by Shad Berry
Kardia is the Greek word for heart, but not the organ that pumps blood through your veins. Your kardia is the center of your emotions, volitional will, and courage. Technically speaking, your kardia is known as your limbic brain and it is fully developed when you are born. It knows no language or time. It is tender, sensitive, and responsive to life, in order to help you survive and ultimately thrive. Your Neo-cortex, the CEO of the brain, is developed much later into adulthood. In part, your Neo-cortex exists to give voice to your limbic brain. It would be accurate to say that you were designed to feel before you think.
The kardia is resilient and fragile, powerful and weak, courageous and afraid. Your kardia is what makes relationships with other humans possible because it is what makes us 99.9% the same. It is what makes us able to relate one to another. When the weight of responsibility and the pain of living becomes great, humans are unique from other members of creation. We have the ability to hide our heart from the world in order to protect its vulnerability, its weaknesses, and sensitivities. In so doing, at least two things happen, often unknowingly:
1) We insulate ourselves from receiving love.
2) We guard ourselves from loving others.
The same degree to which you deny the existence of your own feelings is the same degree you will expect others to deny theirs. In that process you are becoming less human and asking others to do the same. Living with this denial over time, your capacity for empathy, faith, sacrifice, and love is diminished. Your relationships with other human beings will suffer.
Your blind spots will grow as will your defense of them. In an effort to avoid pain and loss, you will keep people at a relative distance, even the ones you want the deepest connection with. You will become more callous and less tender. This approach to living has a shelf life because the fuel of life is relationship and the power of relationship is love. If you succeed in building a wall that protects your heart from pain then you will also succeed at keeping love out. If you succeed in keeping love out you will also prevent yourself from freely loving others. Allowing yourself to be loved is one of the most vulnerable postures the heart will ever know.
Every single human heart carries with it the same dignity, value, and worth. Every single human being deserves the same opportunities to be nurtured, encouraged, seen, and heard.
Every single human heart carries with it the same dignity, value, and worth. Every single human being deserves the same opportunities to be nurtured, encouraged, seen, and heard.
The human heart comes into the world full of hope and yet, it is shaped by its experiences. It fully believes it will have a place and space where it will matter and belong, where it will be valued and loved. It hopes to participate and contribute to the flourishing of human relationships and culture.
Tragically, not every human heart is welcomed into this life with equal dignity, value, or a sense of worth. Not every human heart is welcomed into this life with the same sense of belonging and mattering. Racism and bigotry are great tragedies of our history on this planet and in this nation.
RACISM HAS LURKED IN THE HEART OF HUMANITY IN AN EFFORT FOR ONE RACE TO ENSURE SECURITY, AUTHORITY, AND SUPREMACY OVER ANOTHER. RACISM IS BASED ON FALSE ASSUMPTIONS, MISJUDGMENTS, AND DEHUMANIZING BELIEFS THAT HAVE BEEN HANDED DOWN FOR GENERATIONS.
These biased opinions have become so commonplace over time that they have infiltrated our institutions, organizations, schools, churches, government, and laws. The failure to extend equal dignity and worth to every single heart is reprehensible and intolerable. Every kardia is not provided the opportunity to grow, thrive, be seen, and heard. The generational damage done to the hearts and lives of humans, specifically to black families and non-whites in America, is incalculable. Our grief would be overwhelming and our repentance would be extravagant, if we were to drop our defenses, soften our hearts, and open our eyes to allow ourselves to see the full extent of it.
It is normal to experience multiple feelings at the same time regarding the same thing. If you are reading this and feel a combination of defensiveness, compassion, gratefulness, justification, empathy, sadness, denial, acceptance and shame, you are normal. My encouragement to you, the reader, is to consider each of those parts of your heart.
WHAT ARE EACH OF THOSE FEELINGS RESPONDING TO? WHAT HAVE THEY SEEN? WHAT DO THEY SEE NOW?
If defensiveness is predominant and blocking your ability to experience compassion and empathy, ask yourself what it costs you to set aside your defenses? What does it require you to give up? What might it require you to do?
It is normal human behavior to avoid seeing scary, hurtful, shameful, and tragic things. Denial protects me from my own feelings of what I have seen and the responsibility to carry the burden of love and act lovingly. It allows inequities and hypocrisies to form our thoughts and actions.
Surrender, on the other hand, frees me to see what is true, appropriately feel the weight of it emotionally, and determine what it would look like to lovingly respond to what I have seen and felt. Surrender is not giving up; it is setting down the weapons of denial and avoidance. Surrender says I will allow myself to see, feel, love and be loved.
Denial seeks understanding to reinforce defenses. Surrender seeks understanding to better know how to love. Avoidance tricks the heart into thinking it's not my job and not my fault.
SURRENDER INVITES THE HEART TO CONFESS, “I HAVE BLIND SPOTS AND I NEED HELP SEEING WHAT IS REAL.”
The chorus of conversations and activism around racism in our country is at the highest decibel most of us have heard in our lifetimes. As it should be. There will be a division within humanity in the coming days and it will not be along racial lines. It will be between those who allowed themselves to see the perilous impact of racism in our land and the hearts of those it has crushed and those who insisted on denying and defending racism. May the prior overwhelm the latter with acts of compassion, mercy, grace, and peace.
At Kardia Collective, we are committed to confronting racism continually, first and foremost within ourselves, and wherever else we may encounter it. We are also committed to supporting the healing process of any heart that has suffered under the weight and cruelty of racism to restore the courage, hope, and freedom they were born with.