Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Being Human: Containing Multitudes

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As we make space for our complexities, we know ourselves as Love.

In the daily online WeAwakening meditation group that I facilitate we have a very simple format. We begin by getting centered and open, and then I draw an Angel Card that has a word on it which we bring into our meditation time. As we meditate, we don’t think about what the word means. Instead, we let the thinking mind rest as we open ourselves to the energy of the word, letting ourselves feel how it feels. We allow its essence to become activated within us. This week one of the words was Faith.

As I opened myself to the essence of Faith, I felt its serenity, its certainty, its assured calm. I felt it as an intrinsic quality of the eternal Self that knows no death, no danger, no fear. I could feel how the divine Self doesn’t have faith. It is Faith. What else could it possibly be, knowing, as It does, the Love that is the Source of Its being?

It was a beautiful, sublime experience.

But then, that afternoon after the meditation was over, I found myself feeling an amorphous dread. It wasn’t related to anything specific. Rather, I was experiencing the energetic essence of fear—the inverse of Faith.

The contrast between this feeling and that of the meditation couldn’t have been more extreme. And I had a sense that it was precisely the intensity of the Light I had experienced in the meditation that had flushed out of the shadows of my psyche the energy of fear.

Facing Fear

In my life I have had many opportunities to face fear, and there are two things I have learned about how to respond to it: not to be afraid of it, and not to try to banish it.

So when this fear arose, I made space for it. I let myself feel it, making no attempt to chase it back into the shadows. I allowed it to reveal itself; I cradled it in kindness, acceptance, and compassion.

As all of this was taking place, I sensed that what I was experiencing was a microcosm of what is happening on the planet right now. The intensity of the Love that is now flooding the Earth is flushing out of the shadows of our psyches everything that is contrary to Love and which we had judged ourselves for and tried to drive away. Our task now is to stop doing battle with any of it and make space for it, holding it in all compassion.

Containing Multitudes

Walt Whitman famously said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” For me this sums up what it is to be human.

Being human is a tall order, and we ought to bow to ourselves for our willingness to take it on. It requires that we navigate this world of form in a body that is hardwired for survival (which can never be achieved, since form, by its nature, is transitory—hence the fear), while at the same time carry the awareness of our eternal divine Essence and of the Infinite All which dwells beyond time and form.

It’s a big ask. But that’s what this cosmic experiment is all about: joining the awareness of boundless, timeless Love with the finite fleetingness of form.

At this moment on this planet, we humans are growing increasingly aware that we contain multitudes, and we are facing unprecedented opportunities to grow in our capacity to make space for the complexities we carry within us. This, after all, is what it means to be whole: ceasing to reject any part of ourselves.

As far as the fear goes, what I find is that the more I make space for it, the more I am able to recognize that it has no substance. The more I hold it in Love, the more I come to know myself as the Love I truly Am.

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Love: The Fork in Our Road

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bent fork in the road
A Fork in the Road. Collage by Patricia Pearce.

Some years back I did something that was pretty out there for me: I attended a spoon bending class. Well, actually it was a fork bending class, because forks are a bit more challenging, but it was the same idea.

A friend of mine and I were planning a trip to Sedona where we would be attending a retreat, and the spoon bending class was being offered by the retreat leader the evening before it was to begin. My friend had taken the class before and was interested in doing it again, and she asked if I’d like to go with her. It was a bit out of my comfort zone, but it sounded intriguing, so I said yes.

We gathered in the room that evening, about 30 of us, and when the class began, the teacher, Gene, assured us that before the evening was done each of us would succeed in bending at least one of the forks he would give us. He then named the thought we were all thinking to ourselves: “I’m going to be the only person here who won’t be able to do this.” We all laughed. It’s like he was reading our minds.Continue Reading

Solstice Song

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We sing because the song is in us.
It’s the winter solstice, and this morning I was awakened by a bird singing outside my window. This has been going on for awhile now, a couple of weeks at least. A lone bird in our neighborhood has been singing at dawn, and usually earlier, despite the fact that this isn’t the season for birdsong. I’m used to a chorus of birdsong waking me before dawn in the springtime, when the birds are singing out to find their mates, build their nests, participate in the budding life of spring. They are so loud, in fact, that I have to use earplugs if I want to sleep any later than 3 AM. But today is the winter solstice, and it’s not the season for birdsong. When I first heard this lone bird singing its chirping and cascading song (not a song I am familiar with) I was disturbed. “There you go,” I thought. “Things are so messed up with the climate now that even the birds are confused about what season it is.” But this morning as I lay in bed, having been stirred from a very interesting dream—something about a turn from the age old story of conflict to a new way of nonviolence—I wondered if perhaps this bird was here on a mission. Perhaps it had taken it upon itself to come into this city, into this season of darkness when things seem so despairing on the planet, and sing a song for the human heart. A song that could stir us into remembrance that the new life of spring is on its way, even though we can’t see it. Maybe, I thought, this little bird was even an angel donning avian form. Since we humans haven’t, for the most part, gained the ability to detect the song of angels, this angel had chosen to take on a form familiar to us, to sing something we know how to hear to stir us awake with the sound of beauty in the darkest time of the year. It can be hard sometimes to trust that the planet is turning toward the light of understanding, that we are in fact awakening when so many things seem to suggest the opposite is true. In those moments of doubt we need to hear a song of promise pouring through our window. Yet it can also be a challenge being the one singing of hope and joy when the circumstances don’t seem to call for it. We may wonder at times if we’re confused, if we’re deluding ourselves, singing about something that seems to have so little evidence in the material world to support it. But, like that bird outside my window, we sing our song of gladness and joy not because the circumstances warrant it but because the song is in us. The song is us, and to silence it would be to silence our very souls. And now it is midday. The solstice has just occurred. And I wonder if perhaps it is our willingness to be the “crazy” bird singing in the darkness, embodying the spring on the cusp of winter, that turns the planet toward the Light.

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Meditation, Community, and Our We Awakening

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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.

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Co-Authoring a New Story

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Through our willingness, we are co-authoring a new narrative world

I’m a sucker for a good novel. I love being transported into another world, into the lives, hearts and minds of characters who, like me, are finding their way in the world.

Recently, when I finished reading a very long and dense novel, I realized that when I enter into the narrative world of an author I am giving myself over to them in trust. I am reading the product of their imagination. It feels like a sacred act, a solemn trust.

As a reader I am picky. I want the author to take me somewhere meaningful, somewhere transcendent. I don’t want to spend my time reading a story that leaves me on the same vibrational plane that I experience in consensual reality. I want to enter into a narrative world that transports me into the New. This is why I have no time for dystopias. They are unimaginative. They merely play out a catastrophic trajectory to an epic dead end.

The Fiction We Live In

Why does any of this matter? Because fiction isn’t limited to the books we read or the movies we watch. We are living in a fiction everyday—the fiction in our own minds as well as the fiction in the collective mind. You could say that this whole world is a novel, but unlike the books we store on our shelves, we are both the characters and the authors of this novel we call the world.

And we have a choice, each of us. We can either continue spinning the same narrative thread of the past, remaining loyal to the premises of its plot, or we can be bold enough to invite a surprising narrative twist that opens up a whole new horizon for ourselves and for planet Earth.

And we all know it’s high time for a surprising narrative twist to take place on planet Earth.

Willingness Opens the Way

How do we invite that? All it really requires of us is that we be willing to relinquish our loyalty to the narrative that has been passed down to us, defect from its ground rules and its demands for enemies, divisions, struggle, winners and losers, fear.

Notice that I said it requires us only to be willing. That’s an important point, because one of the core themes of the current story humans have been authoring is based on the belief that we have to make things happen, and that even this planetary transformation and this global awakening is on us to carry out.

But it isn’t, and the first narrative twist happens when we accept that there are spiritual Beings who are in this with us, cheering us on, eager to partner with us to help bring forth what wants to happen in our lives and on this planet.

Since the spirit realm respects our free will, it will not intervene if we want to try to go it alone. This means we can decimate the ecosystems on the planet to the point of collapse if that is what we choose. And the shocking truth is that even if we do, Love would not reject us.

A New Story

So I encourage you to be picky about the stories you indulge, beginning with the stories in your own mind, because a New Story is ready to emerge on this planet. It isn’t based on the fallacy of separateness and division and judgment, but expresses the Reality of Love and the truth of our inter-existence.

This New Story is a partnership between the spirit realm and we embodied ones who are willing to release our allegiance to the narrative world of the past and become co-authors of  what is to come.

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The Promise of an Awakened World

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This is a talk and guided meditation I presented for Unity Church of Albany on June 27, 2021.

Transcript

I’ve been looking forward to this talk and this opportunity to bring you a message ever since Roger reached out to me several weeks ago, and invited me to speak to you all and he shared with me the vision statement that you adopted last summer, “a world transformed through spiritual awakening of all.”

And when I saw that, that vision statement, I knew that. something’s afoot here. Like this is meant to happen. So it’s really my delight and my honor to be with you all today to talk about the promise of an awakened world.Continue Reading

The Impulse to Be

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Is it time to let your awareness be rooted in the deep soil of your soul?

Recently I was talking with some women friends who have accompanied one another in our spiritual lives for nearly 20 years, and the conversation turned to something several of us are experiencing right now: the impulse to be, rather than to do.

I have noticed it in myself of late. It is as though something in me is putting the brakes on any sort of initiative. It is a season in which inner patterns are dissolving and even imagination seems to be taking a hiatus. I haven’t a clue what comes forth from it all. I am simply yielding to it and allowing it to be.

As I was noticing this impulse to not-do, an image arose in my mind of a tree, and I could feel how doing and action in our usual human sense of those words were foreign concepts for it. The tree was not going anywhere. It was becoming more deeply rooted in its own beingness.Continue Reading

The Return to the Feminine

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Our return to the Feminine holds the key to our healing.

Each February I take about ten days away to go on spiritual retreat. It is a time when I step away from the daily routine to listen more deeply. I never go with an agenda; I allow whatever wants to arise to do so. I have been doing this annually for almost twenty years, and I am always amazed at what unfolds. Often my time is guided by dreams, and always by intuition.

This year I had been immersing myself in a book I had just received, Mirari: The Way of the Marys, which recounts a prolonged dialogue between Mother Mary and Mari Perron, who also channeled A Course of Love.

As soon as I began reading Mirari in the days before leaving on retreat I felt a deep sense of relief, and of homecoming. Having grown up in mainstream Protestantism, in which the Divine Feminine is completely absent, it was like arriving at a spring of life-giving water. My thirsty spirit was being quenched.

Decades ago, when I was in seminary, I had to grapple with how the Feminine had not only been suppressed, but demonized in the religious tradition that formed me. This exile and vilification of the Feminine had profound implications for how I saw myself and my worth as a woman.

This is a struggle that I know many, if not most, women have had to deal with, and, because all of us, no matter our gender identity or biological sex, have both the Feminine and Masculine within us, the repression of the Feminine has had devastating effects on men as well.

Thankfully, that is beginning to change. The patriarchal beliefs of the past are crumbling, the Feminine is rising, and the balance between the Masculine and Feminine is being restored.

In this moment of return and re-balancing, we are coming back into the awareness of our intrinsic, reverent relationship with all Life, including ourselves. This understanding of the inherent truth of relationship is at the core of the Feminine, and it holds the key to the healing of our species and our planet.

While I was on my retreat, I felt Mary’s presence profoundly, which was a new experience for me. I felt her guiding me, encouraging me, holding me in the gentle embrace of the Mother. Since I was already experiencing her presence so keenly, it isn’t surprising that she was also referenced in a dream I had.

I’m riding on horseback with a few other people through an open, expansive landscape of scrub brush and rolling hills when we come to a place overlooking a village. Down in the village, the people, who are also on horseback, are riding out in a procession to honor Our Lady of Guadalupe. One of the riders is carrying a large banner of her on a tall, upright pole. As I watch the processional, my own horse drops her head, and when she does her bridle falls off.

One of the most intriguing things about this dream for me is the horse dropping her head, causing her bridle to fall off.

A horse’s bridle is the means by which a horse is placed in service to a human, directed by something besides her own will. As a friend of mine noted, Horse, in the I Ching, is a feminine symbol, and bridle sounds exactly like bridal (my dreams often use word plays). In traditional patriarchal culture, bridal indicates the ownership of a woman by her husband.

Mother Mary, by contrast, is often referred to as Virgin Mary, and the deeper meaning of virgin is a woman unto herself, a woman who is her own person, not owned or controlled by another.

As I listen to this dream I see that it is depicting a movement underway in which the Feminine is being honored (the processional) and released from the legacy of patriarchal control (the falling away of the bridle/bridal).

But the symbolism of the horse dropping her head goes deeper still. To drop the head is to be released not only from being controlled, but from the need to control.

For so long, western civilization has exalted the head, has sought to control the world through the intellect: dissecting, categorizing, compartmentalizing, seeking certainty and dominance over all things. In the process, we have alienated ourselves from Mystery, and from the direct knowing of the Heart and unmediated wisdom of the Intuition.

Yet, as Mary says in Mirari, The New that is now arising emerges from the Unknown. It is not something the intellect can plan, or strategize for, or make happen. The New gestates within us, is nurtured by us, is birthed through us. It is an act of creation, not fabrication.

As we return to Feminine ways of knowing and of being, we drop the head. We release our need for certainty; the old thought patterns of domination and control fall away; we experience our reverent relationship with All That Is; we bow before Mystery.

This is Women’s History Month, a time when we acknowledge the countless contributions women have made throughout history. But at this moment of global transformation, what interests me even more than women’s history is the contribution the Feminine is bringing, even now, to our future and our mutual survival on this beautiful planet.

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