NEWSLETTER

TRUSTING EMERGENCE

During these seven plus months I’ve been home with my father I have learned to trust emergence. When we needed something it appeared, not in my time but in a timely manor. I didn’t make plans but allowed things to unfold day by day-and somehow it worked. Now that my father is gone and I’m thrown back into the world of dates and deadlines trusting emergence is more challenging. The cultural myth that we need to make something happen is strong and pervasive.

My brother, Gregory Kramer, teaches a form of meditation called Insight Dialogue. In this practice you sit with another meditator and learn to trust emergence, speaking when a thought wants to emerge as a communication. (to learn more about this see www.metta.org ) Just as is the case with the final months of my father’s life, the meditation retreat is an extraordinary time as opposed to an ordinary time. Many practices are easier to experience during extraordinary times such as retreat or life and death situations. It is during the ordinary days of our lives where the rubber really meets the road. Yes, we can achieve peace of mind on a quiet mountain top supported by other meditators and the sound of the wind through the trees but how about when waiting in line at the post office with a list of about ten things we need to do that day?

Extraordinary practice gives us the opportunity to experience a state of mind under less challenging conditions. Then we bring that state of mind out into our ordinary life in order to fully embody it. We have an experience of patience or trusting emergence and this provides the skeleton on with to drape the body of our practice. Until the skeleton is fully draped it is vulnerable to dissolution.

These seven months with my father has been like a meditation retreat. I let go of plans and lived day by day. I fielded the challenges as they came and learned not to try and think too many steps ahead. When I did try to think it out I was usually wrong in my assessment. I gave up what I thought I was doing with my life and followed grace. Somehow everything got done much more eloquently than I could have imagined.

As “real” life returns I am challenged to continue to trust emergence. The impulse to “make things happen” in my life is strong. When I resist the temptation to try and control life I once again experience the grace of emergence.

Jacqueline

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