Source: AlliedMedia.org

Hola! I’m so excited to begin the Emergent Strategy blog series to provide strategies, tips and practices you can implement to build a more liberated life. What you will come to know about me is that I love taking something conceptual like values or theory and applying what they could look like in our everyday life.

But before I get into the series, I wanted to introduce how I found Emergent Strategy.

December of 2017, a new comrade at the time (who today is my wellbeing check-in buddy and so much more!) introduced me to the How To Survive the End of the World podcast hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown where we get to learn from the apocalypse with grace, rigor and curiosity. 

It was while listening to the ‘God is Change’ episode that I decided I’m going to break up with my boyfriend at the time. I realized that by doing so, I would be creating space for me to experience the dedicated, quality care I craved. I knew I wanted to be ready, open and inviting for new things to come into my life (spoiler alert: this ending led me to meeting the love of my life in like, a month) so to say that Emergent Strategy has had a huge impact in my life personally, is an understatement.

At the same time, listening to the Brown sisters propelled me to get into loving up on Octavia E. Butler given the ways the sisters described the impact Octavia has had in their practice. 

• In a matter of 2 days, I binged Kindred (I read somewhere that if you’re not bought into science fiction, you should start with this book).

• In less than a week, I consumed the Parable Series— Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. 

• Before 2017 was over, I began tackling Lilith’s Brood— Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago. 

• Since then, I have read and reread everything Octavia Butler has written (hit me up if you want to hear which one is my fave!).

Once I started, I couldn’t get enough! Up until that point I had never read science fiction. I didn’t know there were books that blended Black feminist ethics, community-building, vulnerability, and the general complexity and messiness of being a human in relationship to other life forms. I was already taking notes of the things that were compelling to me and the things that I wanted to begin living into.

In December 2018, I came across Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown at a time where I was navigating a new leadership position at this LGBTQ organization doing anti-bullying initiatives with young people— all of which, at the time, felt wildly out of my comfort zone given the school-based work I had done before it. As you can imagine, the Universe’s algorithm caught my attention at the perfect time when I was seeking to learn, experiment and model new and old ways of being that aligned towards life.

WHAT IS EMERGENT STRATEGY?

adrienne describes Emergent Strategy as “how we shape and generate complex systems and patterns through our own relatively simple interactions”. Another way to put it is that this framework is about how we get in right relationship with change as something we can move with, shape and sustain. My intention with the blog series is to reference and break down each of the Emergent Strategy Principles as a way to help us move towards more concrete practices and skills. To give you a sense of where we will go, below is an image of the Emergent Strategy Principles. 

Source: Niche-Canada.org

Before we begin this Emergent Strategy series, I’d like to invite you to do two things: 

• I invite you to be curious: about what I share here and about how your mind and body respond as well. If you’d like to engage publicly with this post, you can comment below. If you’d like to engage privately, you can email me or send a DM to my Instagram or Facebook page. I’d love to get into this with you.

• I invite you to allow yourself to be changed: there may be some things that I present here that may be different from what you know to be true or maybe you’re familiar with the offerings I will provide but you’re not sure that it can make the mass scale impact you’re hoping to have in the world. Either way, I encourage you to be open. I commit to doing the same in service of Principled Struggle as articulated by N’Tanya Lee via adrienne maree brown where we struggle for the sake of deepening our collective understanding and getting to greater unity.

NEXT STEP: If you’re curious about what a-ha’s or practices might come up for you, you can sign up for my A Daily Practice workbook below.

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