Speaker: Paulette Pipe
Touching the Inner Stillness
“It’s time. It’s time to let it go,” said Rev. Paulette Pipe on trusting your deepest intuitions. And Paulette does just that.
Her life embodies trust and faith, as well as surrender to the deeper forces around and within us. A minister who served formerly as Spiritual Director of the UK Unity headquarters, and then manager of the Retreats department at Unity Village, Rev. Paulette left her full-time job, with benefits, to follow her inner voice and work for free – “doing the thing I loved most…hosting my podcast.” She leads Touching the Stillness Ministries, a vibrant organization she created to make meditation and mindfulness both practical and accessible for daily application. She is a meditation teacher with the goal of increasing a sense of well-being in anyone who feels lost, confused, or like their Inner Stillness is getting a bit too rowdy to handle.
Paulette’s Touching the Stillness Ministries provides tools and resources for meditation and mindfulness that emphasize finding and sustaining a sense of inner stillness. She acknowledges the challenges that come with learning to meditate when one is desperately striving for inner peace, but also notes how beneficial it has been for her to engage with it. In fact, she writes that “Meditation...is the spiritual gift that gets me out of bed.” Inspired by three stones on her vision board, Paulette hopes to assist people in finding “Stillness, Love, and Peace” through the experience she has cultivated as “Touching the Stillness.”
Paulette takes a compassionate approach to beginning meditators – she lists out guidelines for them that include pointers such as the fact that meditation can happen at any moment, and preparing beforehand is important. Her guided meditations are available on platforms like Youtube, Unity Online Radio, Itunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, and more.
Paulette’s innovative meditation techniques, which include practices such as Affirmative Prayers and a Dance Your Own Dance Meditation, aim to make meditation an accessible asset daily. She draws on multiple forms of expression – she dances, journals, drums, sings and travels. With her mesmerizing voice, and distinctive gift of affirmative healing prayers and meditations that stir the soul, she masterfully creates rich, sacred experiences from a range of traditional and unexpected mindful and meditation practices.
Currently residing in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City, Paulette is British-born and hails from London, England. She has a BA in Ministerial Studies. Her career, before answering the call to ministry, was as a professional fund-raising manager (development officer) for a number of medium-sized national UK charities, including Motability (a charity for disabled drivers), the Down’s Syndrome Association, and the Women’s Institute, where she was also merchandising manager of its trading arm, WI Enterprises. Prior to that, she was a qualified business and trade magazine journalist, “who once got nominated for a prestigious industry award, the name of which eludes me now!”
Rev. Paulette holds the role of Keeper of the Flame on Unity Worldwide Ministries’ Board of Trustees, where she maintains a sacred prayer space—generally doing so in silence—during the board’s deliberations and decision-making process at all of its board meetings; and is the liturgist for the assembly during the organization’s Annual General Meeting. She is a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle, a project of the Source of Synergy Foundation, where she also serves as its Keeper of the Flame during online meetings and events. She also led and created the Opening Ceremony at the Institute of Noetic Sciences Competition, as well as co-emceeing and presenting a breakout group.
Paulette provides a “spiritual oasis” for those who are either religious, spiritual, none, or both. Reverend Unity Bass, a Unity Minister, once remarked that being with Paulette felt like “[touching] the Stillness through her...She is so connected to the Source that it radiates right into my own soul.”
Please join us in conversation with Paulette, an inspiring, creative meditation leader who has committed herself to democratizing meditation for those of us who crave it!
Five Questions with Paulette Pipe
What Makes You Come Alive?
(1) Viscerally feeling and/or recognising my connection with the Divine. (2) Sharing my healing gifts and creative talents in ways that are transformative and inspiring. (3) Being in community where love is evidently expressed, and coherence is one of the outcomes. (4) Being a generous, gracious giver and a generous, gracious receiver~with no strings attached. (5) Dancing "my own dance". (6) Mindfully maintaining health, balance, and self-care. (7) Experiencing positive, uplifting, healing music. (8) Being a creator of beauty. (9) Being by the ocean--or any body of water. It lifts my mood and positively impacts my demeanor. My intention is to make meditation, mindfulness and spiritual practice come alive, relevant, and accessible for many people. Singularly, this partial list may seem unrelated to that work I do in the world. Actually, though, the influence of these activities and experiences is what undergirds, inspires, motivates, and features heavily, in what I do.
Pivotal turning point in your life?
There have been several. The one uppermost in my mind today is leaving my full-time position -- the one I had moved to the US only three years prior to take on. I gave up the security of a monthly salary with benefits to work for free, doing what I love. That changed everything and is pivotal to where I find myself now: a podcast host, guided meditation and retreat facilitator and a 'Keeper of the Flame'. Since becoming self-employed in 2010, about 65-70 percent of my work has been gratis. While paying-it-forward, in this unorthodox energy exchange, I don't always receive from the same place where the gift was given. Often, I find I "reap where I did not sow." To date, all my needs have been met and I've never missed or been late on a mortgage payment or utility bill.I even remember my tax preparer asking me once: "How do you live?" Good question!I have no regrets about my decision to resign or, now living on the edge in this way. It was worth it... as am I!
An Act of Kindness You'll Never Forget?
My parents made two attempts to repatriate back to the Caribbean island home they loved. The first time, was in the 1970s, when they took with them my younger brother and I, who were both born in the UK. I did not fare well in what I experienced as an unfamiliar, culturally and environmentally "hostile" setting. The culture shock was horrendous. So, after two years, inspired by a nocturnal dream I'd shared--which seemed to spook both my parents--they sent me back home to London. I was only 13yrs old at the time. To purchase the airline ticket, my father sold his ONLY inheritance--a very small plot of land he used to grow vegetables on. It wasn't only an act of love and courage, this act of kindness was a great sacrifice. One which could only be fathomed, if you knew the full extent of the poverty my father was born into. Unfortunately, things didn't work out in London quite how everyone expected. So, in another tremendous act of kindness, he and my mum made another pivotal decision. They agreed my dad would return to London to take care of me, leaving behind his wife, his life, and beloved Caribbean home. My mum was caretaking her elderly mother at the time and was unable to join us right away. She did so later.After high school (UK equivalent) they again made a similar decision when I opted to move abroad to study. Once again they were apart for a few years--my mother stayed on in the UK to help support me abroad and my dad headed back to the Caribbean. Thankfully, their commitment to each other was so deep that, both times, the marriage survived a long-distance relationship. I am one of six children. So the choice they made, on each occasion, had far-reaching consequences on many of our family members. I cannot begin to truly express just how grateful I am to both of them. My life went in a whole different direction than it might otherwise have taken, had I stayed where I wasn't thriving, or not chosen a path of study that kept them apart for a second time.This is definitely an act of kindness I will never forget; and one I may never be able to repay...
One Thing On Your Bucket List?
To have afternoon High Tea with Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey. I'd also love to have Afternoon Tea at the Plaza, in New York. So perhaps the three of us could just meet up together there for tea and posh sandwiches. Can there be two bucket list items? I'd love to walk the Labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral in France by candlelight.
One-line Message for the World?
Create breathing space in your life for stillness and Silence. It'll change everything!
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