Life, as Sydney Banks described it, is "a contact sport."  In a contact sport, each player has great plays and terrible plays.  Wins and losses.  Injuries they cause and injuries that happen to them.  No one can expect smooth sailing under cloudless skies every minute of every day.  Our life is our learning adventure.  Life offers us the development of new skills, the clarity to learn from mistakes, the humility to recognize that denying our role in ups and down holds us back.  Denial sustains the uneasy experience of insecurity.  When we accept human frailty in all of us, when we don't try to evade or deny or refuse to see our part in the course of events, we are cheating ourselves from learning life's lessons, building trust within ourselves and with others, and finding peace of mind.  Denial keeps us stuck in time; denial keeps us stuck in our own beliefs about ourselves and life.  Stuff happens.  We make mistakes.  We are sometimes thoughtless and hurtful.  We are human beings.  Denial slams the door on our spiritual growth and our capacity to acknowledge and learn from our past, and the ability to take responsibility for our own missteps and then let them go.

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