One point that Ajahn Sumedho would stress regularly, is that loving things is not the same as liking them. Having kindness for ourselves or for other beings is not the same as liking everything. We often come a cropper by trying to make ourselves like everything. This is a completely wrong approach. When we taste something that’s bitter and try to force ourselves to believe it’s sweet this is just falsity, it’s just sugaring things over. It doesn’t work. It just makes the bitter even worse….We’re not trying to like everything, rather we’re recognising that everything belongs. Everything is part of nature: the bitter as well as the sweet, the beautiful as well as the ugly, the cruel as well as the kindly. The heart that recognises that fundamentally everything belongs is what I would describe as being the heart of kindness, the essence of kindness. If we get that really clear within us, and begin to train ourselves to recognise it, we realise that we can cultivate this quality of radical acceptance.
Ajahn Amaro, Radical Acceptance
If we do not stand firmly in the present moment we may feel ungrounded when we look at the future. We may think that in the future we will be alone, with no place of refuge and no one to help us. Such concerns about the future bring about unease, anxiety and fear, and do not help us at all in taking care of the present moment. The best way of preparing for the future is to take good care of the present, because we know that the present is made up of the past, then the future will be made up of the present. All we need to be responsible for is the present. Only the present is within our reach. To care for the present is to care for the future. 
When we practice it in meditation, self-acceptance entails noticing thoughts and emotions with empathy, but with a reduction of ….. the reactions of approval, disapproval or final judgment. This can give rise to two important realizations. First, through maintaining this equanimity, we can see patterns of thought and behaviour as they come and go – and let them do just that. So this provides a neutral space in which to witness what we often take to be “myself” as a dynamic of impulses, thoughts, responses and fresh impulses….. The second realization that depends on equanimity (and on investigation) is that mind-states are radically impermanent. If through sustaining equanimity, we stay focused on a mind-state, thought or emotion we notice that it ends – not in a sudden stop, but in a fading and an unravelling.
