‘…we must now find ways of turning society beyond its too regimented path, and towards paths of design and planning and construction which allow the life of every whole and the life of every part to emerge freely from the process by which we made the world.’… Christopher Alexander, The Process of Creating Life, Part Three-A New Paradigm For Process In Society

We are each a world – a unique individual world in eternal process.  This evolutionary process houses our resonant potential.  It gifts us the experience of being home in the form of our primary expression – the body, and in the individual external expressions outside our immediate physical shell.  In those times and circumstances that we experience as ‘off’ or lacking, forced or ‘jagged’, it is a sure bet that we have left ourSelf and its natural process for something outside or foreign to it.  We have all had this experience.  Our humanity ensures it.  We know the opposite experience equally well.  We remember those savoured moments and circumstances in which we chose ourSelf and what was true in our being.  We recall the experience of natural emergence from a process of which we were not aware and did not understand.  I have been asked lately how it is that the QuintessentialYou Blueprint came to be.  For me, the answer lies fundamentally in presence to this kind of emergence ‘beyond the too regimented path’ of which Alexander speaks.

The Blueprint and the work of QuintessentialYou Design came unexpectedly and spontaneously.  Its first appearance came in an informal conversation with a mature male who was in a pivotal transition point in his life.  As a part of being in discussion with him, I casually mapped a series of questions and inadvertently created an on-the-spot process that resulted in articulating for him, two simple words that I sensed embodied his unique ultimate possibility.  He began to cry and asked me immediately how it was possible that I could nail him so perfectly and so succinctly.  To this day, I remember saying to him that I did not ‘nail’ him – he did.  This distinguished element turned out to be the central core of one’s QuintessentialYou Blueprint – the unique central element around which we each take our evolutionary journey and how we individually conceive all that we create.  Today this element is called EssenceExpression.  Its original appearance gifted to me, it is now QuintessentialYou’s Gift To You.  Left with his response and the scrap of paper on which I was writing, I curiously started asking the questions of friends and family.  The response was the same.  People cried.  They laughed.  They sat in awe of their essential Self.  That was the beginning, if you will, the initial emergent piece of what has become a body of work that reveals one’s blueprint, distinguishes its elements, and emerges its fulfillment over time.

When the Blueprint began emerging, I knew only to witness my own life, observe what I saw and specifically record the process that was evolving.  That is exactly what I did.  Without exception, the Blueprint just kept unfolding.  I am literally in service to its emergence.  I could not make it go any faster than it appeared and try as I might in the beginning, my own natural training has been to stay in stillness, in silence and solitude on one hand and simultaneously in relationship and in the world on the other.

As the Blueprint continued to emerge, I established a pilot group that has stayed with me through the entire process and whose members are still with me today.  I work with them and do the work myself as a part of this group.  In each client’s case and in my own, we are clear that what we are accessing and evolving is our essential self – our Quintessential Self.  We recognize that we are each in our humanity, the vehicle for fulfillment of that very Self.  The QuintessentialYou Blueprint emerges as each individual or venture evolves in their own process through three series of intentional conversations.

On a personal level, I most certainly have faced challenge and crisis and breakdown of structures I had set up for my egoic existence.  Even so, I was and remain compelled to follow what resonates within.  Perhaps in essence, that is the work of the QuintessentialYou Blueprint – the awakening and the strengthening to live consciously as our Quintessential Self in the face of everything.  With this choice, we remove layers to reveal who we are and what is authentically ours to contribute.

It has been and is to this day, a labor of love in juxtaposition to a love of labor – an assimilation of all that makes me and you Quintessential us…. ‘beyond the regimented path and towards paths of design and planning and construction which allow the life of every whole and the life of every part to emerge freely from the process by which we made the world.’

What is your natural evolutionary process and its authentic contribution?  What is the resonant potential within you, waiting to be revealed?