Heartland Header

To understand the primacy of kindness – to understand this in our hearts – is the necessary basis for living a grounded human life, and for becoming trustworthy, to ourselves and to others.

song: Kindness is my only Home

It is in our hearts that we feel unkindness, our hearts that are hurt by it. I use the word ‘heart’ to mean our feelings, our psyche, our responsive, feeling selves. It seems significant that heart and hurt are such similar words. (And the word heard comes close too.)

Song: Cover your Hurt/Heart

Often, the play between words, and between their worlds of meaning, can elucidate them enjoyably to our playful minds. (See Wordplay)

maybe postcard image for songs of earth & heart

It hurts, to care. Therefore we may seek to avoid pain by not caring, by turning away and closing our hearts. But if this turning away becomes a habit, it is ourselves we are failing to care for. Most harm is caused to others unconsciously - by people who are unaware - i.e. who can’t feel the damage they themselves have sustained.

Song: We are the Last to Know

When harm has occurred, we can’t heal, or be a part of the healing process unless we are willing to let things hurt – i.e. to care. We need to be willing to become aware of the truth we know through our feelings, and not push it away. No one else can feel or release our pain for us, from the locked boxes we’ve stored it in.

image - cartoon

Self-neglect – for the sake of avoiding pain – leads to pretend feelings, to going through the motions, to self-estrangement and confusion. In this state, we are at the mercy of every ego gambit, and can’t feel the difference between trustworthy and untrustworthy approaches, between sincerity and manipulation.

When we find our way back into our own Heartland, we have open access to our feelings, which keep us accurately informed about everything we need to know, to stay clear of unsustainable and compromising associations. This frees us up to enjoy the companionship of others who are being true to themselves.  Good company.

Christian Confusion

'Love thy neighbour' is a much-quoted saying of Jesus – but many Christians, and would-be ‘good people’, have overlooked the last two words of that saying: 'as thyself'.  'Love thy neighbour as thyself' loses its positive meaning in a culture where people are taught to 'deny themselves', and in fact to regard themselves with suspicion and contempt.

Christian culture has led many generations to get lost in a maze of self-deception and exhausting, destructive catering to mischief.

Similarly, many little Hitlers are appeased and atmospheres poisoned, within families and workplaces, because people are scared of their own fear and would do anything, including nurturing and colluding with a monstrous ego, to avoid it. Without accepting and feeling our own fear, and learning not to be bullied by it, we can’t become true to ourselves.

Christianity has preached that ‘self-sacrifice’ is the way to ‘salvation’, which actually means that self-betrayal is how to be rescued – from what, exactly?

Answering this question highlights the contorted (ego-pleasing) thinking that has beset Christianity since (in my view) Paul and the Church fathers got their hands on it.

For the implication of sacrificing ‘self’ for the sake of ‘redemption’ is that there is something fundamentally wrong with us, with our human nature, and something wrong with nature itself – something that needs ‘saving’ – from itself!

This arrogant attitude to life has tainted and driven the West's amazing rise, over the past few centuries, to global pre-eminence.  Because of this underlying attitude, our rise has proved destructive both to our own emotional health and to the health of the earth.

Here is a view from the Heartland: this amazing human life we are sharing runs on love and attraction, on generosity and kindness.  It is so mysterious, beautiful and subtle that we don’t begin to understand it, for all our scientific ingenuity.  One of the stumbling blocks to our understanding is surely our managerial attitude to the Cosmos.  We regard nature as inadequate, and requiring our interventions to improve it and make it habitable for us.  Western culture seeks to resist the fundamental reality that this life and this world have brought us into being (including all our technology) - and not the other way round!

Instead of celebrating this miracle in gratitude, respect and wonder, we have been educated to look down on human (and, by implication, animal) life as 'nasty, brutish and short'. Our religious culture has slandered our human nature as evil, as something to be somehow floated free of, or ‘transcended’. This slander, foisted on our children from their infancy, is Christianity’s original sin.