Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

The Taoist Lesson of My Handleless Coffee Mug

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handleless coffee mug
Are there areas of your life in which you need to let go of control?

I’ve been taking pottery classes this past year, and a few weeks ago, as I was finishing up a mug, I told my teacher I wasn’t going to put a handle on it.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I didn’t explain my rationale to him, mostly because I thought it might seem too weird.

You see, I’ve been drinking my morning coffee from a handleless mug for over a decade now, ever since one of my winter retreats in New Mexico.

One evening I was sitting in my room reading a book of poetry by Rumi when, for no apparent reason, the books on the shelf over the fireplace shifted and knocked the mug I’d brought with me onto the floor. It was a sturdy mug and survived the fall, or so I thought. I went over to pick it up and when I lifted it by the handle, the handle broke off.

It felt like one of those waking dream moments when outer circumstances mirror inner realities, because on that retreat, which came at an especially tumultuous time in my life, I’d been doing some challenging inner work that had to do with letting go. I was being asked to release some things that were precious to me, things that felt core to my identity and essential to what I perceived as my reason for being. Letting go of them felt like a death.Continue Reading

Toxic Thought Remediation

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What kind of thoughts are you spewing into the noosphere?
What kind of thoughts are you spewing into the noosphere?

A vortex of plastic twice the size of Texas is floating in the North Pacific Ocean, and a similar one in the Atlantic. Because of the way the ocean currents converge, these locations have become the aquatic dumping grounds of all the plastics we toss onto our streets and into our streams that eventually find their way to the ocean. Over time those plastics, some of which break down into small polymers, are ingested by birds and aquatic life, becoming part of the food chain of the entire planet.

I’m mentioning this because the plastic vortex floated through my mind in meditation recently, offering itself as a visible depiction of the effect of our thoughts.

Thoughts, like plastics, are energy, and thoughts are what we cast out into the ocean of consciousness encircling the planet, the noosphere as Teilhard de Chardin called it. When we generate thoughts that carry the toxicity of hatred and violence we are polluting the environment of Earth’s consciousness, which of course includes our own consciousness as well.

This toxicity of thought is extremely intense right now in the political sphere and becomes amplified in social media, and the disregard and disdain for the so-called “other” that we witness in our public sphere is the same disregard and disdain that is threatening the biosphere. Our thought pollution and the pollution that is choking the oceans are completely intertwined.

Helping Restore the Planet by Cleaning Up Your Mind

On this blog I often talk about our need to move beyond the prevailing consciousness which sees the world through the lens of separateness, the consciousness of the ego. I talk about this for a good reason, because the unprecedented challenges Earth faces right now can only be met if we humans undergo a radical shift in our consciousness. In fact, I believe this is the most essential task facing us in our day. If we are going to make it through this initiation into adulthood as a species we will have to move beyond the ego consciousness that has created the crises we now face. In other words, our future rests on what we do with our minds every bit as much as what we do with our plastics.

Like the biosphere, Earth’s noosphere has been polluted over centuries, and the thought legacy we’ve inherited of violence, oppression, prejudice and exploitation is something we all have a role in cleaning up, just as we each have a role to play in helping clean up the water, soil and air.

Obviously the most important thing each of us can do — and the one thing nobody can do for us — is to clean up our own mind, our own mental backyard so to speak, and the way we do that is by simply refusing to feed negative thoughts that float through our minds. We deny them the nutrients they need of attention (which can also come in the form of resistance), and by doing so we allow them to begin to dissipate.

Please notice that I didn’t say that we stop having negative thoughts. The truth is we all have them from time to time; they come to us quite unbidden. But when they come we have a choice whether we will indulge them with a good juicy story they can feed on.

One of those juicy stories, and the one that’s often the hardest to detect because on the surface it seems so righteous, is the story that says you’re a bad person for having negative thoughts. When you judge yourself (in the interest of improving yourself, of course) you’re actually generating more toxic thoughts, causing your and the planet’s suffering to continue.

Rather than practicing judgment we have the power to practice compassion, acceptance and forgiveness, which are the only things capable of dispelling the pollutants of violence and hatred that swirl within and around us. By practicing compassion, acceptance and forgiveness we begin to transcend the ego’s story of otherness and in so doing we begin to heal the fragmentation that lies at the heart of so much of the suffering on Earth.

So the next time you hear about something like a plastic vortex in the ocean, or politicians duking it out over ideological differences, or read a post on Facebook that vilifies or ridicules the “other”, see if you can hold the situation and all the players in your heart, encircling them all love. Because truthfully, their fragmentation is our fragmentation, just as the ocean’s pollution belongs to us all.

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

The Problem with New Year’s Resolutions

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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