purpose

purpose.md — Why this wiki exists

CLAUDE.md says HOW the wiki works. This file says WHY, and where the fellowship

currently stands. The agent reads both on every ingest and query. The team

edits this as thinking hardens. When the Guiding Principles are ratified, the

committed direction below becomes binding gospel the agent enforces.

What this is

The central depot where the EPI fellowship designs its own wrapper. EPI is a

peer-led practice of presencing — being with sensation, emotion, and want, and

returning from reactivity to choice. The practice is proven over years and many

people. What we are building here is the wrapper: the best framings, packaging,

and order-of-operations to give people an effective experience, and to let the

practice be taught and learned peer-to-peer without professional training or

licensing.

This wiki is the stable organizer we have been missing. We already hold competing

framings side by side and work toward shared wording — we just do it without a

central home, so framings scatter and we re-litigate what we’d half-settled. This

fixes that.

Who builds it

Four people, all feeding sources. The wiki holds disagreement honestly until the

group converges; it never picks a winner for us.

The committed direction (a resolved fork, not a founding given)

We lean — now firmly — toward peer-led, strictly no professional class. The

form does the work, not the wisdom of any individual (Principle 6, 9, 10, 11).

This was NOT true at the beginning. Earlier EPI work included a facilitator

development pathway with levels, stewards, and supervised certification. We

consciously moved away from it. The wiki preserves that history as a resolved

fork — “we considered a trained-facilitator model and chose peer-led, here is

why” — rather than pretending the question never arose. See

forks/facilitator-pathway-vs-no-professional-class.

What is settled vs. still moving (the three layers)

• Settled — the Tools. SEW, the Inner Map (Reactive/Creative Brain), persona

  interviews, the withhold process, FACT, and the rest of the core library.

  Canonical, slow-moving, proven. Allowed to evolve, but only deliberately.

• Hardening — the Principles. The Guiding Principles (v3). Close to solid; not

  every statement locked. Becomes gospel statement-by-statement as we ratify.

• Moving — the Wrapper. How members work through the practice over time, and

  how it’s framed for newcomers. The live work. The Twelve Steps live here as a

  waning candidate — we like it, but it carries recovery-world stigma and isn’t

  settling as a good flow for working the EPI tools, and nothing has replaced it

  yet. Other models are held alongside it; more will be added.

What good looks like

Any of the four of us can come here and see, at a glance: what’s settled and what

isn’t, which framings are competing and which won and why, where the open forks

still need our discernment — and trust that nothing we’ve agreed has quietly

drifted, and nothing we’re still deciding has been quietly decided for us.

Open at the wiki’s birth

• Ratifying the Guiding Principles (currently mostly under-review).

• Finding the wrapper/flow that replaces or reshapes the Twelve Steps.

• The word “presencing” (Principle 2) propagates everywhere; confirm or revise.

• Statement count (target per source: 12–16; currently 22). Naming resolved 2026-05-25: the layer is now Guiding Principles (was “Integrity Layer”). See glossary.md.