Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Ode to Trump and the GOP

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You have proven yourselves once again to be the party that liberates the enslaved.

Dear Mr. Trump and the GOP,

I want to thank you for all you have done in such a short period of time to help me come to clarity about the world I want to live in and for showing me that I don’t need to let any rule or precedent from the past stand in my way.

Your astounding ability to envision, claim and fashion the world you want has prompted me to ask myself: What does the world I want to live in look like? I don’t have the complete answer yet—it’s still coming into focus—but here’s what I can see so far:

The world I want to live in and help create is joyful and kind. It’s a world where everyone has the opportunity to express their unique genius and radiant Self. It’s a playful and creative place where all are flourishing together, celebrating one another, and living in constant wonder of the miraculous Now and of themselves as one-of-a-kind expressions of Existence itself. Mine is a world where the Earth is abundant and thriving, and we humans are fully aware of our oneness and interdependence with all Life on the planet.

In short, it’s a world where Love reigns.

I know I would be preaching to the choir if I told you that if I want to see a new world, I have to first be that new world. (After all, it’s not like a new world is just going to happen on the scene one day and we’ll go, “Oh wow! How cool is that?!?”) Furthermore, thanks to you, I now understand that if there are any rules or norms from the past that get in the way of the world I want to live in, I’m free to throw them onto the trash heap of history.

So here are some of the rules of the past that I know I’ll need to discard in the interest of creating and living in the world I desire:

Rule #1: Nothing is ever enough, and life is an endless, desperate struggle to get ahead. (Where is “ahead” anyway? I’ve just been wondering about that.)

Rule #2: We are all engaged in an existential battle of US vs. THEM and there is something called “The Enemy.” (Really? That is so second millennium!)

Rule #3: Some people are entitled to more _______________ (fill in the blank: money, power, influence, education, health care) than other people because, well, they just deserve it. (WTF?!?!)

Rule #4: We all have to prove our worth, and a person’s worth is based on how much they have. (I find it fascinating how nicely this ties in with #3.)

Rule #5: In the face of so many global challenges, there’s nothing to do but feel despondent, disheartened and disempowered. (If ever there was a pointless rule, this has got to be it!)

All of these rules—and I’m sure there are many more—have created a world that, frankly, I’m just not interested in anymore.

Now there was a time when I believed there wasn’t much I could do about it, but that was before you burst on the scene. I also assumed that the “leaders” would create my new world for me. (No, really, I’m serious. I actually believed that.)

But thanks to you, I now realize I have the power to envision a new world, that no “leader” is going to create it for me, and that I can break any rule I need to in order to be it and help bring it forth.

I am so thankful that you in the GOP have proven yourselves once again to be the party that liberates the enslaved. Not only have you broken the chains that held us in bondage to an old world order, you did it in such an ingenious way—by becoming the hyperbole of that order so that we could see for ourselves what a dead end it offered us and freely choose to walk away.

I admit that I have always been perplexed about why your mascot is the elephant. It just never made any sense to me, especially since elephants aren’t even native to this continent.

But now I think I understand.

The elephant, after all, is a powerful remover of obstacles, and you have successfully removed the greatest obstacle of all: disbelief in our own power to create the world we want.

I for one am eternally grateful.

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Letter to the Frightened Self

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It is precisely in the tempest that your Peace and Love are most urgently needed.

Dear One,

I know you are troubled by what you see happening in the world, and how desperately you want to do something to help stop the madness. I know how you do not want to sit this out, that it is unconscionable to you to do nothing in the face of so much discord and the alarming rise in authoritarianism.

You compare this moment to historical events, and this adds to your anxiety. You have been troubled all your life about what happened in Germany, wondering both how it could have happened and how it could have been stopped. I know how desperately you want to know what to do, and how powerless you feel that, as a solitary person, you can do anything that will make a difference.

I see this unsettledness in you. Let’s name it for what it is. It is fear.

You are experiencing and witnessing the escalation of fear, fear that is amplified as you see the containment walls that might have checked this tide of hatred and abuse collapsing, fear that is, as you know, the inverse of Love, a contractive force, a divisive force, a desperate force.

Take a moment now and let yourself feel the fear. Do not try to push it away. Notice it. Feel it. Then hold it in the utmost compassion. Hold that frightened part of yourself in absolute Love and compassion and gentleness, as you would a frightened child. Cradle it. Console it. Cherish it.Continue Reading

An Open Letter to Future Generations

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All is interconnected. One Life. Indra’s Web.

Dear Future Human Inhabitants of Earth,

I am writing to you from the early 21st century guessing you may be looking back on our time and wondering how we could have made such a mess of our world. I’d like to try to give you some insight into that question.

One of the huge breakthroughs in our recent understanding has been to recognize that everything we see, touch, experience—and even things that we cannot—is woven into a single system. All is interconnected. Interwoven. One Life. Indra’s Web.

I understand this is not news to you. It is obvious. But for us, for a very long time, it was far from obvious.

You see, the mind state most of us lived in was very different from yours. This will seem alien to you, but I’m going to try to explain.

We were stumbling through a dark age, you could call it the ego era. We truly believed, and therefore perceived, that all things, including ourselves, existed in isolation: separate entities living out separate lives. Crazy, I know.

This feeling of being existentially alone in the Universe, cut off from the web of Life, gripped us with fear. It was a primal fear of being alone, left to our own devices to scrape for our own survival, a fear that pitted us against one another and other species as though we were competitors rather than companions expressing the One Life. We weren’t able to grasp that Reality is, in its essence, interdependence, relationship, Love expressing itself in myriad forms—and that we were that Love.

Beneath it all was a horrifying belief in what we called death. We thought we were these temporal bodies, and that one day we would cease to be. So many of us had no awareness of the infinite aspect of our nature, or that these temporal selves and bodies were simply means for the eternal Self to experience and express Itself in the spacetime dimension of form.

The mess we made of our world, which you quite rightly find unfathomable, was blessedly the very thing that helped us move beyond our ignorance and opened the way for a world you could inhabit.

You see, there came a point when our error began to dawn on us. It became more and more apparent that nothing did or could exist in isolation, and that all of our cleverness and ingenuity had wrought a wholly unsustainable world because it was built upon on this illusion of separateness. At first the denial and resistance to this awareness was great because the fear was great.

But as more and more of us began to see that it was the idea of separateness that was at the root of all of our fears and all of our suffering, we began to surrender.

I say surrender because we came to understand that it was precisely the belief in the isolated self that had to be relinquished. We had to surrender the very thing that we thought we were.

This surrender felt terrifying. It felt like the death we were so afraid of. Little did we know that what we were surrendering to was our own infinite, magnificent nature, and that the surrender wasn’t a death at all, but a joyous, glorious liberation.

The joy and relief were overwhelming.

That is when we became able not just to see a new world, but to know it as a present Reality. And we also understood that we didn’t have to make a new world happen, because we were that new world, and from our own Beingness it began to arise.

Since judgment doesn’t exist in the world you inhabit or the consciousness you hold, you know that we weren’t acting out of malice, but out of ignorance and fear. I am grateful for your understanding.

Please feel in your hearts how much I and others are cheering you on as you continue to manifest the great Intention for this beautiful planet, that it be a place where the wondrous Reality of Love becomes visible in the realm of form.

Many Blessings,
An Awakening One

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Eudomy: The Land Where Truth Reigns

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tree at sunset
In Eudomy there is no judgment.

I once had a dream where I am transported into the future. I look around and I see a thriving Earth and a world at peace. And I think, elatedly, we did it! We humans did it! We made the transformation into the new consciousness!

As I walk around, I see a woman with the most interesting garb. It has a traditional feel, colorful, and somehow it conveys wholeness and wisdom.

Around her on the ground are seated several children and I realize she is their teacher.

The students are reading passages that they have written and one of them reads something that refers to or implies judgment.

The teacher gently explains to the child that in Eudomy, which is the name of the land where they live, there isn’t any judgment. I understand that she doesn’t mean we don’t do judgment because it’s bad. She means in Eudomy judgment simply doesn’t exist. It has no reality.Continue Reading

Squandering Time: A Spiritual Practice

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pocket watch in sand
What does it really mean to squander time?

Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” It’s not surprising, given such a philosophy, that Franklin accomplished an amazing amount during his lifetime. Inventor. Statesman. Author. Public Servant. Founding Father.

But as much as Franklin is revered here in Philadelphia where I live—the city Franklin also called home—and as grateful as I am for all of his contributions to our city and society, I’ve come to question his premise that time is the stuff life is made of. More and more I see that life is made of a kind of attention that takes us into a dimension where time doesn’t even exist.

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The Counterintuitive Path of Transformation

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Are you ready to explore the path of transformation?
Are you ready to explore the path of transformation?

Imagine you woke up tomorrow to a life that was reflecting the fullness of the potential that you always knew was in you. What does your life look like? What sort of person have you become? Let yourself inhabit that vision for a moment.

You no doubt know that there is far more inside you than you have ever brought forth—more creativity, more contribution, more joy, more love, more life. You probably also understand that you have the capacity—as all human beings do—to consciously choose who you will become and to actively participate in how your life unfolds. The question is: How can you let go of the limiting beliefs and behaviors that prevent that potential from coming forth?

Why Personal Transformation Can Be Challenging

There are a couple of reasons why personal transformation can be challenging: we misunderstand what is real, and we misunderstand the nature of power. First, let’s consider our misunderstanding of what is real.Continue Reading

Why Resistance Isn’t Radical Enough

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We_One

[This article was also published on the Huffington Post.]

The other day I was having coffee with a friend, and as we got to talking about what is going on in our political arena she asked me, “Do you ever say ‘no’?”

What she was asking was whether, in my way of seeing things, there a place for resistance, for saying “no.”

Her question got me thinking, because—as someone who has been arrested more than once for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience and who went to prison for doing so when the US invaded Iraq, and as someone who all my life has been haunted by the Holocaust and wondered how it could have been prevented—I am not a stranger to these questions.

And yet in recent years I have strongly sensed that at this juncture, given the political and environmental challenges we face, something far more radical than resistance is called for. We have reached a point where we need nothing less than an entirely new understanding of who we are and why we are here, because it is the stories we hold that generate the world we create.

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Money: Ally in Our Spiritual Awakening

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Money: Ally in Awakening
What if money could serve our spiritual awakening?

 

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

Now that the president has released his proposed budget, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about something that for a lot of spiritually-oriented people is anathema—money. More specifically, I’d like to talk about how money was hijacked to serve the purposes of ego.

When I talk about ego, I am talking about a thought system based upon the idea of separateness. Because separateness is an illusion (the only place it exists is in the mind) the ego itself is an illusion. Yet this illusion has shaped the world in which we live.

Believing separateness to be real, ego constantly fears for its survival, and its deepest hungers are for security, worth, power, and status. Money came to be seen as the provider of all of those things.

By its very nature ego is insatiable. No matter the present circumstances, it always wants more. More power, more influence, more security, more status. Ego, in other words, is an addictive thought system, and money is one of its drugs of choice.Continue Reading