The Benifit of Denial
"Faced with the depth of loss and disappearance in the average life, a measure of denial is creative, necessary and self-compassionate: children are not meant to know they are one day meant to die and older adults are not meant to tell them. Refusing to face what we are not yet ripe and ready to face can help us to live in the present." David Whyte
I have often sighted the feeling of denial as a tool to endure the hardest of times when we are not ready to deal with what has come our way. There will be always be things that will happen in life that we don't have to focus on and that are better left alone, put away until we are ready or until it is necessary to address it. People with cancer and other serious illness may opt not to think about the cancer spreading in their body and prefer to live in the moment, sighting the fact that they are still feeling good, especially when the treatments are presented as an option that will lessen the quality of their life. Denying that one has cancer or AIDS is about not being ready yes but much more about living in the moment and living it fully. When we don't need to dwell on something and can put it aside and not think on it too much it serves us for the moment. There is really nothing wrong with denial to a large degree. If we love ourselves sometimes we just have to pretend that what happened or is happening is a lie. We then replace the lie with our own truth.
For ten years Susana has been fighting cancer. She is an incredible artist and happens to be a Buddhist. For the past thirty years she has believed that we are the ones who manifest things in our life. During the time that she has fought cancer Susana has had very little conventional treatments, always following the trends to heal holistically. She has denied that she is going to die and denied that cancer will take her, even though when the time comes I think she will embrace her transition she lives each day fully and rarely if ever talks about her cancer. As a result of denying the cancer she has lived ten years and likely more of a quality of life than had she taken the conventional western medical path. Her refusal to see her body as a vessel with cancer afforded her a longer life and one that is of quality. This is when denial helps us to heal and understand that we are not the issues that are presented to us and that we can and do overcome them in various ways: like denial.
As some know my sister Dora committed suicide when she was 22. She checked into a hotel and she shot herself with a gun she'd gotten from her boss's desk. I was devastated when I received the news and for weeks I cried day and night and wondered what I could have done for her. I blamed myself for not seeing the signs and not helping her through the difficult period in her life with an abusive spouse. It took me a long time to heal from that loss and denial played a part in it. In my mind I decided that sh had a right to decide whether she wanted to be in this world. I also thought that she knew that she was not of this world because she was simply too nice a person. In my mind I made up a story about how much more happiness she is experiencing in heaven where she went. I denied the pain and replaced it with a story that was for me a bit more acceptable to my heart and it helped me to heal. When she died I told the people at work that she died in a car accident because at that time I was not prepared to say that she killed herself. Every denial around this incident helped me to move forward and to deal with it at my own pace. This is what denial does for all of us. It helps us to address things at the pace that we are ready for.
"Much better to pay attention to what beckons than to try to look at what by definition , we are not ready to look at".
David Whyte
This quote says it all to me and perhaps will help others navigate from denial to reality when they are ready to do so. There is not one good reason to look at something we are not ready to address and the fact is that if we force it we can only make ourselves sick over it. When we are ready we will face the issues associated with the death of a spouse. When the time comes for us to face the financial facts around losing a job then we will. We may have been fired from our job and our spouse not been such a nice person but dwelling on these realities will not help us to heal or move on. It is better to deny we were married to a jerk that died before we left them and put that information where it belong: in the denial garbage bin, deleting it for good if we can and never speaking about it. We can create our own truth and that truth be prettier than the facts. This is especially useful when it comes to past situations that are negative and have only caused us pain, things that others don't want to hear anyway.
What in your life are you accepting, pondering and thinking about that could be better put aside as if it were not true? Think about this my beloveds.
I have often sighted the feeling of denial as a tool to endure the hardest of times when we are not ready to deal with what has come our way. There will be always be things that will happen in life that we don't have to focus on and that are better left alone, put away until we are ready or until it is necessary to address it. People with cancer and other serious illness may opt not to think about the cancer spreading in their body and prefer to live in the moment, sighting the fact that they are still feeling good, especially when the treatments are presented as an option that will lessen the quality of their life. Denying that one has cancer or AIDS is about not being ready yes but much more about living in the moment and living it fully. When we don't need to dwell on something and can put it aside and not think on it too much it serves us for the moment. There is really nothing wrong with denial to a large degree. If we love ourselves sometimes we just have to pretend that what happened or is happening is a lie. We then replace the lie with our own truth.
For ten years Susana has been fighting cancer. She is an incredible artist and happens to be a Buddhist. For the past thirty years she has believed that we are the ones who manifest things in our life. During the time that she has fought cancer Susana has had very little conventional treatments, always following the trends to heal holistically. She has denied that she is going to die and denied that cancer will take her, even though when the time comes I think she will embrace her transition she lives each day fully and rarely if ever talks about her cancer. As a result of denying the cancer she has lived ten years and likely more of a quality of life than had she taken the conventional western medical path. Her refusal to see her body as a vessel with cancer afforded her a longer life and one that is of quality. This is when denial helps us to heal and understand that we are not the issues that are presented to us and that we can and do overcome them in various ways: like denial.
As some know my sister Dora committed suicide when she was 22. She checked into a hotel and she shot herself with a gun she'd gotten from her boss's desk. I was devastated when I received the news and for weeks I cried day and night and wondered what I could have done for her. I blamed myself for not seeing the signs and not helping her through the difficult period in her life with an abusive spouse. It took me a long time to heal from that loss and denial played a part in it. In my mind I decided that sh had a right to decide whether she wanted to be in this world. I also thought that she knew that she was not of this world because she was simply too nice a person. In my mind I made up a story about how much more happiness she is experiencing in heaven where she went. I denied the pain and replaced it with a story that was for me a bit more acceptable to my heart and it helped me to heal. When she died I told the people at work that she died in a car accident because at that time I was not prepared to say that she killed herself. Every denial around this incident helped me to move forward and to deal with it at my own pace. This is what denial does for all of us. It helps us to address things at the pace that we are ready for.
"Much better to pay attention to what beckons than to try to look at what by definition , we are not ready to look at".
David Whyte
This quote says it all to me and perhaps will help others navigate from denial to reality when they are ready to do so. There is not one good reason to look at something we are not ready to address and the fact is that if we force it we can only make ourselves sick over it. When we are ready we will face the issues associated with the death of a spouse. When the time comes for us to face the financial facts around losing a job then we will. We may have been fired from our job and our spouse not been such a nice person but dwelling on these realities will not help us to heal or move on. It is better to deny we were married to a jerk that died before we left them and put that information where it belong: in the denial garbage bin, deleting it for good if we can and never speaking about it. We can create our own truth and that truth be prettier than the facts. This is especially useful when it comes to past situations that are negative and have only caused us pain, things that others don't want to hear anyway.
What in your life are you accepting, pondering and thinking about that could be better put aside as if it were not true? Think about this my beloveds.
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