Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

De-Inventing Yourself

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The essential Self is not something you invent. It is something you are.

Lately the phrase “de-inventing myself” has been rolling around in my mind. It’s a potent phrase for me because I feel as though that’s exactly what I’m doing at this stage in my life.

Over the last many years I have become acutely aware of the identity that I inherited, an invented identity that conformed to societal and familial expectations, but which wasn’t really me.

We all inherit an identity, handed down to us by our ancestors and societies that reflect the beliefs they developed. This inherited, invented identity isn’t ever truly us. It is a sort of pseudo-self we are given and from which we unconsciously live—until we don’t.

There comes a time when the impulse within us to be true to ourselves, to be truly our Self, becomes too insistent. It is like a shoot pushing up through compacted soil that will not be deterred. It will express itself. And in order to do that it must break through the crust of the invented self.

We can try to keep it down. We can try to hold onto who we have thought ourselves to be out of fear. But deep down we know that’s not what we are here for.Continue Reading

The Counterintuitive Path of Transformation

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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.

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Are You Making Your Best Contribution to the World?

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be your pixel 1
Are you being your pixel?

I’ve been thinking a lot about pixels lately. It might seem like a strange thing to think about, but it will make sense once I tell you the backstory.

I’ve been taking a couple of online classes to help me build a more robust author platform in preparation for some book launches down the road. One of the classes talks about finding your niche and positioning yourself against the competition.

Needless to say, I’ve been doing a lot of translating—trying to straddle the worlds of marketing and spirituality.

They emerge out of two very different worldviews. Conventional marketing focuses on competition and setting yourself apart. Spirituality, where my interest lies, is rooted in the realization of our oneness.

The way I see it, each of us is like a pixel in a larger picture. We each have our own authentic, unique attributes which the big picture needs. This is why I don’t need to think of my compatriot pixels (those who are offering similar teachings) as competitors, because we’re all doing our part to bring forth the big, beautiful picture. After all, an image of a dahlia needs more than one yellow pixel.

I was talking to a friend about all of this recently and she reminded me of that old Hassidic tale of the rabbi Zusya who died and went to stand before the judgment seat of God. As he waited for God to appear, he grew nervous thinking about his life and how little he had done.

He began to imagine that God was going to ask him, “Why weren’t you Moses?” or “Why weren’t you Solomon?” or “Why weren’t you David?”

But when God appeared, God simply asked, “Why weren’t you Zusya?”

We’re each here to be our authentic, unique pixel. Nothing else.

Despite what you may have been taught, it isn’t self-centered or arrogant to simply to be who you are and offer the world what you have to offer. In fact, if enough of us withhold our true hue and try to shine as a different sort of pixel, the big picture becomes nothing but a chaotic, indecipherable jumble.

So here’s my bumper sticker advice: Be your pixel. Go down deep into your essence, beneath all the beliefs that you’re supposed to be like somebody else or act like somebody else. Search for your authentic Self and let it shine—because the world needs you.

 

Spiritual Teachings From the Garden: The Purslane Parable

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My spouse and I have a plot in a nearby community garden that a number of weeds would like to call their home — dandelions, thistles, morning glory — and keeping them in check is a never-ending task.

There’s also another weed whose name I’ve never known that grows like crazy. Like most weeds, it’s hardy. It doesn’t seem to mind heat waves or dry spells, nor torrential rains for that matter, and try as we may to pull it all one week, the next week it’s always back, spreading its long red stems, with their shiny oblong leaves, low to the ground.

So you can imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I saw bundles of this weed for sale at our local farmer’s market. “You’re kidding me,” I thought. “This stuff that I’ve been tossing onto our compost pile for years sells for $2.50 a bunch?!”

The vendor, an Asian man who apparently didn’t feel compelled to follow American rules about what is a weed and what is a vegetable, knew that purslane (such a dignified name!) is loaded with vitamin A and C, and is delicious in salads and stir fry. He recommended sautéing it with garlic and a pinch of chili powder.

Sometimes Life Challenges Our Norms

Life is always challenging us with parables like that, isn’t it? It plops down right in front of us things that upset our assumptions and insist we shift our perspective. Purslane’s presence in our plot (forgive me for having a bit of alliterative fun here) has been a parable I’ve been parsing now for weeks.

First of all, it’s challenging any vestiges in me of the assumption that life is all about effort, and than nothing good comes to us except through hard work. This vitamin-loaded plant grows all on its own, thank you very much, without our fussing over it in the least. Heck, we didn’t even need to send away for any seed packets, nor, I’d lay bets, is Monsanto’s research team in their lab trying to figure out how to genetically modify and patent it, at least not yet.

Now according to Arla, an Ag teacher we knew in Missouri, a weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it to grow, and the purslane episode has also gotten me thinking about things in my life that I might see as weeds — unwanted and irritating — that might in fact be offering something quite useful if I would only stop rejecting them.

Sometimes life circumstances can be like that. Experiences we judge to be unpleasant often turn out to be the very things that enrich our growth. They’re loaded with all sorts of spiritual nutrients that grow our capacity to do very healthy things, like practicing acceptance and letting go.

From the Chopping Block to the Cutting Board

One of the most fertile fields this purslane parable invites me to explore isn’t necessarily what’s outside of me, but what’s right here inside of me. In the inner field I encounter a whole host of qualities, some of which I like and some I don’t, and the ones I don’t I often try to reject or resist.

And here’s the crazy thing: oftentimes it’s the very act of resisting them that causes them to thrive. My brother-in-law, Tim, recently told me that if you try to pull a thistle out by the roots, not only will you not succeed in getting all the roots, but you’ll trigger the thistle’s growth response and you’ll end up with more of them than you had before.

When it comes to our inner qualities, resistance simply doesn’t work. What does work is acceptance.

It’s the difference between trying to use the chopping block and the cutting board. The things we put on the chopping block are things we want to get rid of. The things we put on the cutting board are things we intend to take in, welcome, metabolize, absorb, knowing it will make us whole.

Needless to say, the next time I went to the garden after my farmer’s market discovery, I didn’t throw the purslane onto the compost pile after I pulled it. I brought it home, washed it up, and fixed it for dinner. The Asian farmer was right. It was delicious.

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Becoming a Practicing Creative

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clay revelation
What in you is paralyzed, longing to be set free?

Whether I was weeping outwardly I don’t recall. What I do know is that inwardly I was — from gratitude and a deep sense of relief for what the lump of clay in my hands was revealing to me.

I was at a workshop led by theologian Walter Wink and his wife June Keener-Wink, a potter. We had just been studying a biblical story about Jesus healing a paralytic whose friends had hauled him up onto the roof of a house, dug through it, and lowered their friend down on his mat to get him near Jesus, who was teaching in a crowded room below.

After we studied the text, we did a role play, and then June gave us each a lump of clay and instructed us to go find a quiet place and simply work the clay as we held the question: What in me is paralyzed?Continue Reading

From Manipulation to Manifestation

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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

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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