Cost of Denial

You can go into denial mode, which is “I won’t think about that suffering. I’ll push it away.” And the cost of that is very heavy. See, if you go into a denial mode, what you do is you armor your heart from the world, and when you do that, you are keeping something out that is going to overwhelm you, but you’re also keeping something out that you need, which is the nourishment that comes from the emotional interaction with the world around you. You become armored, you become ‘professionally warm’, you become able to handle the crises moment after moment, the horror of it all, by just going up into your head, closing your heart. So denial has an incredible cost.

– Ram Dass, Detroit, Oregon – 1994