Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Making Meaning

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How are you connecting the dots?

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning about his observation, from his time in a Nazi concentration camp, that those people who could find meaning in their suffering were more likely to survive than those who could not. He came to the conclusion that meaning is an essential human need.

One of the things that makes that so remarkable is how much power we have to create meaning. We may not always be able to control our circumstances, but how we interpret those circumstances and relate to them is by and large up to us.

When the ancients looked up at the nighttime sky, they connected the stars into pictures, constellations, that conveyed entire mythologies. Each of us in our own lives experiences moments of hardship, sorrow, blessing and happiness, which are like stars scattered across the sky of our lives. It is our choice how we will connect them, and, in so doing, what personal mythologies we will create.Continue Reading

Occupy the New Mind

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Which operating system are you feeding?

Suppose just for a moment that we are all living in a false reality, an illusion that has been generated by a collective misconception, very much like a program that’s running on a holodeck on one of the ships on Star Trek. This false reality is the creation of the human mind out of touch with our true nature as timeless, divine beings. Everything that you witness in the world around you that constricts or annihilates the ongoing creativity and diversity of Life is the mind’s illusion taking on manifested form.

Let’s call this false reality the emperor’s world. The emperor’s world constructs systems that benefit a small minority by dominating, conquering or enslaving others. In the emperor’s world, nature is understood as a commodity to be exploited, and the goal of life is to accumulate power and wealth.

The misconception at the root of this false reality — the operating system, if you will, running beneath the emperor’s world program — is that there exists in this Universe something called “separateness”: “separateness” between people, “separateness” between humans and other species, between humans and the Earth, “separateness” between the physical dimension and the non-physical.Continue Reading

Autumn’s Wisdom

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May the autumn trees be our spiritual teachers.

I love the season of autumn, the brilliance of the sunlight, the golden trees that blaze so gloriously before the onset of winter, the graceful dance of leaves riding the wind. Every year this season reminds me to trust in nature’s cycles, not to hold onto what is ready to pass away but to let the necessary shedding occur so that emptiness can hold the space for something new to emerge. Continue Reading

All Structures Are Unstable

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Are we willing to let the structures collapse?

A few years ago I was on spiritual retreat in New Mexico and one day, while sitting, reading, up on a mesa overlooking a valley, I suddenly heard a thunderous roaring sound and I looked up. Across the valley a billowing cloud of dust was rising high up into the air as an enormous landslide cascaded down the side of the mesa across the valley.

I was in awe. This geological formation had stood there for millions of years, and here I was witnessing it as it began to reshape itself.

As if that wasn’t incredible enough, the book I was reading was Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth.

And if all of that wasn’t incredible enough, after the dust from the landslide settled and I continued my reading, I turned the page and found that the next section of the book was headed: “All Structures Are Unstable.”Continue Reading

Release All Concept of Enemy

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What would it be like to release all concept of “enemy”?

Several years ago, while on retreat, I was meditating as I walked an outdoor labyrinth. Suddenly, the words came to me: “Release all concept of enemy.”

I was startled. I hadn’t been thinking at all about enemies. In fact, having been on retreat for several days, I hadn’t even had a disagreeable encounter all week.

More surprising than that, though, was what the message was telling me: enemy is nothing more than a concept—just an idea in the mind.

Thanks to that labyrinth revelation, I have become more aware of how often the concept of enemy is invoked. There are the obvious examples, of course—people of other nationalities, ethnicities, religions, socio-economic classes or worldviews are often seen as enemies—and the concept of enemy fuels much of our current politics.

But it doesn’t stop with people. We can see all kinds of things as enemy: the weeds in the garden, the stain on the shirt, the morning commute, the cold virus that’s paying a visit.

People sometimes look to the natural world for evidence that having enemies is, well, natural. Isn’t the lion an enemy to the gazelle, the hawk an enemy to the rabbit? Well, no. They are participating in the food chain that we’re all part of—life sustaining itself on itself. Enemy has nothing to do with the food chain. It’s a category we use to justify malevolent actions towards another.

To release the concept of enemy we first have to notice it. We have to be aware of when we are caught in the concept ourselves, and also notice when it is being used to manipulate us. How many times have you received a phone call from a fundraiser invoking the concept of enemy in order to raise money for a candidate or cause? Can you imagine if we all rejected the whole concept and politely asked them to come up with a different strategy for making their case?

Of course there will be people with whom you disagree. There may even be people whose actions you feel you must oppose. But the only way they become an enemy is if you make them one in your own mind.

One of the most famous sayings of Jesus is, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” By saying this, Jesus was actually negating the concept of enemy. It’s not possible to love someone and at the same time place them in a category called enemy.

Maybe one reason we cling so tenaciously to this concept of enemy is that it enables us to project all the traits we don’t like in ourselves onto other, avoiding the hard work of healing ourselves. But as the Tao te Ching so wisely states:

A great nation is like a great man:

. . .He considers those who point out his faults

as his most benevolent teachers.

He thinks of his enemy

as the shadow that he himself casts.

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Who falls in your category of enemy? CEOs? ISIS? Wall Street bankers? Right-to-Lifers? Immigrants? Marines? Fox News Anchors? Democrats? Your neighbor? Your boss? Humanity?

Yourself?

Can you imagine for just a moment how profoundly your life—and the whole world—would instantly change if this concept of enemy simply vanished from our minds?

All Big Things

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What is one tiny seed you could plant today?

We’ve been harvesting chilis from our garden and so far have canned 34 jars and the plants are still producing. We started the plants last winter from small seeds, no more than a quarter of an inch across, but now, from those few tiny seeds, we have chilis to last us for at least the next couple of years, and plenty to share.

Is there something you envision for your life, but you feel immobilized because it seems too big and you don’t know where to begin? Or is there some shift in the world you long to see, but because the status quo is so entrenched there just seems no possibility of it ever becoming a reality? If so, take a lesson from the seed: all big things start small.

Let me repeat that, because it’s so easy to forget. All big things start small.

 

Imagine That: Reflecting on 9/11

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Imagine what will happen when we tap the most potent resource of all.

If someone had told you on September 10, 2001 that it was possible, using nothing but a handful of box cutters and careful planning, to take thousands of lives, send the world’s largest economy into a tailspin and cause its most technologically advanced military to get mired down in an endless, impoverishing war, would you have believed it?

Doubtful. Most of us probably would have written the person off as a member of the fantasy-based community.

But then we woke up on that sunny September morning shocked to discover that one person’s fantasy can become another person’s reality.

Box cutters. Imagine that.

The attack of September 11th was, first and foremost, an act of imagination. A violent imagination, true, but imagination nonetheless. The great irony was that most of us allowed our own imaginations to be highjacked by our attackers’ narrative. Assuming our assigned role in the script we were handed, we eviscerated our principles of Constitutional law and human rights, launched a military attack, bled off our economic resources to the “War on Terror,” gave the green light to torture, and embraced government surveillance on all of us.  In other words, we began to live as a terrorized people.Continue Reading

Dump the Pushing

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Ready to dump the pushing?

Once, driving down the freeway, I got behind a dump truck that had the words “Do Not Push” on the tailgate. It looked like the Tao on wheels.

For those who may not be familiar with the Tao te Ching, it’s an ancient Chinese wisdom text–one of my favorite pieces of spiritual writing–which emphasizes living in accord with the Tao (roughly translated “the Way”), the guiding principle of the Universe.

The wisdom in this writing at first glance seems to be foolishness because it speaks of the potency of non-action, the power of yielding, and the effectiveness of letting things follow their natural course.Continue Reading