Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Believing Mirrors

by

Winging it home

In a recent conversation, the concept of “believing mirrors” came up. It is a term coined by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Cameron talks about the importance of artists having people in our lives who believe in us and in our creative work. These are the people who can reflect back to us what we are capable of even when we may not be able to see it ourselves.

I appreciate Cameron’s insight, because I know what a huge difference it makes when I hear back from someone that they have been touched or helped by something I have put out into the world. But when the subject of believing mirrors came up again recently, I realized that in my core I feel like I am a believing mirror for humanity. In my heart of hearts I know we have it in us to get through this awakening process, turbulent though it is.Continue Reading

Meditation, Community, and Our We Awakening

by

The time of the lone wolf is over

Recently I began hosting daily online gatherings in which people from many different locations have joined together to meditate. I have been amazed at how quickly we moved into resonance—opening and amplifying a Heart Field and allowing ourselves to be attuned to higher frequencies. I launched the group because I had been feeling a strong intuitive desire to gather community as the next step in our collective awakening.

Many of us for years have attended to our own inner work and meditation practices. Now it is time for us to come together and enact the truth of we-ness, which is the essence of the unitive consciousness that is arising. It is like the imaginal cells in the chrysalis, after the structure of the caterpillar has dissolved, finding each other, connecting with each other, and beginning to form a new organism: the butterfly.

What Meditation Has Meant to Me

One of the members of the WeAwakening meditation community emailed me asking that I share my understanding of meditation and what it has meant to me. As I have considered her question I have realized how much my practice of meditation has evolved over time.

Early on I practiced mindfulness meditation, becoming aware of sensations, sounds, breath, developing the ability to notice thoughts as they arise—not getting drawn into them, but simply letting them appear and subside without judgment or attachment.

That practice has been extremely valuable for me. It has helped me cultivate the ability to be present in the moment, and it has given me the essential ability to observe mental activity without identifying with it.

This capacity to notice the thinking mind without believing it or engaging it is fundamental in coming to know the true Self, because the thinking mind generates and sustains a false reality and a false identity. Unless we can see through its chatter we can never experience the Real Self.

Opening to Union with Spirit Realm

Over time though, my meditation practice has evolved into an opportunity to unite with the spiritual dimensions. This is another way in which this is a we-awakening. As humans, we aren’t doing it on our own. It is happening in partnership with the Spirit Realm—as well as with the entire Earth.

In my meditation time I join the Spirit Realm and invite assistance in dissolving all traces of erroneous thought forms. I allow myself to be attuned to the energies that are now present to help us through this moment of planetary transition.

I suppose it has become a blending of mindfulness meditation, prayer, and spiritual energy work in which I open, invite and allow my own awakening to emerge fully, knowing this is my most important contribution to the world and our collective awakening.

The WeAwakening Experience

Now, gathering with the beautiful community of souls in the WeAwakening meditation group I feel as though the whole process is accelerating. My experience so far has been that I have felt an expansion of the Heart as we have joined together from our Heart centers, creating a palpable Heart Field among us.

I have also experienced moments when that greater Heart Field has been present even when we’re not meditating together. The dissolving of attachments to former ways of perceiving also seems to be accelerating.

Since our group began I have also come to see that joining with others from the Heart is a powerful antidote to fear, which as humans is our greatest obstacle to awakening.

But an experience I had earlier this week helped me understand even more clearly why I had been prompted to gather community.

The Need for a Collective Container

For quite a long time I have experienced spontaneous visitations of Joy. It is a feeling, an energy that wells up in my body, unbidden, and ignites my Heart like a bright, radiant Sun in my chest. The other day, while I was in my kitchen (for some reason, these visitations often happen while I’m in my kitchen) I had one of those Joy moments. But this time it was so intense that its energy was almost overwhelming.

I realized then that one of the key reasons for us to join together in community is that the higher frequencies that want to be anchored on the planet right now, the frequencies that will usher in a new world, are very intense. They are more than most of us can handle on our own. They require a We container—a collective Field that is expansive enough and strong enough to receive them.

I am exceedingly grateful for our meditation community and for everyone on the planet who is offering themselves in service of this monumental shift. Earth truly is in the midst of a We Awakening, the radiant sun of the Heart is rising—and as the famous Hopi prophecy says, the time of the lone wolf is over.

If you would like to join the WeAwakening meditation community, you can sign up here.

Like what you read?

Sign up for more.

Sign Up Now

The Forest: Our Wisdom Teacher

by

Life is an interdependent whole.

Recently, a criminal cyber organization called DarkSide, based in Eastern Europe, hacked into Colonial Pipeline’s computer system and installed ransomware. As a result, the pipeline, which serves many areas on the East Coast, was shut down.

After they hacked Colonial Pipeline, DarkSide apologized for inconveniencing U.S. citizens. They claimed they only ever wanted money and never intended to disrupt the lives of ordinary people. After pressure was put on them by the U.S. government, DarkSide supposedly disbanded their operations.

What I find especially interesting is that DarkSide (who comes up with these names anyway?) had so perfected their ransomware that they had established a franchise, sharing their ransomware code with other hackers in exchange for a portion of their proceeds.

That the Internet, which now connects people globally, is being used to extort wealth may be inevitable in a capitalist economy that is all about taking. The whole idea in vogue now is to amass as much wealth as possible and share as little as you can get away with.

It may be that DarkSide is just bringing out of the shadows the dysfunctional priorities of the global economy. The only difference is that in their case the law doesn’t support the way they go about it. But then, laws, too, can be criminal.Continue Reading

Outgrowing Our Myths

by

In the many, the One.

Several months ago, on my birthday in fact, I had a dream unlike any I’ve ever had: a dream telling me how to interpret another dream I had 15 years prior.

The original dream was quite short. Here it is.

I’m returning from some sort of sojourn or quest, possibly returning from my time on Earth, and a Voice asks me, “Did you see minotaurs?”

I reply, “No. I saw crystal, and a star on the rainbow of life.”

The Minotaur, as you may recall, was that creature from Greek mythology that had the torso of a man and the head and tail of a bull. It was a ferocious creature that eventually had to be imprisoned in a labyrinth on Crete, and every year it would be fed with human sacrifices.

As I worked on the dream, I wondered, “What does it mean to see minotaurs?” I sensed that it symbolized journeying through life seeing only terrifying forces looking to devour you, living beholden to a myth of fear.

But I was baffled by my response to the question that had been posed to me. Seeing “crystal and a star on the rainbow of life” sounded very poetic, but I had no idea what it meant.

That’s where the dream I had last fall stepped in. It told me that crystal symbolizes the way in which light solidifies into form. The rainbow, the dream explained, symbolizes the diversity of expression that light takes on, just as in a rainbow light refracts into many colors. To see a star on the rainbow of life is to be able to see that all diversity arises from a single Source.

I was in awe, and very grateful, to receive this clarification of a dream that seemed important but had always stumped me.

This shift, from the mythology of fear into a realization of the intrinsic oneness underlying All That Is, is part of the global awakening that is underway. We are living in an era in which humans are becoming increasingly aware of the wholeness at the heart of all matter and of the unified Source that expresses in astounding diversity in this world and cosmos.

This recognition of diversity as an expression of singularity and form as solidified light is a long way from the mythologies of our ancestors that have guided our understanding for millennia.

Mythologies, like all stories, are ideas in the mind that have taken on narrative form. They are symbolic rather than real, and they can either be true or false, expressing either the truth of interbeingness and Love, or depicting the illusion of separateness, enemies, and fear.

Personally, I am someone who loves stories, but lately I have become unwilling to indulge in stories that aren’t true, whether they show up in the media or in my own mind. I guess you could say I’m done with minotaurs.

But give me a story that captures the essence of Light taking on form, or a story that transports me to the star on the rainbow of life, and I’m all-in.

I also know, though, that to live my entire life immersed in story, even if it is true, would be to live my life missing out on the unspeakable amazement of this present Moment. The mind, when it is engaged with story, is in a trance state. Only when it steps away from story to be fully present to What Is can it have a direct experience of Reality. Only then can it behold the beauty of Light dancing Its infinite diversity into form.

Like what you read?

Sign up for more.

Sign Up Now

Spring at the Penitentiary

by

It’s time we rejoin the community of Life.

In the heart of my neighborhood here in Philadelphia stands an imposing building that looks like a medieval fortress complete with turrets.

Eastern State Penitentiary, which is now a museum dedicated to raising awareness about the criminal justice system and mass incarceration, was built in the early 1800’s and was originally conceived as a visionary reform to the criminal justice system of the time, which used various means of corporal punishment as the sentences for crime.

The idea that was envisioned and which took on form at Eastern State Penitentiary was that a person found guilty would be removed from society for a period of time to contemplate, without any distractions, what they had done. The belief was that, by contemplating their wrongdoing, inmates would reform themselves. They would become penitent, hence the name penitentiary.

It was the first time that time became the sentence for a crime, and people doing time at Eastern State Penitentiary when it first opened had absolutely no contact with other human beings. They were kept in their own cells, handed their meals through small openings in the wall, provided a Bible, and given lots of time to think.

What the people running the penitentiary discovered, though, was that rather than becoming penitent, the inmates started going insane. They were subjected to what we now know as solitary confinement, something that is completely unnatural for human beings, social creatures that we are. (After a year of COVID, some of us had had a glimpse of the toll isolation can take.)

Frequently, when I pass by Eastern State, I think of how the penitentiary is a carefully architected depiction in stone of our story of separateness. Most of us, most of the time, live inside a sort of prison of the mind, believing and perceiving ourselves to be cut off from one another, from the Earth, from the Source of our Being, even from our true Self. This perception, even though it is illusory, has resulted in us feeling an existential displacement from the community of All Being.

Many years ago I got an inside glimpse into what actual incarceration is like when I was sentenced to a week in federal prison for engaging in civil disobedience when the US launched its invasion of Iraq. It seemed symbolic that I and the dozen others protesters who were sentenced with me, had to report to the Federal Detention Center on Earth Day.

Walking into that prison, leaving the spring sunshine and blossoming trees behind and stepping into the completely artificial environment of cinderblock walls, florescent lights, cell blocks and locked doors, was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had.

While I was there, I reflected on what it would be like to be in this environment year after year.

Earlier in the day I had stood with my eye glued to a tiny pinprick of clear glass I had discovered on the frosted window of our cell. Smaller than the head of a pin, it was my only view to the outside world. Looking through it I could make out the basic outlines of buildings, cars, a distant highway. I realized that for me the cruelest aspect of imprisonment would be to live months and even years never seeing a moonrise or a flower opening to the sun, never feeling the breeze on my skin or breathing in the smell of the woods after a rain, never hearing birdsong or touching the rough bark of a tree or walking a beach and feeling the sand beneath my feet. Ripping people away from the web of life and caging them in a world of artificial lights and unyielding surfaces was inhumane, the antithesis of the spiritual truth of interconnection. [ excerpt from Beyond Jesus: My Spiritual Odyssey]

This is the month when we celebrate Earth Day, an observation that calls us to renew our relationship with the Earth and to restore the damage done by our dream of separateness. It is a time for us to bring down the walls of isolation that we have built within ourselves so that we can know our oneness with all life on the planet.

The other morning, I took a walk around Eastern State Penitentiary. It was a gorgeous April morning, and the flower beds in front of the prison were brimming with hundreds of daffodils, tulips and iris. Along one of the towering walls the air was full of birdsong, as birds flitted in and out of cracks and crevasses between the stones where they had found safe places to build their nests.

That this historic site, such a graphic symbol of humanity doing time in our story of separateness, should now be a place where birds can hatch new life and daffodils and tulips open their petals to the sun moved me. It reflected the shift so many of us sense is happening on the planet right now as we move beyond the egoic consciousness of separateness and into an awareness of the truth of Love.

And just as moving was coming upon a gathering of toddlers and their parents sitting on the grass, in the community garden that has been created on the penitentiary grounds, under a canopy of flowering pear trees. They were being led in song by a young woman reading a story to them that had a recurring chorus, a story titled One Love.

Like what you read?

Sign up for more.

Sign Up Now

Love’s Idiots

by

May you be who you are here to be.

It’s been a fascinating experience for me these past four years as I have occasionally ventured into the whirlwind of our political controversies. I’m not the sort of person who relishes conflict, so I wasn’t eager to do it, yet I felt drawn to share my own take on things.

When I wrote about Donald Trump as someone who portrays the ego mind and who is here to help us recognize and release those patterns in ourselves, I found myself in an interesting borderland. Since I haven’t seen him as evil incarnate, nor as a savior figure—both of which I believe are just egoic projections—I have stood outside the polarized perspectives about him that gained such currency in the culture.

Some people were irked that I wasn’t getting on board with the Trump-the-Savior/Trump-the-Demon dualism. One person went so far as to tell me I was an idiot for not seeing him as a lightworker.

His choice of words got me thinking, and I realized he was right. I am an idiot.

The word idiot comes from the Greek, and it originally referred to someone who goes their own way. Those of us who are supporting this global awakening are going our own way. We are walking away from the norms of an ego-oriented world, which is based in judgment, division, and attack, and we are choosing to live into something New, something more revolutionary than the planet has ever seen.

We are the idiots who we have the audacity to stand in the very real possibility of a world that depicts the truth of Love, the truth of our inherent interconnectedness, a world founded upon mutual respect and reciprocity and which celebrates our oneness with all of Life.

Why? Because we feel that world within us, and we simply can’t ignore it. We sense it stirring in our cells and claiming our imagination, even though we may not be able to see it clearly yet.

Of course we have our days when the ways of the old draw us in and we get caught up in the hoopla. But at some level of our being we have made a choice to support this planetary awakening, attuning ourselves to the frequency and the vision of a transformed world and allowing it to gain a foothold in our consciousness, in our cells, in our lives, in our world.

Crystallizing Love

Recently I was sitting in our glassed in porch watching a beautiful snowfall, big clumps of flakes floating silently from the sky. I sat there for hours, mesmerized.

Snow always blows my mind when I consider that every snowflake is unique, even though every snowflake is the same thing: water. Just as we are each unique, even though we are each the same thing: Love. And I believe this is what we are here to do: to crystallize Love in a way that is uniquely our own.

The other thing that amazes me about snow is that each snowflake, by itself, is quite unsubstantial. And yet, as I watched from our porch that morning I could see what was happening. Each unique snowflake was joined by countless other unique snowflakes, and together they blanketed the landscape with beauty and brought a hushed peace to the city.

So my wish for you is that you allow your essential Love nature to crystallize and express itself in your life in a way that is uniquely your own.

And always remember that you are not alone. There is a Love blizzard underway that you are part of. So keep the faith and be who you are here to be, no matter how strange it may seem to others.

Like what you read?

Sign up for more.

Sign Up Now

Yielding: The Way of the Christ-Bearer

by

By yielding to the Reality of Love, Mary births Its expression in form.

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the political scene I have seen him as symbolizing the ego patterns that we must now leave behind if we are to survive as a species on this planet. By depicting in such an overt manner how the ego mind operates, what it believes, and how it plays out in the world, Trump has precipitated a jump into warp speed of our awakening process.

Recently, there have been reports that his mental health is deteriorating due to the loss of the election and his waning ability to bend circumstances to conform to his will—something that in the past he has always seemed to manage.

Symbolically, this is showing us the ultimate impotence of ego. Other than within the confines of its own fabricated alternative world, it has never been able to alter Reality, which is Love. The attempt to do so—to fracture Reality, to overturn Love—has been the great egoic escapade humanity undertook, and we have failed. Not for lack of effort, but simply because it can’t be done. Continue Reading

The Reality of Oneness

by

You are the eyes through which the Universal Mind sees Itself.

A friend emailed me recently asking if I could clarify what I mean when I use the term “oneness.” It’s a term she finds quite distasteful because to her it smacks of an amorphous, undifferentiated blob.

Although in my writing I often use terms like inter-existence, inter-beingness, interdependence or interconnectedness rather than oneness, I thought I would take some time to describe in more detail what I mean by all of it.

To do that, though, I need to give some autobiographical context, because when I speak of this it isn’t an abstract concept for me. It comes from a very formative experience I had years ago.

Almost two decades ago, a very close friend of mine died, and her death prompted me to resolve to open to deeper dimensions of my existence that I sensed were there but had never known.

Some while later I began to experience an onslaught of synchronicities too numerous and implausible for my worldview to accommodate. It felt like my reality was cracking apart.Continue Reading