Presence, Integration, Emergence

'Integrated history is presence. Unintegrated history is past.'

Thomas Hubl

In exploring how we may most skillfully tend our lives, my attention returns to the value of balancing our care of past, present and future. This enables a beautiful relation to time, wherein we open to include the wide span of our lives and support our unique ripening.

In our offering here I speak of this in terms of cultivating Presence, Integration and Emergence. Each of these strands invites us to open to the fullness of our experience, and to keep including more elements of what we have lived through and what possible futures may unfold for us.

Throughout this course we will be consciously tending Past, Present and Future. We will balance acknowledging and attending to the residues each of us carry, with a cultivation of our presence and availability to our emerging futures. Our aim is to be with what we have lived through in ways that deepen our coherence, integrity and wisdom; and to become ever more available to experiencing our present and future in fresh, enlivening ways.

[video transcript]

I’d like to say a little about our project here and these touchstones of presence, integration and emergence. Those three words are important for what we are doing here. We are exploring a balance between our capacity for presence, our willingness and ability to revisit the past in order to integrate things that are unsettled in us or where our energy is stuck or habitual and limiting, with an availability to the future and to what wants to emerge through us, in terms of the ongoing unfoldment of life.

I feel that we can really achieve a lot here if we keep tending to these three territories and inviting those different capacities to come into balance. Because all of us know people who are almost rigidly present in a way that actually narrows life and doesn’t have enough generosity or connectivity to the past and the future. And all of us also know people (and some of us have been those people) who are so absorbed in the past, that there isn’t actually much room for life to touch us freshly now. And we also know people who are so planning-oriented, so driven by the future and by projects and to-do-lists that their ability to be present and be able to acknowledge or include things from the past is actually very compromised.

Personally, for many years I have been really moved by people who are more integrated and able to hold these different elements. I find something very beautiful about the continual digestion of our lives in new ways which allows us to keep maturing in a way that isn’t a rejection of where we’ve been, but a continual inclusion of more of the complexity of what we’ve lived through. This doesn’t mean we ourselves have to get more complex; there’s a point at which we start getting simpler, but that simplicity is not based on simplifications but based on this quality of integration of what we have lived through.

So I’m just encouraging us all to feel into the balance of these energies.

[video transcript]

I want to say a little bit here about this word Emergence which will be less familiar to some of you than Presence or Integration. The reason that emergence is central here is that when we look at tending our futures, in a sense we are talking about tending the unknown, tending the not-yet-arisen. And that requires a receptivity and an availability and a kind of sensitizing to what is coming into form. We need a willingness to support and to experience that unknown, freshly-arising quality.

In terms of the course overall, we look at Emergence more fully later. But for now, I’d like to say a little about this capacity. To become attuned to emergence is to feel into our availability in the present * to sense what is on the periphery of our awareness and to make space to hear what Thomas Hubl calls the ‘whispers of the future’. This is to feel what is fresh, what is non-habitual, what is potent or immanent in the ether. The more genuinely we can make room to sense and be touched by what is emerging, the more we align with the fluidity and dynamism of life.

This can be very humble: Sometimes what is emerging might be an insight about a family member that recalibrates our understanding; sometimes it might be ‘oh, now when I feel pain, I notice I feel it with more space than I once did’. This is about noticing where the growing edge is – where the fertile, fresh edge is. The more we can listen to that and really let it touch us, the more life is renewing us.

This is true even if some of the situations and scenarios we are in feel routine. Because if we are able to make space to receive what is emerging, we are going to be in apparently routine scenarios but they will be subtly different. And this gives birth to fresh futures, to new forms and new expressions and experiences that subtly alter our lives and enhance our sense of aliveness.