Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Fear: Passage to Liberation

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facing fear

[This article has also been published on the Huffington Post.]

In the wake of our recent presidential election, many people are feeling deeply afraid about what the future holds, and understandably so. We have already seen an alarming rise in hate crimes now that bigotry has seemingly been legitimated through our electoral process.

In upcoming posts I will say more about the bigger picture that I see unfolding and the unprecedented opportunities now before us to come together in ways the world has never seen. But for now, I want to speak about fear and offer some ways we can work with it to become the mindful, liberated agents for change these times need us to be.

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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

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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The Mind Game We’re Playing

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woman's face painted with American flag
What game are we really playing?

This past Tuesday, sitting with my spouse, Kip, in a packed sports bar watching the World Cup soccer match between the U.S.A. and Belgium, I was delighting in the comedy of the situation.

The gathering, mostly young people, many of them decked out in red, white and blue, beers in hand, crowded around the large flatscreen televisions, cheering and groaning together as though they were many bodies ruled by one mind.

The excitement was palpable. Maybe, just maybe the U.S. could pull off an upset and defeat the Belgian team to move on to the next round. Anything seemed possible in this World Cup that has already seen the dethroning of some of the world’s soccer powerhouses.

Thanks in large part to the extraordinary performance of their goal keeper, Tim Howard, the U.S. team managed to hold their own through the 90 minutes of play, and when the whistle sounded to end regular play the game was tied 0-0. During the break before overtime, we all took a breather. The T.V. volume was turned down, the bass-heavy music turned up, people mingled and, in the case of several of us women, stood in line for the restroom.

Not long after the 30 minutes of extra time began, Belgium scored its first goal, and the mood of the crowd instantly plummeted from excitement to disappointment, and then to resignation when Belgium scored yet again. A man behind me, angry, began using expletives more liberally and another young man within ear shot, clinging to the possibility of victory, said, “You gotta believe!”Continue Reading

The Cross Is Empty and Always Has Been

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cross of matchesEvery summer growing up I attended Vacation Bible School at our Presbyterian church in downtown Denver. We would do crafts, sing songs, memorize scripture verses about God’s love, and try to cream each other in games of dodge ball in the church basement.

One summer one of our craft projects was to make a cross out of matches. We took partially burned matches and pasted them onto a cross-shaped piece of cardboard. Then our teacher had us glue the cardboard cross to a piece of contact-paper-covered plywood and told us to find an appropriate scripture passage to write on it.

I loved doing crafts, and this project was right up my alley. Painstakingly, I pasted my matches onto the cardboard, lining them up neatly, then glued the cross onto the backing. Then I thumbed through my Bible to find just the right scripture verse.

I was excited when I landed on the perfect verse. I carefully wrote it out, and proudly took my project to my teacher to show her.

As soon as she looked at it I could tell by her expression that I had done something wrong. She didn’t say what it was, but there seemed to be a problem with the verse I had chosen: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”Continue Reading

Gonna Lay Down My Sword and Shield

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shield
What do you think you need to defend?

Several years ago I was attending a Quaker meeting when a young woman stood up and began singing, slowly, the old gospel song “Down By the Riverside.”

I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside…

After singing a few lines, she spoke the first few words of the lyric, adding an emphasis that opened up the song in a new way for me. “I’m gonna lay down my sword — and shield.” 

In all the years I’d sung that song I’d scarcely paid any attention to the shield part. After all, it was a song about studying war no more, and war, as we all know, is about swords.

But when she emphasized those words — “and shield” — I realized that laying down the shield is even more radical than laying down the sword, because to lay down one’s shield is to lay down one’s fear.

In truth, we rarely lay down our shield. We spend a lot of energy trying to defend ourselves  against the threat of attack, whether it be of terrorists, lawsuits, or even personal embarrassment. If you start paying attention, you’ll probably notice how often you use the shield in everyday interactions. Every time you feel the impulse to defend your opinion, or your experience, or your worth you are holding forth the shield.Continue Reading

The Sacrament of Civil Disobedience

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Handcuffs_on_table
There are two types of civil disobedience. One originates with the ego, the other with the soul.

In response to a reader’s comment on last week’s blog post,  The Ultimate Keystone Demonstration: Love, I said I often use the word “sacramental” to describe some of my experiences of engaging in civil disobedience. In that post I talked about what seem to me to be limitations of conventional civil disobedience, and yet over these past days I’ve also been thinking more about those moments when c.d. felt sacramental to me and why.

I think of a sacrament as a visible action using tangible elements that touches upon an intangible truth. A sacrament has the power to transcend the action and objects themselves, opening a portal to a Reality that is beyond our ordinary consciousness, and it always has at its heart the understanding that we are one with something much greater than ourselves.

As I’ve thought more about why certain moments of civil disobedience have felt sacramental to me, I realized that it wasn’t because of the actions in and of themselves: crossing the property line of a military base singing Amazing Grace or sitting in front of the doors to a Federal Building reading the Beatitudes. Rather it was because I and those I was with were choosing to abide within the understanding that we were one with each other, with those arresting us, and with a Reality that transcends us all.Continue Reading

Of Crosses and Crocuses

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of crosses and crocuses
There are two realities available to us: imperial reality and divine reality.

Last week on March 21st Kip and I celebrated our 21st anniversary. These last couple of weeks I’ve been recalling our wedding, which was a small, intimate gathering of immediate family and close friends. The ceremony was nontraditional. We wrote our own vows, friends and family members sang and played music, read poems, did liturgical dance and at the end of the ceremony each person came forward and gave us a blessing as they placed ribbons across our shoulders.

It was a wonderful gift to be showered with the well-wishes of our loved ones, and later Kip wove the ribbons of blessing into a wall hanging that hangs in our home to this day.

Of the many blessings we received that day, two stand out clearly in my mind. The first was, “May you have many crosses to bear.”Continue Reading