting it with acceptance. Attention without acceptance can even make people more reactive, while the combination helps reduce stress (Lindsay & Creswell, 2017).
What a more realistic inner peace can look like
- Feeling sad after a loss, and knowing that sadness has a place.
- Being angry about an injustice, and choosing how to act on it.
- Feeling anxious before something important, and going anyway.
- Having a bad day without concluding that your life is falling apart.
- Being kind to yourself when you do not feel peaceful at all.
Inner peace in this sense is a way of relating to your feelings: steady enough to hold what comes, even when it hurts.
Peace in everyday life
This kind of peace often shows up in small, ordinary moments. It is the parent who feels overwhelmed by a crying child, takes a breath and stays. It is the person who feels the old sting of jealousy and does not act on it. It is someone sitting with a friend in grief, without trying to fix anything. None of these moments are calm on the surface. What makes them peaceful is that nothing is being fought against inside: the feeling is allowed, and there is still room to choose what to do next.
Small practices
Name what is there
“There is sadness.” “There is fear in my chest.” Naming feelings gently, without a story attached, can create a little space around them.
Allow, for a moment
Instead of trying to make a feeling go away, try staying with it for three breaths. Notice where you feel it in your body, how strong it is, whether it changes. You can always stop.
Ask what the feeling needs
Pain often carries information. Grief shows what we loved. Anger shows where a boundary was crossed. Fear shows what matters to us. Asking “what does this feeling need from me?” can turn avoidance into care.
When pain is too much
Accepting feelings does not mean staying alone with overwhelming pain. If emotions feel unbearable, if you have experienced trauma, or if you notice that you are numbing yourself a lot, it can help to work with a therapist who can make the process gentle and safe.
If you are in crisis or having thoughts of ending your life, please call your local emergency number (for example 112 in Europe or 911 in North America and Mexico), or find a free, confidential helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.
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References
- Anālayo, B. (2020). Somatics of early buddhist mindfulness and how to face anxiety. Mindfulness, 11(6), 1520–1526. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01382-x
- Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2018). The psychological health benefits of accepting negative emotions and thoughts: Laboratory, diary, and longitudinal evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(6), 1075–1092. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157
- Lindsay, E. K., & Creswell, J. D. (2017). Mechanisms of mindfulness training: Monitor and Acceptance Theory (MAT). Clinical Psychology Review, 51, 48–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2016.10.011
- Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? [corrected] Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11(4), 807–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010
- Wang, Y., Tian, J., & Yang, Q. (2024). Experiential avoidance process model: A review of the mechanism for the generation and maintenance of avoidance behavior. Psychiatry and Clinical Psychopharmacology, 34(2), 179–190. https://doi.org/10.5152/pcp.2024.23777
This article is exploratory and meant for information and reflection. It cannot capture the full complexity of any individual situation, and your own experience may be different. It does not replace a diagnosis or treatment.
