Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Donald Trump: Your Spiritual Teacher in Disguise

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Behold your spiritual teacher

With this presidency you may feel you are in the midst of a nightmare. The crucial question is, do you know how to work with nightmares?

According to the late dream expert and author Jeremy Taylor, who worked with dreams for over 40 years, all dreams come in the interest of health and wholeness. All dreams—including nightmares, which bring information so crucial and urgent that they scare the bejesus out of us to get our attention.

This presidency nightmare is no different. It is offering us exactly what we need at this precise moment to grow and evolve as a species. But first we have to be willing to look at what is happening beneath the contentious headlines to discover the deeper wisdom being offered us.

So let’s do some dream work, shall we?Continue Reading

Your Radiant Nature Can Never Be Diminished

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Your worth can never be diminished

 

Do you accept the idea that Love is all there is, yet see yourself as the Lone Cosmic Exception (i.e. special)—the only being in the entire cosmos who is excluded from the circle of Love because, unlike everybody else, you are too unworthy or simply too irrelevant to be included?Continue Reading

Activating Our Spiritual Capacity

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labyrinth_central_high res_cropped_1If you’ve landed on this website, chances are you’re a spiritual explorer, as am I. I hope you’ll look around, and if what you find here resonates with you, perhaps we are meant to travel this journey together.

First, let me tell you a little bit about how I landed here, starting with the photo you see here.

That’s me, kneeling in the labyrinth. It was 2010. I was in Denver, staying with my mother who was in hospice. About the time I learned of her cancer diagnosis, I also learned—through a series of dreams, synchronicities and intuitions—that it was time for me to leave my vocation as a pastor. It was time for me to step onto an unknown path.

I went to the labyrinth that day because I was facing monumental losses—that of my mother, my vocation, and my spiritual community. I needed guidance. I needed reassurance.

When I got to the church, a photographer from The Denver Post told me they were doing an article for an upcoming workshop about the labyrinth, and he asked if he could photograph me walking it. I wasn’t thrilled—this was an intensely personal moment—but I agreed.Continue Reading

Praying for Rain

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“Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”

In the dream Thunder and Lightening came to introduce me to their daughter Rain. Rain was in her late 20’s, a thin woman, dressed in a knee length tunic made of long torn strips of fabric in muted hues of light blues and greens, exactly the colors, I discovered, of Van Gogh’s painting titled “Rain.” She looked like the colors of the painting, except that this was not Rain falling on a French countryside in 1889. The woman, Rain, had streams of watery soot that ran down the strips of cloth. She looked quite ill. Thunder and Lightening saw that I saw that and they asked me, as only parents of a very sick child can, “Pray for Rain. Please pray for Rain.”

I have been praying for Rain for the last several years. Praying, not that Rain come, not that it rains, but for Rain herself, daughter of Thunder and Lightening. Sometimes I meditate and then when my thoughts are dancing around a little less, I invite Rain into the quiet space. I sit with Rain and listen. Sometimes she speaks, usually she’s quiet. I have sometimes prayed for her soot streaked dress, held out my hands to allow a wave of small kindness to wash through the poison. It was then I discovered that the black rivers weren’t just on the cloth, they had seeped into Rain herself, ran in her blood. This week, I want to make a healing place in my garden for Rain, a place where she is welcome, a spot to rest in, soot streaked and all.

We know, of course, why Rain is ill. The sulfur and nitrogen from our cars, factories, and sources of electrical generation have changed her. Yet Rain, in order to be who she is, must fall. Rain cannot not Rain. This I can tell you from the times I’ve sat with her, she grieves when she falls. She knows she is ill and she does not want to carry the poison in her blood into the trout filled streams or the mountains’ trees or the soil’s loam. She knows, also, that she’s needed.

Praying for Rain is not about results. There’s no “so that” in this prayer. It is, if anything, about taking ourselves out of the mode of efficacy and entering into the place where we are unfettered enough in our thoughts and assumptions and desires to hear what is: the world, whom the Lakota call mitakuye oyasin, “all our relations”; brothers and sisters who fly and swim, who hop and run and crawl; Mother and Father, Earth and Sky; Grandparents, among them, Lightening and Thunder; and, of course, their daughter, Rain.

So we pray for Rain or for Earth or for that particular Cardinal or Finch or Tree outside our window. We pray for them, not as one in charge, but as one of them; a being of sentience, intelligence and beauty. Who knows, we might surprise ourselves. We might discover that it is we who change.

 

Lawrie Hartt is a dreamer and tender of dreams. She works with those seeking healing and a soul-filled life, listening for what will assist the journey towards balance, beauty and sustainability. She has been a spiritual counselor, retreat and workshop leader for over 25 years. She co-teaches SoulWisdom with Patricia.

 

One Christ Is Not Enough

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It’s about time.

A few years ago, my spouse, Kip, and I signed up for a retreat in Estes Park, Colorado led by Thich Nhat Hanh. I have long admired this Vietnamese Buddhist master who, with his quiet, humble demeanor, teaches that mindfulness and peace can be cultivated in every moment and every act.

We arrived in the Denver airport and boarded the chartered bus to the YMCA of the Rockies. Once there, we settled into our room, then headed for the opening gathering, joining a thousand others who had traveled from far and wide. Finding a place on the floor of the large convocation hall, we sat, waiting expectantly for Thich Nhat Hanh to appear and give the opening talk.

After awhile, one of the brown-robed monks with shaven head approached the microphone and began reading a letter from Thay—as Thich Nhat Hanh is affectionately called. It was a beautiful, loving letter. But I was confused. Why was he communicating with us in writing rather than just addressing us in person? Was this customary in Buddhist retreats?

As the monk continued reading, it sank in. Thich Nhat Hanh would not be joining us. He was hospitalized in Boston, receiving treatment for a lung infection. His community—the nuns and monks from France and their sister monasteries in New York and California—would lead the retreat.

Even though I was concerned for Thay’s wellbeing, this was an immense disappointment. I’d been looking forward to this retreat for months. But I came to a reluctant acceptance. Perhaps this was the retreat’s first teaching: to release my attachment to something I had desired so much.

The nuns and monks did a beautiful job. They gave insightful and moving Dharma talks, and although they surely must have felt trepidation about having to fill Thay’s shoes, their sincerity, the depth of their presence, and the authenticity of their teaching was an inspiration. Over the course of our days together we coalesced into a supportive community, sharing our meals in silence, joining in our small group conversations, accepting the situation and one another with grace and humor. In the absence of the revered master, the community discovered its strength.

The experience made us all more aware of how we so often project onto a single leader the capacities that lie within each of us. Had we really come to see a Buddhist super star? Or had we gathered to become a community—practicing mindfulness, compassion and peace?

As though to express the collective shift we’d undergone, at our joyous closing celebration a spontaneous dance erupted as Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” played over the sound system. (“If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and then make a change.”) The energy in the room was extraordinary. Something powerful had been unleashed during that retreat, not despite Thay’s absence, but because of it.

The event became known as the miracle of the Rockies, a story of collective awakening when the master became embodied in the Sangha. The teaching was no longer the purview of one individual; it had become the gift of and to the collective.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the retreat had been billed: One Buddha Is Not Enough.

One of the most meaningful moments for me personally was when I was initiated into the Five Mindfulness Trainings—practices that give concrete expression to the Buddha’s teachings about right understanding and true love.

Sister Pine, the nun who facilitated our small group, assigned Dharma names to everyone in her group who had adopted the trainings. The morning she passed out the certificates she gestured me aside to quietly whisper something to me. She told me that the Dharma name she had heard for me was Living Christ of the Heart, but she didn’t know if I would be able to use it publicly, so on my certificate she wrote Joyful Gift of the Heart. When she told me, she emphasized the word Living, repeating it emphatically to convey to me that the name she’d heard didn’t refer to something or someone in the past, but to a present, living reality.

I have held the Dharma name at arms length. There’s so much baggage associated with the term “Christ.” It can so easily be misconstrued—becoming a mine field for the ego. After all, how many mentally unstable people have claimed themselves to be the Christ, sometimes with catastrophic consequences?

And therein lies the problem: people believing themselves to be the Christ, as though there can only be one. In fact, the belief in one’s specialness—that one is somehow set apart from the rest of humanity—is an indication that the mind is still operating from an ego perspective, not a Christ perspective.

As I understand it at this point in my life, Christ isn’t a person but a state of being, a state of dwelling in the reality of one’s oneness with the All. Yes, it is a state of being Jesus inhabited, and one he wanted others to experience as well.

We have now reached a point where our collective survival may well depend on all of us awakening to our Christ nature, understanding that it the fullest expression of what it is to be human.

This, I believe, is Christianity’s new calling, metamorphosing into a religion that helps awaken the Christ capacity in us all, just as Thay wished to awaken the Buddha capacity in those of us who gathered on retreat.

While I was at the retreat that summer I bought a watch designed by Thich Nhat Hanh. In the center is the word “it’s” in Thay’s calligraphy, and in the four quadrants is written the word “now.” I’m sure he intended it to be a constant reminder to be in the moment, present to the eternal now.

And yet, against the backdrop of my experience at the retreat I hear it also as a proclamation that we all have the capacity to be Buddhas, that we are all the Christ we’ve been waiting for. The time for us to awaken to that truth is now.