Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Joy Lessons from Philly

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Joy opens a portal for a new possibility to come forth.

It’s been an interesting time here in Philadelphia in recent days as the whole world watched and waited to see if Philly would deliver the needed votes to tip the outcome of the election. Given that this is the place where our democratic form of government was conceived, I don’t think the significance has been lost on anyone that this is the place where its future seemed to be hanging in the balance.

I moved here in 1997, and as a native of Denver it was a big adjustment for me to come here to the densely populated East Coast, far from the open spaces and Rocky Mountains that I love. It was also devastating to see the extent of the poverty in Philadelphia, the poorest of the major cities in the US, which was once a thriving hub of the Industrial Revolution. But when the factories closed to relocate, they left behind working class neighborhoods that became vast wastelands of unemployment and despair.

And yet, when I moved here I fell in love with Philly. I loved the racial diversity, and how this city is such a microcosm of the world. I loved the expansive parks here that have been set aside as a protected watershed, including the Wissahickon woods where the soil sparkles with with traces of mica.

I loved the art and culture, and that I could go hear the Philadelphia Orchestra in their concert hall a mere 15 minutes from my house, an orchestra I used to listen to recordings of when I was a music major in college.

I was also captivated by Philadelphia’s history, by the cobblestone streets of Old City where redbrick colonial houses still stand, by William Penn’s vision that this place be a Holy Experiment where people of all faiths could live in harmony, by Independence Hall where a new vision of government was conceived that dethroned the idea of monarchy.

Funny, Tough, and Joyful

In recent weeks, during this election season, I’ve found myself falling in love with Philly all over again, but in new ways. I have loved the playfulness and humor that is endemic to this place, and how people took President Trump’s comment that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and ran with it.

And speaking of running, I love that they just organized a benefit run to raise money for Philabundance, our local hunger relief organization, which they are calling the Fraud Street Run (a word play on our long-standing annual tradition of the Broad Street Run).

The Fraud Street Run will start at the now famous Four Seasons Total Landscaping and end at the Four Seasons Hotel in Center City. (If you’ve been appreciating Philly lately too, you might consider donating here.)

In recent weeks I’ve even fallen in love with Philly’s gritty toughness, which I never fully appreciated until now. Here people don’t engage in the gratuitous niceties that I was accustomed to, having grown up in the West. Here people call things the way they see them, and they aren’t easily intimidated or bullied. Lately I have come to understand that when the stakes are high, you want a good dose of that don’t-mess-with-me energy that is core to Philly’s culture.

But I think the thing that has inspired me the most about my adopted city in this whole election drama has been the Joy that has been set loose here—people dancing while waiting in line to vote; people of all colors, shapes, gender orientations and religions dancing outside the Convention Center in what became a block party to protect the vote count.

This eruption of Joy was intentional. The organizers here who have been preparing for this moment understand the power of Joy to de-escalate tensions and shift the narrative of confrontation, and they made sure the d.j. booth was ready so the party could begin.

Joy is a very high-frequency energy. In its presence fear, hate, and anger melt away. Joy dethrones the idea of division, overthrows the idea of oppression. It opens a portal for a new possibility to come forth and take hold.

We know we’re not out of the woods yet. We can see how the old order does not go quietly into the night. But when the people start dancing, the new world is already well on its way.

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Remembering Our Oneness

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All of us have come to the planet to either remember or to forget.

A few weeks ago I had a dream that seemed quite significant for me personally, but I wanted to share the ending of the dream because I think it has universal meaning.

At the very end of the dream I am with a couple other women who begin to sing a song. One of the women, to help me sing along, holds up the lyrics. But actually what she holds up is an empty frame.

The song they are singing says, “We are one. We are one. Some choose to remember. Some choose to forget.” It isn’t conveying any judgment about this choice. The song is simply stating a fact: some choose to remember; some choose to forget.

All of us have come to this planet to experience one of those two things, and in a sense Earth is a vast playground for us to explore and live out our choice. Here we can experience what it is to live as embodied beings in awareness of our oneness, or we can experience the impossible—separateness—which requires that we forget the truth of oneness. And this is a choice we each make for ourselves, a soul choice that we cannot force on anyone else.

We see both of these choices playing out in our world today. It is almost as if two different, parallel worlds are arising, one which continues to play out the illusion of separateness and one which is exploring ways in which to bring forth into full expression and manifestation the truth of our oneness.

As for myself, I am quite clear that I have chosen to discover what it is to live in embodied form fully aware of my oneness with All, fully aware that I exist only in relationship.

Do I get lost sometimes in the machinations of the mind, caught up in the stories and illusions of separateness and division? Sure I do. But I am able to see them now for what they are and I am able to disengage from them because I no longer believe in them. They have simply lost their credibility for me.

I have written many times that at the core of the illusion of separateness is judgment, and that without judgment the egoic thought structure collapses. That is why the most significant message for me of the song in the dream wasn’t that we are one, which isn’t news to me, nor that some remember and some forget, which is pretty obvious if you look around. The essential teaching was that there is no judgment about the choice that we make.

The woman in the dream offered me a frame, and this is the gift we are all given, isn’t it? We are given the power to frame how we see our lives, how we see this time we are in, how we see this soul choice we and others have made. Will we place all things within the frame of the absolute nature of Love?

For those of us who have come here to remember our oneness, I see this time on the planet as our initiation. Can we be in the midst of this drama of division that is playing out on the world stage and remember that it isn’t Real? Can we recognize division as the illusion that it is? Can we opt out of the temptation to rail against it, which only gives the illusion credence in our minds, and instead dispel it with the Light of Love?

And are we willing to make space for those who want to be on this planet experiencing separateness? Can we hold them and their choice in Love? Not joining them in their illusion, certainly, but honoring that this is their choice to make? And are we willing to steadfastly hold our awareness in the truth of our union with the All even when some may reject and attack that understanding?

And are we willing to join together to bring forth the world that reflects the truth of oneness, that reflects the truth of Love, and not allow ourselves to be dissuaded or hindered by those who have chosen differently?

We who have come to remember, who have chosen to realize our divine nature and awaken to the Christ consciousness that we are, have also chosen this initiation for ourselves. We have chosen to be present on the planet at this precise moment because we are ready and willing to leave all forgetfulness behind. We are ready and willing to be Heaven on Earth.

And it just may be that as we do so, some of our kindred souls may remember that they, too, chose to remember.

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The Media and the Egoic Need for Enemies

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The media delivers what the ego wants.

I read a very interesting article recently by Matt Taibbi that summarized his book Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. In it, Taibbi, a journalist, talks about the evolution of the media in recent decades, and how it has become financially dependent upon peddling the idea of enemy.

Taibbi explains how, before the advent of the internet and the proliferation of news outlets, the media’s strategy was to reach the widest possible audience, because the wider their audience, the more advertising revenue they received. As a result, the news media presented information that was acceptable to the largest segment of the population and avoided extremist angles or ideologies.

But with the introduction of 24 hour news channels and the Internet, which led to a proliferation of news sources and the decimation of classified ad revenue, the media’s strategy changed. Now the objective became to identify a niche demographic and give them what they wanted.

One thing they discovered is that most people want news that confirms their biases about people they don’t like.Continue Reading

America’s Healing Crisis

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The US is in a healing crisis, and we each play a part in determining its outcome.

I write and speak a lot about the illusory nature of the egoic mind that perceives all things through a concept called “separateness.” In the mystical experience this idea is revealed to be a fallacy, a trick of the mind. When the veil of illusory separateness is lifted, we see that everything is an interconnected whole. One could say that the mystical state is a united state in which all is seen to be inextricably interwoven and where the separate self we have always thought ourselves to be simply doesn’t exist.

At the dawn of this new millennium, as people all across the globe are increasingly awakening from the trance of the separate self, we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic that is accelerating the process by revealing in unmistakable terms the inescapable nature of our interconnectedness.

We are coming to see, thanks to COVID-19, that we must care for our neighbor not simply out of a moral obligation to do so, but out of the recognition that at a fundamental level our neighbor is ourself, and our personal wellbeing is inextricably tied to the wellbeing of all.

Continue Reading

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

Ferguson and Other Nightmares

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Like most people, I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, deeply disturbing. One of the most troubling things I learned this morning didn’t have to do with the ongoing violence, looting and arrests. It was the results of a Pew survey that showed a wide disparity of opinion between whites and blacks about whether Mike Brown’s murder points to deep racial issues in our country.

I think part of the disparity of opinion is because many white people don’t understand the difference between racism and prejudice. Prejudice is holding negative stereotypes about others. Anybody can be prejudiced, and most of us are in some way or another.

Racism, though, is far more insidious because it couples prejudice with institutional power. It places people in the dominant group in the position of being able to carry out their prejudice through institutional systems.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall a time when an unarmed white youth was gunned down in similar fashion by a black member of a police force. The judicial system in this country is certainly racist as well. The evidence? Blacks are incarcerated at overwhelming rates and for far longer compared to whites for similar crimes.

Someone has said that racism is a disease white people catch, but black people die from. And black people are dying.

As a white person, therefore, it is incumbent on me not only to speak out about injustice, but just as important to heal myself of the disease of racism. It is a highly contagious disease that everyone in our society is exposed to from an early age. It landed on our shores with the arrival of slave ships unloading their emaciated cargo onto the auction blocks, and unlike so many diseases that our medical establishment has managed to banish, racism is one that continues to inflict us all, sometimes with deadly results. [Along those lines, let me recommend an excellent book: Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, by Joy DeGruy]

Every now and then in this blog I talk about this world we live in being a dream. That isn’t an abstract concept for me. It was something that I saw to be the case at the height of an intense awakening I experienced over a decade ago. We are literally living out a story based on our unconsciousness. At the root of this dream’s plot is a very simple, erroneous premise: that something called “separateness” exists.

Anyone who knows me well knows that dream work has been a central feature of my spiritual life. Some of the most important decisions of my life have been informed by dreams, and much of my own healing has come about because of the insights dreams have brought me.

While I was in seminary, when “big dreams” first started coming to me, I studied dream interpretation with Jeremy Taylor, author of several books on dream work, and one of Taylor’s central premises is that all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams.

So let’s imagine for a moment that what’s happening in Ferguson is a dream, that it’s our dream. Better yet, look at it as your dream, because if separateness doesn’t exist, then it is your dream as much as it is mine, as much as it is the people’s on the embattled streets of Ferguson.

What does it mean in your dream that a white police officer has just gunned down an unarmed black teenager? What part of you is that officer? What is at the root of his hatred? What does he really fear?

And what part of you is that black teenager, despised, vilified as dangerous, the target for your psyche’s rage and fear?

How might the battle happening on the streets of Ferguson point to the same divisions that play out in your own psyche, and what must you do to reconcile those factions so that true peace can come? In other words, how can you bring the truth of Love (which is, simply put, the Reality of Oneness) to bear in this hostile, volatile situation?

These are not idle questions. The peace of the world rests on each of us doing this difficult work, of seeing the “other” as an aspect of ourselves no matter how hard it may be to accept. I, too, must embrace the unpleasant truth that inside of me is an armed racist policeman who needs healing, and a despised black teenager who needs respect.

What’s happening in Ferguson is a nightmare. What’s happening in Gaza is a nightmare. What’s happening in Syria and the Ukraine are nightmares. They are all extreme cases of the fallacy of otherness playing itself out in deadly fashion.

And nightmares, like all dreams, come in the interest of health and wholeness. They come in extreme form because the information they bring is important, and because the time has come for us to accept it. They are invitations to us to wake, finally, from our illusions.

 

A Deity Within

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I rolled my eyes when I learned that the conference cocktail reception would be facilitated by a get-to-know-you game. I was ready to decompress with a glass of wine in hand – but as one of the conference organizers I felt obliged to participate. The task was to randomly draw a card with an image that represented a time of major cultural transition in your life. You could trade with others until you had a card that really spoke to you – and share with each other why.

I reluctantly participated. The first card I drew was that of a strong runner facing forward in her starting position, waiting for the signal to launch her race. I scanned my brain for the most significant cross-cultural transition I had completed – my family’s move from northern Germany to Vienna, Austria, when I was twelve years old. Thinking back to that time in my life, I did not feel powerful like an athlete, nor that I was running my own race, so I set out to trade cards.

I noticed that many attendees of the conference (aptly titled Families In Global Transition) chose cards with strong or romantic images to reflect their first overseas experience, presumably when they were adults. My childhood relocation has shaped me in beautiful ways, but it did not feel romantic, and I did not feel in control of my destiny. It had been my mother’s decision to move, not mine.

A fellow attendee walked past me holding a card with the image of an ancient, uninhabited desert building with openings for doors and windows leading into darkness. I was immediately drawn to it.

 

 

 

 

Photo: Courtesy of Anne P. Copeland, The Interchange Institute

My colleague seemed all too relieved to get rid of the card, as if thinking that she’d drawn from the figurative bottom of the pile. I started to feel a bit self-conscious about choosing an unwanted image. Would it reveal my inner demons? I decided to run with it.

We broke into groups and introduced the picture we chose. I explained that as a teenager in Vienna, I felt I’d landed in an ancient culture that I couldn’t figure out how to access. Every time I would open my mouth and reveal my high-pitched German accent, I felt treated like an outsider. In response, I created my own world, at first in the solitude of my room, and eventually with friends who were also “different.”

Someone asked me whether I imagined myself on the outside of the building – and yes, that’s exactly how it felt! I was free to roam around, unenclosed, not bound to one place; yet terrified, in fact, to enter the building whose interior I could not see. I’d gotten so used to being home-less, I feared I’d be trapped inside.

I took a sip of my wine. The afternoon sun illuminated the glass-and-steel conference center. That’s when it hit me: I still felt this way today! Even after years of building strong friendships and investing in the places I inhabited, a part of me remained on the outside looking in.

I was free to roam the world, dabble in any profession, endlessly follow my curiosity, dip in and out of communities – but at the same time I’d been terrified that choosing a “home” would consume me, restrict me, hold me captive. Since graduating high school and leaving Vienna, I had moved house more than twenty times in five different countries. I easily maintained long-distance ties to friends, teachers and employers, but felt reluctant to commit to a romantic relationship or a “permanent” job. Entering that building was not an option for me.

Despite my incessant craving for freedom and non-attachment, subconsciously I looked to other people, institutions, cities or countries to provide me with a sense of identity. I became unable to articulate my personal needs and viewpoints, felt easily misunderstood, and quick to leave when I was trapped between my conscious drive to keep all options open and my subconscious desire to belong.

The metaphor of this game became all too obvious to me: I was still unwilling to pack up my tent in the desert to reside inside the building. That building was not mine.

I put my wine glass down and left.

* * *

On the Metro ride home, I felt perturbed by my discovery. I kept looking at the image of the deserted building, wondering what I had missed all my life by not going inside. Love, belonging, self-worthiness? If I was being really honest with myself, I didn’t even want to enter that dark, lifeless structure – I’d prefer the nomadic life out in the wild.

The doors opened at the next station and people got on. I briefly emerged from my introspection to become a passenger on the train. I imagined myself as a coach asking his client what would have to change about this building that would make him want to go inside?

Immediately, the image of the Parthenon came to me: the ancient Greek column structure that lets you enter and exit with ease, see through to the other side. A place where gossip, food and ideas are exchanged. A place where life bustles. A place that attracts life, transforms it, and allows it to move on naturally. An open-air home.

This new image gave me a sense of relief. I started thinking of other column structures, like in The Neverending Story, where the mystical Uyulála gives the young hero Atréju a riddle to solve. Uyulála exists only as a voice within her forest of columns, a place of divine mystery.

I pulled out my phone and looked up images for the Parthenon. One of the first was a reconstruction of the ancient Greek site, with this golden deity at its center:

In a flash I knew that the deity at the center of my house is me. “Home” is not just a place common to a bunch of people I know, but an ancient site that anchors me wherever I am. Home is not a trap, but an invitation. Home is where I am inside and outside at once. There resides a power at its center – my center – that is both still and eternal.

I decided that evening to move back to Vienna after fifteen years abroad. I had tried returning before, but now I knew that no person, no city, no culture can provide me with a deep sense of belonging. In the past, I kept wanting the deserted building to invite me in! Now I started to realize that this building had been my own projection, and that only I can change the structure of this house.

* * *

 

 

kilian head shotKilian Kröll, Certified Executive Coach, dancer, published writer and President of Third Culture Coach, earned a B.A. in English from Haverford College and an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of East London. Kilian grew up in a bilingual family of classical musicians in Germany, Austria and the U.S. He just signed an indefinite lease in Vienna, Austria.

Regarding Mr. Akin

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This, Mr. Akin, is what rape feels like.
This, Mr. Akin, is what rape feels like.

It has never been my intention in my writing to enter the political fray. I prefer to draw people’s attention to the life of mindfulness, compassion, and wonder. But the recent uproar about the comments of Rep. Todd Akin regarding rape has prompted me to make an exception to my norm and say a word or two.

I can understand why Mr. Akin’s comments have offended, incensed, and wounded so many people. Along with millions of women in this country, I, too, have experienced rape, and Mr. Akin’s beliefs about rape and pregnancy reveal a profound level of ignorance and insensitivity on his part. Others have written eloquently and powerfully about that, so I won’t go into it.

But as a former pastor, what I have found myself asking is why he and so many other devoutly religious people cling to beliefs that are simply erroneous. Why are facts so blithely tossed aside and ignorance so aggressively guarded?

I think to answer that question I need to look not at their political views or even ideology, but at their theology. I suspect that Mr. Akin’s belief that women can’t get pregnant from rape arises out of a firm belief that God will protect the righteous. God, in this worldview, is the Intelligent Designer and therefore “He” must have built into women’s anatomy a protection mechanism against the catastrophe of pregnancy resulting from rape. God, in this worldview, is omnipotent, just, and good, therefore, if bad things happen it must be because the person had it coming to them.

It is a simplistic, Pollyanna theology that simply refuses to accommodate itself to the very real facts of oppression and cruelty. Rather than facing the hard challenges that theodicy presents, this theology skirts the issue by blaming suffering on those who suffer. It may well be that Mr. Akin and those who hold similar viewpoints aren’t simply trying to prevent unwanted fetuses from being aborted. They are trying to protect their understanding of God.

This understanding of God, however, is not a Judeo-Christian understanding. The book of Job, perhaps the most ancient piece of writing in the Judeo-Christian canon, addresses this very issue, and it is unwaveringly clear: bad things happen to good people; God does not necessarily protect the righteous.

If Job had been written with a woman protagonist, one of the horrors visited upon her may very well have been rape, with the compounding catastrophe of a resulting pregnancy, and her friends would have tried to convince her that she must have done something wrong or this never would have happened, or that perhaps her rape wasn’t really legitimately rape or she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant.

Jesus, too, challenged those who would blame suffering on the victims, and of course his own crucifixion at the hands of the Roman Empire was a graphic display of the truth that God doesn’t protect the righteous.  The conventional Christian resolution of this dilemma has been to claim that, instead of protecting those who suffer, God suffers with them, which is the literal meaning of compassion, something that has become tremendously lacking in the politics of our day.

Anyone who advocates for the idea that this should be a Christian nation would, by definition, have to have compassion — suffering with the suffering — at the centerpiece of their political platform.

I was fortunate. I didn’t get pregnant. But it never entered my mind that if I had I would have been forced to carry the fetus of my rapist in my body. Such a sentence was unthinkable, unconscionable, and the belief that such cruel and unusual punishment should be written into the Constitution, as some would like it to be, is abhorrent to me. Whether or not a woman seeks an abortion in such circumstances is not Rep. Akin’s decision, nor any other politician’s, to make. It is hers, and hers alone.

But there is something else that has been present in my mind these last few days. It is a memory I carry with me from a time, several years ago, when I was on spiritual retreat.

I was walking the labyrinth one day and a message came to me saying: “Release all concept of enemy.” It was a revelation, because it was telling me that “enemy” is a concept I hold, a frame of reference in my mind, not something inherently real. Since then I must have taken the teaching to heart because, even though I vehemently disagree with Mr. Akin’s stance and I do not want him to be in a position of political power nor his beliefs codified into legislation, I have been unable to see him as an enemy. In an odd way, I can even sympathize with him. I can understand his desire to live in a world where things make sense, where complexities, such as abortion, can be boiled down to simple absolutes, where rape and other such atrocities can be explained away. That is not the world we live in, but the point I want to make is that I see him as someone not entirely dissimilar to myself, someone who, like me, wants his life to have meaning and needs something to believe in, a human being who is not more and not less than any other.

If I want him to do the hard work of wrestling honestly with the suffering of others and the complexities it presents, I must be willing to do the hard work that my beliefs demand of me: recognizing that we are all members of one human family. His name itself places the challenge before me: to see him as a kin.