While each of our stories are different, their overall shape is very similar for most of us – being trained and working in our respective fields of inquiry while also having various Emergent experiences that we knew were not well understood by science and clinical medicine but seemed to be described by various spiritual and religious traditions.
Along the way, we all wrestled with the questions of how best to conceptualize and navigate the territory we found ourselves experiencing in order to appreciate the opportunities for growth and life enhancement that they offered while also realizing that some aspects of what was happening might be challenging in various ways.
Eventually, each of us realized that we wished to bring our life experience and academic capabilities to the problem of bridging this gap of knowledge and clinical competence, to help both those having these experiences and those caregivers, therapists, and clinicians who might interact with them to be as empowered as they could be to promote good outcomes.
Through an organic process over many years of personal networking and sharing this vision with each other, we founded the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium in 2020, a year of upheaval very much needing wisdom, healing, transformation, and growth. Hopefully, our work will support all of those.