Leading from the emerging future

It’s a bit embarrassing what I want to tell you here, can I ask you not to pass it on to others. It is sensitive to show one’s shortcomings.

I have worked with Theory U for many years, in recent years mostly as a framework for teaching Social Presencing Theater.

A basic concept in Theory U is ”Leading from the Emerging Future”….. BUT I doubt I really understand the meaning of that phrase. That’s why I mostly don’t use the concept when I teach, I think it must be a minimum required, that if nothing else, you at least believe that you understand what you’re talking about.

Intellectually I may be able to understand it, but I don’t think so. A problem with working with a body-based change method like SPT is that you know that real understanding is based on more than just the understanding from the head. Understanding must be grounded, connected to something concrete that you can relate to, even the body must understand, if you really want to understand in a deeper sense.

I myself spend a lot of time on practical things where the body is involved: digging holes, growing vegetables, carving figures, renovating houses, feeling my breath, noticing the contact between my feet and the ground when walking.

In order to feel that I understand, it must relate to my own experiences, that my own experiences are the frame of reference in which new experiences can land settle and become comprehensible.

For me, the concept of “Leading from the emerging Future” has been really fuzzy, I haven’t been able to connect the concept to my own experiences.  

Last spring, before I was going on a three-month long meditation retreat, I wrote a letter to Arawana. It is quite definitive when you have written something and sent it, as soon as it is sent you lose control over it. Therefore, it is often that when I have sent an important letter for me that there is some afterthought… was it understandable, did I get across what I wanted, did I reach the person I wrote to on a deeper level?

Here is a part of the letter to Arawana:

”Now I much more trust, what comes to me in teaching situations, I work more intuitively and I believe that the teaching and the feedback the participants receive from me is more accurate. Now more often I can ask a participant what happened to you right there, when you did that… and that the process questions helps to increase learning in the situation.

Before I had a very planned plan on paper, now I have more of a blank piece of paper, that I fill in afterwards, when what is supposed to happen has happened, so instead of a plan it becomes a kind of diary of the course.

And what grows without a plan often turns out to be good and can connect in a way that makes sense, which in the end gives a good whole in the training.”

Afterwards, when I thought about what I had written, the thought came that I might have understood what ”Leading from the Emerging Future” means. Maybe that change in my way of teaching I had tried to describe for Arawana could be what it’s all about?

If I should try to sum it up: Now I believe that in those situations where the trust and the practice are so strong, that I let go of the plan / agenda and  I’m precent , fully awake, fully open and spacious….there it happens…there am I/Anders suspended/parked for a moment…in that very moment reality comes through unfiltered…a moment…of timelessness, of the concepts collapsing, of the room expanding a moment of nothingness.

From that nothingness, from that space, one can perhaps lead from the Emerging future, exactly where nothingness collapses and becomes something again, there perhaps the future is formed… there perhaps the moment is fresh… there habits may not rule.

How do you get idea of Leading from the emerging future? Maybe you can explain it to me? Or will it be, like for me, a little hard to grasp?

Peace be with what we don’t understand, thank you for reading this far!