How To Accept Change: What the Buddhist Philosophy Can Teach Us About Love, Loss and Letting Go

There is a question that sits quietly beneath much of human suffering, although we rarely ask it directly.

How do I stop losing the things I love?

We ask it in countless different ways. How do I stop my children growing up? How do I keep my parents healthy? How do I stop my partner falling out of love with me? How do I stay young? How do I stop my body changing? How do I make this feeling last?

Sometimes the question is even more subtle. We replay conversations hoping we might change the outcome. We struggle to let go of relationships that have already ended. We compare our current selves to who we were ten years ago. We long for life to return to the way it once was.

Most of us spend much of our lives trying to hold on.

Yet life has never promised us permanence.

More than 2,500 years ago, the Buddha described one of the simplest and most profound observations about being human. Everything changes.

In Buddhist philosophy this is known as impermanence (or ‘anicca’ but when I studied Buddhist philosophy this term was never used to so it’s a new one to me). Every moment gives way to another. Seasons change. Bodies age. Relationships evolve. Emotions rise and fall. Children become adults. Our identities shift as we accumulate experiences. Even the cells that make up our bodies are constantly renewing themselves.

At first glance, this can sound deeply unsettling. We naturally want stability. We like certainty. We want the people we love to stay exactly as they are.

Yet Buddhism offers an idea that is both surprisingly compassionate and remarkably consistent with modern psychology.

It is often not change itself that causes our greatest suffering. It is our struggle against the fact that change is happening.

As psychologists, we see this every day.

People rarely seek therapy because life unfolded exactly as they had hoped. They often come because something unexpected happened. Something changed. A relationship ended. A loved one died. They developed a chronic illness. A diagnosis explained years of confusion. They lost a job. A child moved away. A betrayal shattered their sense of safety. They discovered they are not the person they thought they were.

The pain is genuine. It deserves to be acknowledged.

But alongside that pain there is often another layer. A quieter struggle that sounds something like, "This wasn't supposed to happen."

That second layer is where much of our suffering begins.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, one of the most evidence-based psychological approaches available today, suggests that psychological distress often increases when we become entangled in a battle with reality itself. Rather than allowing painful experiences to exist, we spend enormous amounts of energy wishing they were different. Ironically, the harder we fight reality, the more trapped we can become (Hayes et al., 2012). Marsha M. Linehan, the founder of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy introduced radical acceptance as a fundamental skill in distress tolerance (Linehan, 2015). She talks about radical acceptance as fully acknowledging reality as it is exists in this moment, even when that reality is deeply painful. Because she found that her patient’s suffering was intensified when they refused to accept reality.

Buddhism recognised this thousands of years earlier.

Acceptance does not mean liking what has happened. It does not mean approving of injustice, pretending grief is easy or giving up on making positive changes. Acceptance simply means recognising what is already true, so we can decide how to move forward instead of remaining stuck arguing with the past.

One of my favourite Buddhist teachings illustrates this beautifully.

The Buddha spoke of the "Two Arrows." Imagine someone is struck by an arrow. The first arrow hurts. There is no avoiding that. Someone dies. Your partner leaves. You receive a frightening diagnosis. You lose your home. Your heart is broken. Pain is part of being human.

Then comes the second arrow.

"This shouldn't have happened."

"I'll never recover."

"If only I'd done something differently."

"My life is ruined."

The Buddha suggested that while we cannot always avoid the first arrow, we often spend years shooting ourselves with the second.

Modern psychology describes something similar. Rumination, self-blame, catastrophic thinking and repeated attempts to mentally rewrite the past all prolong emotional distress. They are understandable responses, but they often keep us tethered to suffering long after the original event has occurred.

Healing frequently begins not because the first arrow disappears, but because we gradually stop adding more arrows ourselves.

Impermanence also changes the way we understand grief.

When people hear the word grief, they usually think about death. Yet in therapy, grief appears in countless forms. We grieve the marriage that no longer feels safe. We grieve the version of ourselves that existed before trauma. We grieve opportunities we never took, careers that ended unexpectedly, friendships that quietly faded, our children's childhoods, our parents' independence, the body we had before illness, and sometimes (actually quite often) the future we had carefully imagined.

Every significant change asks us to let go of something.

This is why grief is not simply about death. It is about love encountering change. One of the most difficult aspects of grief is that we are rarely longing only for a person. Often, we are longing for a particular moment in time. We miss the father before dementia. The relationship before resentment. The body before chronic pain. The carefree version of ourselves before anxiety became part of our lives.

What we long for can never be recreated exactly as it was because time has already moved forward. That can feel devastating. It can also gently redirect us towards the only place healing can actually happen, which is the present.

Acceptance is not about forgetting yesterday. It is about building a relationship with today. Perhaps one of the hardest lessons impermanence offers is that nothing we love truly belongs to us.

Not our children.

Not our partners.

Not our parents.

Not our health.

Not even our own minds.

At first this sounds frightening. Yet, if we let it, I think it also changes how we love.

Imagine someone lends you a beautiful piece of music. You know it will end, but while it plays it fills the room with extraordinary beauty.

Would the music become more meaningful if it lasted forever? Probably not. In fact, its temporary nature is precisely what makes us pay attention.

The Japanese cherry blossoms offer a similar lesson. The name of this tradition escapes me but every spring, people gather beneath trees knowing the blossoms will fall within days. Their beauty comes not despite their brief existence, but because of it. If the blossoms remained all year, most of us would eventually stop noticing them. Their beauty exists precisely because it cannot be held on to. They even say the blossom is most beautiful just before it falls. There is a bittersweet feeling about this. Both sadness that we have lost something we loved and, simultaneously, joy that we got to experience such beauty in the first place. We carry both the ache of its absence and the profound gratitude that, for a little while, it was ours to experience.

The same is true of so much in our own lives.

A child's laughter.

A family dinner.

The holiday we almost didn't take.

A parent's embrace.

An ordinary Tuesday that, years later, becomes something we would give almost anything to experience one more time.

Impermanence does not steal beauty from these moments. It gives them their beauty.

Psychology increasingly supports this idea. Research on mindfulness suggests that recognising the transient nature of our experiences encourages us to become more present and less caught in automatic patterns of thinking. Rather than constantly anticipating the future or revisiting the past, we become more available for the life that is unfolding right now (Kabat-Zinn, 2013).

Perhaps the opposite of impermanence is not permanence. Perhaps it is taking life for granted. One of the ideas I find most comforting about impermanence is that it applies equally to joy and suffering. No emotion remains exactly the same forever. Even the most overwhelming panic attack eventually subsides. Intense grief softens over time, not because we forget the people we love, but because our relationship with the loss gradually changes.

This is something we often see in therapy. People worry they will always feel exactly as they do today. In that moment we forget the passing of time and the changing of seasons. Someone living with depression may struggle to imagine ever laughing again. Someone grieving believes the pain will always feel this sharp. Someone recovering from trauma wonders whether they will ever feel safe. The human brain tells convincing stories when we are distressed. It mistakes the present moment for the rest of our lives.

Yet experience repeatedly shows us something different. Everything continues changing.

Not always quickly.

Not always in ways we can see.

But change continues nonetheless.

This reminds me of the Japanese art of kintsugi (for some reason it’s been flooding my algorithm lately), where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold. The cracks are not hidden. They become part of the object's beauty. Many people arrive in therapy hoping to become the person they were before life hurt them. Most eventually discover something more realistic and perhaps more beautiful. Trauma can, and often does, spur growth.

Healing is rarely about going backwards. It is about becoming someone new who can carry both the wound and the wisdom.

The scar is not evidence that life is ruined. It is evidence that healing has occurred.

There is another Buddhist story that has stayed with me from my years of attending teachings. A young mother, devastated by the death of her child, begged the Buddha to bring him back. He agreed, on one condition. She needed to bring him a handful of mustard seeds from a household that had never experienced loss.

She travelled from house to house. Every family gladly offered mustard seeds. None could offer a home untouched by grief. One had lost a husband. Another a daughter. Another a brother. By the end of the day, she returned empty-handed. Not because she had failed. Because she had discovered she was not alone. Every family carries heartbreak. Every life eventually encounters loss.

As psychologists, we witness this every day. Behind almost every person who sits in our therapy room is a story of disappointment, grief, fear or change that few others know about. Suffering is not evidence that something has gone wrong with your life. It is evidence that you are living a human life. Perhaps that is the quiet invitation of impermanence. Not to become detached from life, but to become more deeply engaged with it.

To tell people you love them while they are here.

To notice the ordinary moments.

To allow yourself to grieve when life changes instead of rushing to "move on."

To recognise that happiness does not come from making life permanent, because permanence was never available to us in the first place.

It comes from learning to meet life as it unfolds.

Therapy cannot stop the people we love from changing. It cannot prevent grief, illness or loss. It cannot promise certainty in an uncertain world.

What therapy can do is help us develop a different relationship with change itself.

It can help us understand why we cling so tightly, explore the fears beneath that clinging, and gently loosen our grip without letting go of what matters. It can help us process grief that has become stuck, reconnect with our values after life has changed course, and discover that it is possible to feel sadness and hope, loss and gratitude, fear and courage at the same time.

Impermanence is not simply a philosophical idea. It is the landscape every human being walks through.

The more we learn to walk with it rather than against it, the more freedom we often discover.

If you find yourself struggling with change, grief, uncertainty or loss, speaking with a psychologist can help. Therapy offers a space to explore these experiences with curiosity and compassion, helping you make sense of what has changed while supporting you to build a meaningful life alongside it. If this resonates with you, you're welcome to book an appointment and begin that conversation.

References

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full Catastrophe Living (Revised ed.). Bantam Books.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press

Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (Updated ed.). William Morrow.

World Health Organization. (2022). World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All.