Coming Home This Week Is On Wednesday at 9am EST ~ Emergence

Please note the change of day this week. We will be back on Tuesday mornings next week.

Today, brilliant, wet poppy petals on the ground inspired this “art of emergence.”

Dear Friends,

Back in fall 2019 when the pandemic was still something that was happening in China, I started my own business and called it The Art of Emergence. I have named many businesses. In fact, I worked for a few years as a Naming Consultant at Landor in San Francisco in the early days of my career. So, it’s funny to me that I can’t recall where the name came from. I don’t remember laboring over it or even thinking about it. I remember receiving it, searching it, purchasing the URL, and hiring a designer to make the logo. I didn’t give it a second thought.

At some point in the writing of text for the website, I realized that if I was going to be working under this name, I needed to know—really know—what emergence is. A friend pointed me to the classic, The Systems View of Life, by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi. I had also read and resonated with adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy.

Capra and Luisi define emergence this way:

Emergent properties are the novel properties that arise when a higher level of complexity is reached by putting together components of lower complexity. The properties are novel in the sense that they are not present in the parts: they emerge from the specific relationships and interactions among the parts in the organized ensemble. The early systems thinkers expressed this fact in the celebrated phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

adrienne maree brown wrote on her blog in June 21, 2013:

emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. it emphasizes critical connections, authentic relationships, listening with the body and the mind.

in emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. fractal – the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.

there are examples of emergence everywhere.

birds don’t make a plan to migrate, raising resources to fund their way, packing for scarce times, mapping out their pit stops. they feel a call in their bodies and they must go, and they follow it, responding to each other, each bringing their adaptations…

emergence is beyond what the sum of its parts could even imagine.

Looking back now, I can see that I gave myself a task when I chose that name. The task was to become expert at this art of emergence. At that time, I thought it was an intellectual exercise. I was trying to understand emergence with my mind. I was thinking about emergence. But, the last two years’ deep teachings around embodiment have shown me more about emergence than the mind could ever conceive. Here’s the biggest lesson and the one I am integrating even now as I write:

Emergence cannot be understood solely with the thinking mind. And a mind that is governed by strategic thinking and decision-making cannot embrace emergence. Emergence is a property of the body and it is enacted through the actions and impulses of the feeling body.

Most people at this moment are in this boat—governed by strategic thinking—because we have come of age in a strategic paradigm that arose out of trauma: our disconnect from nature and her sustenance, which led to scarcity and isolation wounds, which seemed to necessitate a strategic approach to survival.

We were taught to be competitive and play strategy games from a very young age. Mastering strategic thinking has been lauded as the ‘sane’ and ‘rational’ way to live for a long, long time: planning your education, planning for retirement, hoarding and saving things for the future, starting a business, getting a date, completing a project…Even the arts have been hijacked by strategy. If I want to write a novel, I need to cultivate an audience, so I need to post regularly on social media, take the advice of an agent, etc. etc.

Strategy is defined by Merriam-Webster as:

: the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems (cleverly contrived tricks or schemes for gaining an end) toward a goal

I am beginning to sense that strategic thinking is appropriate for strategic times, but pretty useless and actually potentially harmful in emergent and/or chaotic times. Useless in that you might just miss the point; won’t see the more-elegant solution. And potentially harmful in that you may actually make things worse—which is what we’ve been doing over and over again for the last few decades.

Strategy is a way of working towards a goal and any goal developed by a purely strategic mind is already isolated, limited, and insufficient to the scale and pace of change we’re in right now. I guess it’s possible that a goal could be sourced through collective emergence and then a strategy devised to accomplish it. In that case, strategy is subservient to, and supportive of, the greater art of emergence.

We must be capable of listening to our surroundings, our bodies, to Nature, our collaborators, the spaces in between. We must be able to follow the impulse of something more complex that wants to emerge through us. This will require a putting aside of the small, reflexive, controlling, tragic, egoic strategizing we’ve become habituated to…I have been through this detox process and it ain’t pretty. It feels a lot like being very confused about your own motives, direction in life, and priorities for a long time…like walking around in a fog that is also full of anxiety…until you begin to source your yeses and nos from a different place.

Practicing emergence in your life and work is hard in a world that is still dominated by strategic action. It can look insane through a strategic lens—”none of this makes any sense!” I have a hard time finding collaborators who are as dedicated to true emergence as I am. It is a very rare quality. And I believe this is because you have to be really, really embodied to do it.

Children at play are experts at emergence without even trying.

Leaning into and even surrendering into emergence puts one in touch with one’s limitations. You quickly see where your capacity to trust is, where your tolerance for uncertainty is, and how resilient your current life is. If you’re like me, you won’t like what you see and you’ll start healing those parts. You’ll learn to ground and put down your roots, you’ll heal your attachment stuff, you’ll repair broken relationships in your life—especially your relationship to your self, your intuition, and your body. You’ll surround yourself with people whose sensing you trust and who respect yours. You’ll take time and make space for your feeling and thinking to happen. You'll become suspicious of urgency. You’ll push back when others are enslaved to arbitrary timelines. And you will begin to assess the trajectory of your life against something precious—not the external yardsticks given to us by the culture—but against how it’s delivering on your heart’s desires.

The art of emergence requires:

• deep embodiment

• comfort with uncertainty and even awkwardness

• strong personal boundaries

• trust in something greater than the small self

• awareness of the interconnectedness of all life

• a responsibility to the whole and for the consequences of one’s actions

• very good and clear communication with others

If you think of others, please post in the comments. I’d love to grow this list.

The main thing I am learning about the art of emergence is that I don’t really have a choice. At least, not in the way I was used to when I was inhabiting more of a strategic frame of mind. What is emerging in the true art of emergence is the will of something much greater, wiser and more complex than me. This might be my future self, my Soul, or something more collective…a group soul…It may be a healing or wholling process. Maybe it’s something that can see the bigger picture and it is in its own strategic way just playing a bigger game. I want to surrender to that.

JOIN ME ON WEDNESDAY MORNING FOR A TALK AND MEDITATION DEDICATED TO EMERGENCE. 9-10:15AM HERE…

A note on payment for Coming Home sessions

I really appreciate donations for Coming Home sessions if you feel called to give. Suggested donation is $10-20. Venmo @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown and PayPal is eschuylerbrown@gmail.com. If you are a paid subscriber, you’ve already done your part and I appreciate it!