Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Deepening the Ho’oponopono Prayer—by Elliott Robertson

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An acquaintance and colleague of mine, Elliott Robertson, contributed the piece below, which I am pleased to share with you.

In delving more deeply into Elliott’s exploration of Ho’oponopono, I am finding it to be a powerful practice in healing my relationship with Mother Earth and my kindred species.

I encourage you to discover how this practice might bring healing to various relationships in your own life, inner and outer.

~Patricia

I’ve been turning to Ho’oponopono frequently over the summer. For me, this prayer from the Huna lineage is healing.

The practice was popularized 15 or 20 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us were introduced to the practice as a set of words. Some of us committed the words to memory and may have repeated the four sentences of the Ho’oponopono prayer by rote from time to time, and rote prayers are usually quite shallow. It wasn’t until I started designing exercises for workshops that I discovered the power and depth of this prayer. It invites us to dive into cleansing waters.Continue Reading

Beautiful You Are

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In honor of Pride Month I wanted to share a song I wrote and recorded many years ago. It was my way of responding to the deep, suicidal pain of someone I knew whose sexual orientation was an abomination to their church.

In this time of intensifying attack on those who do not fit conventional gender or sexual orientation norms, may we continue to stand in the truth of Love. May we celebrate the prism of diversity through which the divine Light expresses itself. May we bow to the beauty of every soul.

Beautiful You Are

How can I break through the pain
To tell you how beautiful you are?
How can I vanquish this cruel false god
To tell you the Universe loves you?

Who cast the stones that broke you
With their anger so righteous in their cause so divine?
And what did they say to convince you
That your Being is shameful and your loving a crime?

How can I break through the pain
To tell you how beautiful you are?
How can I vanquish this cruel false god
To tell you the Universe loves you?

Who was this god that they taught you
Who demanded your love, but detested your kind?
And how could they use sacred scriptures
To torture your spirit and torment your mind?

How can I break through the pain
To tell you how beautiful you are?
How can I vanquish this cruel false god
To tell you the Universe loves you?

That you are a diamond, a snowflake, a star,
That you were created to be who you are.

How can I shatter the lies,
To unbind your soul,
To soothe your wounds,
To see you whole?

Music, lyrics, guitar and vocals by Patricia Pearce

Setting Aside Our Human-Centricity

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The haze of our ignorance is beginning to lift.
There was a brown-gray haze cloaking the city skyline, and the sun was rising red when I went up to our roof deck early this morning to do my morning journaling. I had already seen on my weather app that the air quality was “Unhealthy,” but I decided to go up anyway. After all, all I was going to do was sit and write. Nothing strenuous. But when I saw with my own eyes what “unhealthy” air quality looks like, I thought, “I can’t be up here today.” Much as I love to start my day outside. Much as I enjoy being surrounded by the flowers that are blooming spectacularly right now in the pots lining the deck. So I gathered up my journal and my pot of tea and was just about to go back inside when I noticed the chimney swifts flying overhead. “They have no place to go,” I thought. No indoors they can retreat to. No N-95 masks they can don. They have to endure the smoke that is pouring down from the wildfires in Canada. They live their lives completely vulnerable to what we humans do or don’t do in response to the climate emergency.Continue Reading

Love’s Default

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The default setting is Love.If you have followed my work for any period of time, you’ll know that I sometimes look at global events through the lens of dreamwork. It is a helpful way to understand at a deeper level what we are experiencing collectively, because this human drama is a type of dream in which we are playing out an utterly implausible scenario, namely, separateness.

In this dream of separateness we are unaware of our eternal union with Love. Asleep to the interconnectedness of all Being. Oblivious to our own divine nature. You could say we humans are on this planet dreaming our impossible dream.Continue Reading

My Teachers, the Birds

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The other morning, as I was on our roof deck doing my morning journaling, I noticed a pair of birds land in one of the planter boxes where we grow vegetables. While I watched the leaves of the bok choi and Swiss chard tremble as the birds made their way among them, I wondered what they were up to. Were they finding bugs for their morning breakfast? Were they sampling the tender leaves of the cilantro and parsley?

I soon had my answer when one of them, then the other, flew off with a beak full of twigs and dried leaves. They made several trips from wherever they were building their nest, each time carrying off ample nesting material. I felt so happy that our roof deck garden was providing them with what they needed for the home they were building for their young ones, and I had such a deep appreciation for how they made use of what nature readily offers.

Birds have my deepest respect for the risks they take in learning to fly, and the truth is that not all of them make it. During fledgling season, while on my walks through the neighborhood, I sometimes see dead baby birds on the sidewalk, little birds who didn’t quite get the knack of flying, though far more often, tiny baby birds who were blown out of the nest even before they had a chance to try. That, I guess, is the nature of nature that one just has to accept. Lives end. Life goes on.Continue Reading

Our Make-Believe World

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We built a whole world on one wildly imaginative idea.

The other day I was out for a walk in our neighborhood, enjoying the extroverted exuberance of the daffodils and pausing now and then to breathe in the mind-altering fragrance of a grape hyacinth. Along the way, I passed by a man and his young daughter who were headed in the opposite direction. As we passed one another, I heard the little girl telling her father about the things that were falling from the sky of Middle Earth.

My immediate response was delight at the imaginative capacity of children. They can create whole worlds in their minds, and their spirits haven’t yet been straightjacketed by the realities we adults have to manage.

But in the next instant I almost burst out laughing as I recognized that we adults dwell in our own fantasy world, one that we take so seriously that we have brought it forth in the dimension of form—and perhaps ours is the greater imagination, because we are utterly convinced that our fantasy is the “real world.”Continue Reading

Being Human: Containing Multitudes

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As we make space for our complexities, we know ourselves as Love.

In the daily online WeAwakening meditation group that I facilitate we have a very simple format. We begin by getting centered and open, and then I draw an Angel Card that has a word on it which we bring into our meditation time. As we meditate, we don’t think about what the word means. Instead, we let the thinking mind rest as we open ourselves to the energy of the word, letting ourselves feel how it feels. We allow its essence to become activated within us. This week one of the words was Faith.

As I opened myself to the essence of Faith, I felt its serenity, its certainty, its assured calm. I felt it as an intrinsic quality of the eternal Self that knows no death, no danger, no fear. I could feel how the divine Self doesn’t have faith. It is Faith. What else could it possibly be, knowing, as It does, the Love that is the Source of Its being?Continue Reading

Love: The Fork in Our Road

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bent fork in the road
A Fork in the Road. Collage by Patricia Pearce.

Some years back I did something that was pretty out there for me: I attended a spoon bending class. Well, actually it was a fork bending class, because forks are a bit more challenging, but it was the same idea.

A friend of mine and I were planning a trip to Sedona where we would be attending a retreat, and the spoon bending class was being offered by the retreat leader the evening before it was to begin. My friend had taken the class before and was interested in doing it again, and she asked if I’d like to go with her. It was a bit out of my comfort zone, but it sounded intriguing, so I said yes.

We gathered in the room that evening, about 30 of us, and when the class began, the teacher, Gene, assured us that before the evening was done each of us would succeed in bending at least one of the forks he would give us. He then named the thought we were all thinking to ourselves: “I’m going to be the only person here who won’t be able to do this.” We all laughed. It’s like he was reading our minds.Continue Reading