Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Are You Looking for a Good Resource on Mindfulness?

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Rather than posting a blog of my own writing this week, I’d like to share with you a wonderful resource I recently came upon through Shambala Sun‘s website. In case you aren’t familiar with it, Shambala Sun is a magazine that features teachings from the Buddhist and other contemplative traditions.

This free eBook (PDF), The Mindfulness Sampler, contains chapters by some of the pre-eminent teachers of mindfulness in our day, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, Jack Kornfield, and many more, all writing about the power of awareness in daily life.

You can access the PDF here: The Mindfulness Sampler.

Peace,

Patricia

Finding the Quiet Beneath the Clamor

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sugar packet
Tune in to a different drummer: your soul.

I have a friend who is an exceptional drummer, and she told me a story once of being in a drumming competition and advancing until it was just her and one other drummer remaining. During the break before the final round, she went to a cafe to get a cup of coffee and to try to figure out what she could do to wow the judges that she hadn’t already done.

As she reached for a packet of sugar she thought, “That’s it!!”

She was called up for her final performance and when she walked out on stage she had nothing in her hands. No djembe, no conga, no trap set. Nothing. She stepped up to the microphone, reached into her pocket, took out two packets of sugar and with them began creating subtle, complex rhythms that blew the judges away.

As you might have guessed, she won the competition.

I often think of that story because it has so many lessons to teach me, one of which has to do with risk-taking. I admire my friend’s courage, even when so much was at stake, to do something so original that it could have been seen as completely outlandish.

Her story also reminds me how much we crave the novel — something, anything, that will shake up our expectations. How refreshing it must have been for those judges to see someone dare to take such a creative risk!

What I think about most, though, when that story floats through my mind is what it teaches about the gift of quietness. We live in such a loud culture; we’re constantly bombarded with messages shouting for our attention, messages that keep getting louder and flashier in an effort to stand out from all the others.

The end result of this is what many of us experience as a kind of fatigue, where all we really want is a refreshing dose of quiet honesty and simple authenticity.

But it’s senseless to point the finger at the culture, as if it were to blame for our distractedness, because if we’ve done our inner work we know where all the culture’s bombastic insecurities come from. A culture, after all, is simply a mirror of what’s going on inside all of us, and those of us who have taken the time to really examine our own minds have no doubt felt like we landed smack in the middle of Times Square.

Living a spiritually-centered life, though, we compassionately notice that inner clamor and we tenderly dismiss it, recognizing it as nothing but the imaginary, often fearful, chattering of the ego-mind.

And then, finally, we begin to hear the quiet, beautiful, sweet rhythm of our own soul.

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Recognizing the Praying Ego

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[This post is the fourth in a blog series on prayer. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read the previous three posts first, beginning with Learning How to Pray.]

dawn clouds
It’s best to let the ego’s clouds of fear dissolve until the spacious, open Self can pray.

Before I launch into this week’s theme on prayer, let me tell you an old Zen story.

Once upon the time there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

I love that story because it reminds me that I can never see the big picture enough to judge whether something is “good” or “bad.” Things that at first seems like hardships can end up opening the way for blessings, and vice versa.Continue Reading

Being the Prayer Bowl

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[This post is the third in a series on prayer. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read the previous two posts first: “Learning How to Pray” and “Praying With the Heart.”]

crystal prayer bowl
Praying with the heart, we empty ourselves like a prayer bowl.

Last week I talked about how I go about prayer as an act of the heart, not the head, and about how when I pray I let my awareness rest in my heart, which is the part of me that is always aware of my connection with all things. OK. But then what?Continue Reading

Praying With the Heart

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[This post is the second in a series on prayer. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you read last week’s post — Learning to Pray — as an introduction.]

disconnected telephone_prayer
How’s your prayer connection working out for you?

Down the street from our house is a booth for a pay phone that’s no longer there (another casualty of the cell phone age) that somebody decided to have fun with. They glued a fake paper phone on the back wall of the booth and stuck a tin can on the end of the cord. Anybody who walks up to that booth expecting to place a call is in for a surprise.

I’ve been walking by this faux phone for a while now, appreciating the humor of it, but recently it occurred to me that it’s an apt symbol for the way a lot of people feel about their prayer life — like they’re trying to connect with the divine realm and it’s just not working. If this describes your experience, it might be an invitation to change your way of approaching prayer.

Before I get into the details of how I go about praying, let me clarify something that you’ll need to know about me. I often use the word “Reality” to describe what monotheistic religions usually call “God,” and the reason I do comes out of my own spiritual experiences that have shown me that all is One, that nothing exists outside of the Great Love, that all of our notions of separateness are illusion, as well as any apparent forms that arise from that notion. Because the word “God” can conjure up ideas of a Being that stands apart from the world and humankind (think Sistene Chapel), I don’t often use it.

This perspective about Reality has significant implications for how I go about prayer, because I no longer approach prayer as though I were placing a phone call to request help from an external being. When I pray, I move inward, to the part of my being that already knows my oneness with Reality and with the situation or people for whom I’m praying.Continue Reading

Learning How to Pray

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prayer bowl
Prayer isn’t a technique or a formula. It’s more like an inner orientation.

Several years ago, when I was still working as a pastor, I traveled to California to attend a conference of church leaders. The keynote speaker was a man who had made a name for himself as a director in the movie industry, and one thing he said has stayed with me all these years. He told the clergy gathered there what he thought lay people really want from their pastors: “Teach us how to pray.”

To be honest, I was surprised. Is that really what people wanted to know? How to pray?

His comment struck me not only because of what he said, but how he said it. It was obvious he wasn’t just making a request. He was pleading with us. He truly wanted to know how to pray.Continue Reading

When Uncanny Coincidences Challenge Our Worldview

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A couple weeks ago I posted a blog about overhearing an 80-year-old woman talking in my dentist’s office about her plans to do the next thing on her bucket list the following day: go skydiving.

This week I’d like to share a delightful coincidence that occurred while I was writing that post.

I’d gotten my first draft done Monday morning and then stopped for lunch, and after I ate I stepped outside to get the mail. There, tucked between the bills and the fund-raising appeals, was a handwritten envelop, a rarity I always welcome.

I recognized the handwriting as my friend Susan’s, who was away on vacation, and when I opened the envelop and pulled out the card I laughed out loud. On the front of it was a picture of a well-dressed, dignified older woman posing for her mugshot.

I figured the reason Susan had sent me this card was that I was arrested once (well, okay, more than once) for doing nonviolent civil disobedience, and after one of those arrests Susan came to visit me while I was doing a week in jail.

But when I opened the card I laughed even harder. Inside it read: “Here’s to another check on the bucket list!”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.