Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Learning to Lighten Up

by

There are many ways to be a Light Worker. I like to think of myself as, among other things, a Light Writer—that my writing can be a portal for Light to shine through and illuminate the times we are in, dispel fear, help us find our way into our truth and essential Self.

Which is why, as a Light Writer, the word “blog” is so unappealing to me. It sounds like slog. Or flog. Or blob. I mean, really! Who came up with such a heavy, dense word? Of course I know where it came from. It’s short for weblog. But still. Words carry frequency, and this word feels pretty darn dense.

I think the reason this seems significant to me is this: Earth is speeding up. I don’t mean in the busyness way, although there’s that. Rather it’s that frequencies are rising, and we’re being asked to rise with them. We’re being asked to lighten up—in every way.Continue Reading

The Counterintuitive Path of Transformation

by

Are you ready to explore the path of transformation?
Are you ready to explore the path of transformation?
Imagine you woke up tomorrow to a life that was reflecting the fullness of the potential that you always knew was in you. What does your life look like? What sort of person have you become? Let yourself inhabit that vision for a moment. You no doubt know that there is far more inside you than you have ever brought forth—more creativity, more contribution, more joy, more love, more life. You probably also understand that you have the capacity—as all human beings do—to consciously choose who you will become and to actively participate in how your life unfolds. The question is: How can you let go of the limiting beliefs and behaviors that prevent that potential from coming forth?

Why Personal Transformation Can Be Challenging

There are a couple of reasons why personal transformation can be challenging: we misunderstand what is real, and we misunderstand the nature of power. First, let’s consider our misunderstanding of what is real.
What Is Real?
Until you have achieved a certain level of self-awareness, you accept as true ideas about who and what you are that you have inherited or been socialized into. Even though these ideas are arbitrary, you take them to be reality: accurate and unchangeable. You live as someone others believe you to be, and more important, you perceive yourself to be who others believe you are. These ideas and beliefs comprise your mental operating system, and it never even occurs to you to question them. At the root of this operating system lies a fundamental error that almost all of us have inherited: the idea that we exist as solitary entities separate from one another and the rest of Life. This notion of being separate gives rise to a false self, often referred to as the ego, which we mistake for our true self. And that brings me to our misunderstanding of power.
What Is Power?
As long as we are living from this ego perspective, we see ourselves as lonely strivers who must prevail over all obstacles through our own effort, and we see power as the ability to force things to happen—the ability to dominate, dictate and control. This egoic understanding of power is what we see playing out on the national and global stage, and if we pay close attention we will see it within ourselves in our approach to personal transformation: once we realize that the beliefs we have inherited about ourselves are false, we try to overcome them through judgment and resistance and we try to become the person we wish to become through the energy of striving and grasping. Ironically, this ego approach of force, with its judgment, resistance, striving, and grasping, is the very thing that assures that the old patterns stay locked in place. The ego approach to change keeps transformation at bay.

Transformation Arises from Acceptance

Despite our misperceptions, domination, force, and control are not power. Power is what has brought forth Life itself—it is an attribute of Love. Nor can transformation ever be achieved by the ego. It is a natural process which occurs in the presence of acceptance, appreciation, and blessing. If you think about your own experience, you will probably recall times when being in the presence of judgment had the effect of shutting you down and inhibiting you from expressing your potential. You will probably also remember times when being in the presence of love, acceptance, and appreciation allowed you to thrive. This loving energy is precisely the power we can bring to bear to support our own personal evolution.

Three Ways to Cooperate with Transformation

So how can you cooperate with the natural process of transformation? Here are three things you can do:

Lay Claim to Your Intention

You begin by affirming your intention to open to transformation, recognizing that it is not something you personally bring about. You move beyond your limited ego perspective and call upon the power of Love to assist you. Setting an intention is very much like setting coordinates in your GPS. You use a GPS precisely because you don’t know how to get where you want to go. What sort of person do you want to be? What sort of life do you want to live? What sort of contribution do you want to make in the world? These things make up your GPS setting. You don’t dictate how your journey unfolds (which is what the ego would like to do). Rather, you lay claim to the person you want to be and the life you want to live, accepting that there is a greater Wisdom that is supporting you.

Accept and Bless

After laying claim to your intention, you practice something that seems counterintuitive and paradoxical, but which is extremely potent: accepting and blessing what is while simultaneously accepting and blessing what can be. It sounds quite simple, and in a way it is. But it is also quite challenging because in order to do this you have to surrender resistance and disbelief. You begin to discover that you can yield to what wants to come forth, rather than strive to make it happen. You also begin to discover that you really aren’t in this life alone.

Become an Improv Partner with Life

Having assumed a stance of acceptance and blessing you enter into an improvisational partnership with Life, employing the improv maxim of yes. . . and. . . You say yes to what Life has given you, and you offer up your own creative response to it without any attachment to specific outcomes.

Entering the Dance of Becoming

Through laying claim to your intention, accepting and blessing what is and what can be, and engaging in the improvisational practice of yes, and you open the way for transformation to occur. Partnering with the power of Love, you enter into the dance of becoming. You allow your life to unfold in surprising ways that you neither dictate nor control, but in which you play a vital creative role.

Like what you read?

Click the circle.

It’s Just One Thing After Another

by

paintbrush
The great task is nothing but a series of small acts.

At our house, construction has been going on since last fall. After two years of planning we finally took the leap and had a roof deck built, and due to several factors — among them the most severe winter in recent memory — the project, which was supposed to have taken two months, has taken nearly eight.

It’s been grueling living in a construction zone, dealing with the dust and the disruption, although the end product is turning out to be everything we’d hoped for.

Part of the project included gutting, insulating and sheet rocking our home office, as well as ripping out and replacing the bathroom ceiling, and since the contractors finished their part of the interior work several weeks ago I’ve been very busy reclaiming our inner space: spackling walls, sanding, painting rooms and doors, and vacuuming up the plaster dust that managed to float into every nook and cranny.

Fortunately, an out of town guest was coming to stay with us a couple of weeks ago, and I say fortunately because having a firm deadline did wonders to keep me focused. I didn’t have the luxury of indulging the temptation to become overwhelmed, throw up my hands and fall into the pit of paralysis.Continue Reading

From Manipulation to Manifestation

by

What possibilities do you wish to invite into manifestation?
At the heart of reality is a field of infinite possibilities.

This post is the third in a series based on the prayer practice I introduced in The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions. Last week I wrote about the first part of the practice, accepting and blessing what is. This week I will explore in more detail the second part: blessing and welcoming what could be.

My approach to this is based in the scientific and spiritual understanding that at the heart of reality is a field of infinite possibilities and that, because all things are interconnected, we cannot help but influence this field.

Sensing the Limits of Our Senses

In our daily lives we operate mostly based on what our five senses perceive. We tend to believe, out of laziness or convention, that reality only consists of that which we can see, hear, taste, touch or smell. But our senses are only able to detect a tiny fraction of reality. Take ultraviolet light. Until we had the technological equipment to measure it, it was invisible to humans. For us it simply didn’t exist. For some other creatures though, like bumblebees, it was quite real because they could see it. Or consider the high-frequency sound waves that are beyond the range of the human ear to detect. Just because they may not exist within our boundaries of perception doesn’t mean they won’t drive a dog crazy.Continue Reading

From Resolution to Re-Solution

by

By shifting our own energy we allow our circumstances to become more fluid.
By shifting our own energy we allow our circumstances to become more fluid.

Several people have been in touch with me this past week expressing their enthusiasm for the prayer practice I introduced in last week’s blog, The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions, and their interest has inspired me to share a bit more about what the practice has meant to me and how I understand it.

One thing to remember is that even though I use this practice when there is something in my life I’d like to transform, perhaps the most important aspect of the practice — and maybe the thing most of us would like to skip over — is the complete acceptance of my present circumstances, whatever they may be.

If I want to tap into the full power of the practice I can’t look at acceptance of what is as simply a means to an end. If I do that I haven’t really accepted the present circumstances fully. Full acceptance means just that. I let myself come to peace with what is, I let myself come to love it in fact.

What I’ve discovered is that just doing that much is transformative in and of itself. When I move into a stance of true acceptance I will feel something shift within me, and I will sense that the simple act of loving what is has opened a portal to the realm of possibility, the realm of what could be.Continue Reading

The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions

by

The secret to change is counterintuitive and paradoxical.
The secret to change is counterintuitive and paradoxical.

This is the time of year when many of us think about what we want for ourselves and make New Year’s resolutions about the things we’d like to do differently.  Hanging a fresh, new calendar on the wall has a way of prompting us to assess where we are in our lives and in relation to our goals.

As we all know though, New Year’s resolutions are usually so ineffective that they are standard material for comedians and cartoonists. The comedy works because we can all relate to our endearingly earnest yet perennially futile efforts at change. It seems that for every resolution there is an equal and opposite inner resistance.

So what’s the deal? Why is it that what we begin with a sense of possibility and conviction ends up leaving us feeling even more imprisoned in the very patterns of behavior we want to change?

I believe the reason change often seems impossible to us is because we don’t understand the basic spiritual dynamics at work.Continue Reading

Living by Heart

by

The Heart creates from the limitless possibilities of uncertainty.

I’m recently back from retreat, and once again I am convinced that taking time away from the incessant noise of our society is good for my soul. I can hear myself so much more clearly when I’m unplugged than when I am constantly navigating and responding to external communications and distractions. I can tune in more completely to the wisdom of my heart that perceives possibilities that my analytical mind is simply unable to access.

While on retreat I always do a drawing or two by heart — meaning, I let my intuition guide the process — something I wrote about in a previous post, The Life of a Heartist. This year on retreat I again immersed myself in the fluid ways of intuitive knowing, and in the process I saw more clearly that when we live guided by the heart, we must by definition live in the field of uncertainty.

Our society values certainty. We live in a very left-brained culture that believes that in order to accomplish anything you must have a clearly laid out plan and you must focus your attention on numbers, statistics and “proven” strategies. All of that has its place, but only if it is in service to the heart’s desires and the heart’s guidance. To live a life in alignment with our deepest values and soul purpose, the heart must be in the driver’s seat.

I suspect one reason we prefer to live out of the analytical left-brain is that we feel more secure. If we can head out the door knowing exactly where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, we feel safe.

To live by heart is to live very differently. When we live by heart we center our lives not in certainty, but in trust. We don’t know ahead of time what the outcome of our actions nor the destination of our path will be. We simply follow the step-by-step leading of our intuition.Continue Reading

Yes, And: Life As Spiritual Improv

by

What would Yes, And look like for you?

This past summer I met a woman who teaches comedy improv, and our conversation piqued my curiosity since I teach extemporaneous preaching, which is its own sort of improv. So I started doing a bit of research into improv, and what I discovered is that many of its principles — just as in the case of extemporaneous preaching — are the very same things that make for a spiritually aligned life.

The most important principle in improv is known as “Yes, And.” What it means is that when your improv partner does or says something during a scene, you accept what has been offered and then build on it with your own interesting response. By doing so you keep the action moving forward in an unexpected, creative and sometime hilarious direction.

One thing that kills improv is if one of the players takes a stance of “Yes, but” or simply “No,” refusing or ignoring what has been offered and instead forcing the scene to move in a direction based on his or her own desires which have nothing to do with what their partners have already created.

I see life as spiritual improv. It presents us with situations, sometimes quite unexpected, and it’s up to us what we do with them. If we let go of our resistance to what is and accept our situation, then we are able to respond imaginatively in a way that allows circumstances to evolve in an innovative direction.Continue Reading