Have you ever watched a great artist perform, perhaps a musician or a dancer, and felt completely transfixed?

It isn’t just their technical excellence, beauty, or precision that captivates you. There’s something else that holds your attention, some particular quality that is theirs alone.

You could listen to a hundred violinists play the same piece of music, and each one would bring something subtly different. The notes are the same, but what moves us is that essential character – the unmistakable flavor of their own being shining through. Those who achieve greatness don’t stop at mastering their craft. They do the deeper work of discovering their authentic voice, their own sound that carries the truth of who they are.

The poet E.E. Cummings once wrote that “to be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else,” is “the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

Martha Graham, the mother of modern dance, expressed it this way: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.”

What Graham describes touches something we experience in the Mutual Awakening Practice, a quality I call essential uniqueness. It’s not surface individuality or the relative differences in expression and personality that make us who we appear to be. It’s something far more fundamental: the intrinsic substance of who we are as a soul.

To touch your essential uniqueness is to come into contact with the purest, most intimate sense of yourself – the irreducible “you” that exists through every changing circumstance of your life. It’s the part that remains steady, recognizable, even as everything else evolves.

Each of us carries an essence that is entirely our own, unrepeatable in the vastness of existence. It’s not something we invent; it’s something we discover. It doesn’t need validation or recognition. It is the particular spark of divinity at your core.

When we meet inside shared unity, it is this essential, unique self in each of us that recognizes and connects with the essential, unique self in the other. And in that meeting, something greater than either of us comes alive.

With love,
Patricia