denial

When you're in bed to-night think not of wars, But rather of the Panda fast asleep, Her piebald head cushioned on woolly paws; Or think of velvet mice that warmly creepInto their holes to curl up round and soft. Transfer your thoughts from bellicose affairs;Though it be true that bombers fly aloft,Try to reflect on little furry

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

The human mind isn't a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn't make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.

Denial isn't just a river in Egypt.

The world could use more love. Why deny it to others?

What does love mean if we would deny it to others?

The best antidote to the furtive poison of anger, fear, anxiety, or any of our destructive, unwieldy passions, is just gratitude. And not the grandiose, boisterous or especially obvious kind. It is not necessarily the verbose or expressive kind. It's often the full immersion, a kind of deep submersion even, into a pool of awareness. This penitent affect distills within us surreal realizations; it is a focus, tinged with layers of deep remorse and the profound beauty of newfound appreciation that washes over us about the simplest things we have slipped into, or suddenly become aware of our own complacency over. This cooling antidote instantly soothes any veins swollen with the heat of pride, or stopped up with pearls of finely polished self-pity. This all comes about with a balm of humility that is simultaneously soothing and jolting to all of our senses at the same time. It is a cocktail both sedative and stimulant in the same, finite instant. It often occurs as we are halted dead in our tracks by a thing so extraordinary and breathtakingly natural, even luscious in its simplicity and unusually ordinary existence; often something we have been blatantly negligent of noticing as we routinely trudge past it in our self-absorbed haze. These are akin to the emotions one might feel as they finally notice the well-established antique rose garden, in full bloom; the same one they have walked by for years on their way to somewhere - but never noticed before. This is the feeling we get when our aging parent suddenly, in one moment, is 87 in our mind's eye - and not the steady 57, or eternal 37 we have determinedly seen our so loved one to be, out of purely wishful thinking born of the denial that only the truest love and devotion can begin to nurture - for the better of many decades.

We tend to deny our humanity because in accepting the fullness of it, we would need to confess how little we__e done with it.

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one.

Nothing will ever be solved if we wallow in the darkness of denial.

Fear left unrestrained always leaves us running __rom_ something. Fear harnessed compels us to run __o_ something. And fear denied leaves us running in circles.

Love should never mean having to live in fear.

Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?

To __retend_ is to say that I__ willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I__ unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren__ true.

Denial is the way people handle what they cannot handle.

From time to time, we all must go unto a landscape__e it inner or outer landscape__here there are no hiding places. Allowing the stark awe and silence to aid us in both communing and confronting the depth of ourselves. We fear emptiness because we know that within those places of nothingness we will come face-to-face with who we are and gaze into the internal mirror. But what is the alternative? Shall we go our entire life without hearing our own voice . . . without ever having met who we are when isolated from all?

Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth.

... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.