When facing life circumstances we don’t like — loss, grief, a difficult medical diagnosis — the idea of acceptance is often out of reach.
Instead we fight, deny, bargain and battle with reality.
Michael Eselun knows this experience firsthand, as an individual faced with the everyday challenges of being human and as a board-certified clinical chaplain with the Simms/Mann UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology, which provides psychosocial support, spiritual care, nutrition guidance and patient education at no cost to people receiving cancer treatment at UCLA Health.
Eselun meets with patients and caregivers privately and hosts a weekly online support group.
He offered insights on finding peace amid life’s difficulties during a recent webinar called “Face the Music and Dance: Acceptance and Self-Compassion,” part of the Simms/Mann Center’s regular online educational series.
Below are some highlights, in his own words:
Eastern wisdom traditions suggest that equanimity — acceptance of what is as it is — is the pathway to inner peace. In fact, there’s a Zen Buddhist maxim that says, “The great way is easy for those with no preferences.” It sounds simple. Yet as an oncology chaplain, every day I walk beside folks for whom a cancer diagnosis is automatic entry into the veritable Olympics of acceptance, Zen masters be damned. Nobody bought a ticket for this particular ride. Everyone definitely has their preferences, and they would have chosen anything other than this.
Stage 4 cancer at 40? I can't accept that. I want my old life back.
Still, the wisdom traditions are right about one thing: resisting what is deepens our suffering. Yet we live in a culture that reveres self-reliance and abhors anything that looks like self-pity. The part of us that characterizes our feelings as self-pitying is the same part that would deny us acceptance and, with it, self-compassion. The two go together in a kind of dance. While I might have this lofty ambition toward acceptance and equanimity, I’m also encumbered by very human feelings of regret and anger and grief and sorrow and disappointment. What about equanimity for those feelings as well?
Letting feelings into the light
One patient, a man in his early 40s, had just been diagnosed with an aggressive sarcoma. He felt fine, which made the whole thing seem unreal. He had read enough to know what might be coming, and he was terrified. “I don't dare feel those feelings,” he told me. “If I do, I'll go down a dark hole and never come out.”
It’s a pretty commonly held perception that if we allow ourselves to feel our feelings, somehow they will take over. What I’ve found to be true is the exact opposite. When we give our feelings some sunlight, take them out into the air, it can rob them of their power. They loosen their grip from around our throat and we can see, oh, they’re just feelings. As the poet Rilke reminds us: no feeling is final.
The symphony of a whole person
Another patient had lived with a rare lymphoma for many years and cycled through a dozen treatment protocols. Each worked for a while, then stopped. On the first day of yet another regimen, she was sobbing in the infusion clinic.
She insisted that she was lucky: “I have great insurance, a wonderful husband, a deep faith. So many people have it worse. Why am I such a crybaby?”
She could not reconcile her weariness, frustration and anger with her identity as the cheerful one, the person for whom positivity comes before everything else. It was as if she were composing a symphony using only four or five bright, high notes: gratitude, hope, joy. But it takes all 88 keys on the piano to write a full-bodied symphony: the sweet, high notes and the deep, dark ones and everything in between.
A bird and a cage
When I was a boy, I had a toy — a little gizmo with a trigger on it, and when you pulled it, a card would spin really fast. The card had a bird on one side and a cage on the other. When you pulled the trigger, it spun so fast that it looked like the bird was inside the cage. Each side told the truth of what it was. But we only got the complete picture by the constant movement between the two.
I think acceptance and self-compassion work the same way. Acknowledging what is real, and tending to what that reality does to us, are not separate tasks. We move back and forth between them.
A woman with ovarian cancer once told my reflection group she hated the word “acceptance.” To her, it implied approval, and she would never approve of her cancer. She preferred “acknowledge.” I think she was onto something. Acceptance does not mean liking, approving or giving up. It means facing what is true.
What a cold hotel and a wrecked car taught me
In 2017, I spent a glorious day climbing to Bhutan's Tiger's Nest Monastery. The next morning, an unexpected snowstorm shut down the airport, the power and my itinerary. I had to spend an extra night in a small town and fretted over missing my series of flights back to LA. I ran into a man from the airport in the hotel lobby and he asked, “How do you like the hotel?” There was no power, no heat, no hot water. I felt my ugly inner American start to rise up.
“Well, it’s very nice,” I said. “But there’s no heat, no hot water, and no internet and I need to contact home and get home.”
“Yes,” he said. “This whole area — no heat, no hot water.” He said this with a gentle, compassionate shrug, and shaking his head— as if to say, “I’m so sorry. That’s just how it is, and we are all in this together.”
It was such a striking example of equanimity and acceptance. I realized I may not have the DNA for that kind of equanimity, but I can aspire to it.
Another lesson. On January 3, 2020, a driver ran a red light and totaled my old Prius, which I’d hoped to get a few more years out of. I’d just invested $5,000 for a new hybrid battery and new tires. Now I had to spend money I didn’t plan on to replace it. Ten months later, my new car was parked in front of my house when a kid running a drug deal gone bad smashed into it with such velocity that he knocked it clear in front of the neighbor’s place. On Christmas Eve. During the pandemic.
I could not accept it. Well-meaning people told me to be grateful I was safe and that it was only money. They were right, of course. And yet I wanted to scream. It took a good few days before I finally came up with a word for how I felt: forsaken. It was as though the universe had broken its contract with me: be good, and good things will come.
When the tow truck finally hauled away the wreck, I sobbed as if they were wheeling away a loved one.
Driving past Forest Lawn cemetery a few days later, I was having a little conversation with myself because I was so angry for not being able to get past this and let it go. I thought, “Thousands of people are buried up there. I bet they’d give anything to be back in a body and dealing with something as stupid as your car. Doesn’t that put this into perspective?”
It didn’t. That’s when I realized this touched a deeper wound than just the car. And it’s incumbent upon me to show some compassion for that wound, to investigate it, to try to understand it, without trying to judge it or compare it to something else. As soon as I did, I started to float much closer to a place I would call acceptance. The two go together, self-compassion and acceptance.
Tips for practicing self-compassion
Eselun offered this guidance for developing self-kindness:
- Notice when you are being unkind to yourself. Many of us talk to ourselves in ways we would never speak to anyone else. That harshness is a sign we need tenderness, he said.
- Be with yourself, don’t try to fix yourself. The root of compassion means “to be with.” When you are struggling, consider placing a hand on your chest and saying to yourself, “This is really hard, and I’m not going to abandon you.”
- Say “I need a break,” even when you can't take one. Naming the need is itself a kindness.
- Beware of “compare and despair.” Measuring your pain against someone else's only gives you another stick to beat yourself with. Suffering is not a contest, and compassion is not rationed.
- Hold both. A patient facing life-altering surgery put it perfectly: she was scared and brave and grieving and curious, all at once. It is rarely either/or. It is both/and.
