Identify, Accept, Embrace, and Let Go

What I’m offering in this blog post isn’t revolutionary.

It’s been done before.

Really, all spiritual tools and techniques have been done before.

Any time I hear someone trumpeting a personal transformation or spiritual awakening tool as the latest and greatest thing, I am more than a little skeptical.

That’s not even the right word. It’s not skepticism. I know that all these tools are leading us back to the simplicity of letting go, and they’re all really the same thing.

As such, I am happy to announce that this is NOT the latest and greatest thing.

You most likely have and/or will find other people saying the exact same things with different words in other spiritual traditions, psychology, and so forth. So let me repeat. This is not new.

Hopefully, this post is immensely helpful.

Step 0: Surrender

This spiritual awakening blog post is one of the more fundamental spiritual techniques and ways of thinking about healing and spiritual growth. Especially for healing, this process of identifying, accepting, embracing, and letting go can be immensely valuable.

But it all starts and continues with surrender.

Surrender means you’re willing to open your eyes to the reality you’re in.

Most people never get past Step 0, and it is a step that is repeated through the other steps.

Most serious seekers on the spiritual path are traumatized bypassers hoping for a magical solution. They don’t want to see or be where they are.

In short, they’re in resistance–the opposite of surrender.

As such, nothing can change for them. The suffering continues. That all changes when you choose to surrender.

I didn’t say that you felt like you should surrender or that your ego self wants to. I said that you choose to surrender.

Choice is at the heart of realizing your spiritual freedom.

Surrender, Surrender, and Keep Surrendering

With that said, I’d like to break out the four phases and talk about what they are and how to use them.

Step 1: Identify–Bringing Light to the Problem

If you can’t see it, you can’t deal with it.

The identify step tends to be of huge importance especially for the spiritual newbies.

Initially, people are used to being self-ignorant and sometimes very self-arrogant, which is when we think we know ourselves but actually we haven’t a clue. Learning to turn the spotlight of attention on ourselves tends to feel unnatural, strange, and unsettling. People can get very upset by what they notice because…well, they’re noticing they’ve got a lot of pain.

That pain may jeopardize their ego story.

For example, lots of ego stories paint a picture for the person that they are fine. However, when their own light illuminates all these broken pieces, that story gets disrupted. They are forced into a conflict, and they have to either choose the illusory story or the reality. This is where the ego defensive mechanisms can kick in.

5 Ego Defenses and Traps You Need to Know

You have to come back to awareness to surrender and keep your eyes open to the reality.

Many spiritual seekers look away and go to a state of

willful ignorance.

This polar opposite of identify means the person knows there’s a problem but tries to play dumb.

The Ego Plays Dumb

They may try to self-medicate and re-numb themselves with a variety of things such as constantly staying busy with work, recreation, endless scrolling, drinking, doing drugs, and countless other distractions.

But the problem doesn’t go away.

Ignorance is not bliss.

If your leg is broken, just because you can’t feel it doesn’t mean you’re not damaging yourself.

Pain, by and large, is the way we get our own attention that something is wrong. A lot of the identification phase will be noticing the pain in which you live.

Keep in mind that this phase will go in waves and move into deeper levels as you work through issues. It’s generally not the case that someone identifies every issue off the bat. We work through layers of limiting beliefs and issues as we work down into core beliefs.

At the identification level, tools like journaling, meditating, working with a spiritual teacher, and so forth are all about finding issues and noticing what is actually going on in your mind, heart, and body.

Do You Need a Spiritual Teacher?

Finally, there is often a time period of stabilization and un-numbing that many people will go through before dealing with more significant issues. Those stages only happen when a person identifies what they’re doing as a problem.

Step 2: Accept–Letting the Truth Sink in

After you’ve identified an issue such as old wounds from your mother’s emotional neglect abuse, the only rational thing to do is to accept them.

However, the very human thing is to deny the problem.

You’re noticing that I’m pointing out the polar opposites as I’m going.

I hope to help you better understand yourself by showing you the reverse because the reverse actions are much more commonly practiced.

Where ignorance and denial operate in your life, you live in darkness. You are closing your eyes.

Open eyes can identify and accept life as it is. It doesn’t mean you like things as they are. Surrender, identify, and accept are not about liking or agreeing with reality.

But with open eyes, you can see the forest fire. Now, you can make better decisions as opposed to closing your eyes and trying to ignore the burning smell.

Going back to the example of emotional neglect abuse, accepting this truth doesn’t mean that you have to confront your mother.

There’s almost never step one.

Rather, it means you can identify further elements involved with the emotional abuse inside of you. You can go back to that identification step and see where this issue affected your relationships with other women, how you neglect your emotions, how you neglect the feelings of others, and so forth.

Coloring or diagramming these issues can be useful to visualize the whole system of this issue and further shine light on the situation.

And lots of issues are systemic, which is why it can feel like it takes forever to release something.

We don’t need a long time to release an issue, by the way. But you need to understand the system because it’ll help you see how committed you are to it, and it’s your commitment and attachment to pain that drags things out.

Again, the urge to deny is likely to rise up again.

Breathe, come back to awareness, and surrender to your reality.

Acceptance of an issue takes you deeper into it. It moves you towards embracing it–not cutting it out.

Step 3: Embrace–The Long Hug that Makes Your Skin Crawl

Yes, cuddling with fear is not fun. That’s why it’s still inside.

Hanging out with shame is gross.

Sadness is a sopping wet mess, and anger wants to burn you from the inside out.

Sitting with these upset emotions is never on anyone’s fun-day Sunday list.

Which is why they’re there.

They’re your past due emotional bills that you avoided paying, and this is why so much of a spiritual awakening and most spiritual transitions involve sitting with the upset emotions.

What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

Most people don’t postpone joy (although some do), which is why we don’t spend a lot of this process releasing emotional attachments in giggles.

On the other side of the emotional coin, we have to mindful in our lives to not try and to hold on to “good” feelings. This is the quickest way to sour a good relationship or situation.

Letting go is natural for all emotions.

On the spiritual path, we aren’t creating a preference or one blissful state to continually experience.

We are opening to all feelings and experiences, which is a very profound thing indeed.

As such, we are always going through an embrace of an experience and a letting go. Where we don’t, we get stuck.

With upset feelings, the polarity can be avoidance and procrastination. We don’t want to deal with them. You will find many internal ego guards, guard dogs, and closed gates of your own making inside of you, which is why releasing often goes in layers.

In one case, a lack of self-belief may be shielding you from going into painful emotions. In another situation, it could be a fear of the unknown. In yet another, it could be fear of being overwhelmed. Yet another, it could be guilt and shame.

But all these emotions, old traumas, pains, stories, and general suffering are just you.

They are also transitory if you give them their moment to be fully seen, heart, and felt.

Step 4: Let Go–At Long Last, the Release

For the upset emotions, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for.

But still, even amidst the embrace, you may notice a desire to hold on. Holding on shows up in this fourth step as well as the third.

The embrace of the romantic relationship is ending after 5 years. It’s time to let it go.

The job is ending.

The conversation is ending.

Your phone contract is ending. It’s time to find a new one.

Even when things are uncomfortable, the trained habit of holding on will have people grasping to things that they know they should let go of. It’s insane.

And people worry:

Who will I be without my pain?

Keep noticing what is holding on. Breathe into it. More issues are about to be identified.

But then, something releases.

And ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Relaxation.

Opening.

A moment of peace.

Maybe.

For those in intense shifts, this moment may be nonexistent or quickly submerged by the next set of issues.

But at different parts of your inner work, you will have this moment.

A new expansion in you may follow, but not necessarily.

Lots of things can happen.

Typically you feel better. 🙂

If the letting go happened in the mind, you may feel more at ease in understanding, thinking, and speaking. It may be clearer what is true and what is not.

Discovering Reality and Real Empowerment–Mike C.’s Testimonial

If the letting go happened in the heart, you may feel more loving and compassionate.

If it happened in the body, the body may feel more relaxed and flexible.

With letting go, there may be shifts in the people and situations around you as you behave differently. And of course, the more clear you are in yourself, the more deeply you can see within so that you can go deeper.

How to Go Spiritually Deeper

The next set of issues gets ready to be surrendered to, and the process repeats.

Speeding Up of the Process

As we have greater and greater faith in this process, it tends to speed up. By faith, I mean you more quickly surrender to the reality without looking away, denying it, holding on (when you should let go), or avoiding when you need to more fully embrace.

We often don’t need to spend as much time identifying and accepting because we actually know already.

You already know so many of the things you need to address.

So many people get stuck in an ego playing dumb.

In some instances, all four phases may happen seamlessly together for an issue. This is often what a lot of spiritual masters and teachers are talking about when they say, “Just let go.”

Ultimately, it takes a lot of internal tension to ignore, deny, avoid, and hold onto things.

Feel the resistance in your body some time. If you want to, just clench your fist as tightly as possible for 2 minutes and see how it feels. You probably will hate the exercise after about 30 seconds (and please don’t hurt yourself–this is just an example).

The point is that this is how many people are living their lives at the intellectual, emotional, and physical levels. Generally speaking, the pain you feel is simply the pain you have been living in your whole life. Awakening and the spiritual path aren’t making you suffer;

they helping you to see that you already ARE suffering.

Now it’s time to make a choice to find a way out.

The Way Out Is the Way In

We cannot get away from ourselves. However, we’ve tried in every way to escape reality in this culture.

All of our escapes fail to help us, and they usually create so much more suffering for everyone.

I encourage you to have courage to go within.

Look at what is going on inside so that you can identify what is happening. This can take awhile. It is very humbling to realize that we have no idea who we are. Then it very naturally follows that you have to accept this and everything else you see.

This simply is what Is.

If you don’t enjoy the pain you live in, you only have one person to point the finger at even if you’ve had horrible traumas (and while there are exceptions, blaming other people doesn’t help you release attachments and heal).

Then you take a really big deep breath and embrace this truth. You feel it. You sit with it. You may cry. You may scream. You may ache in your body.

It varies by issue. Not all issues feel like someone is pulling your teeth out. But even when it does feel that bad, just understand that it is temporary. It is passing as you sit with it, but make no timetables for how long it should last.

Then it lets go.

Something opens up, and you get to be a little freer and clearer. It’s different with every issue, but

once something truly lets go, you don’t have to deal with that piece of the issue again.

That freedom is why many of us become so dedicated to this path out of suffering.

If you want help in letting go, you can learn more about my sessions here:

Updated 5/17/2026