Your Unique Self

Purposeful Wanderings - Bradford L. Glass - October 2025

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“In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.”

– Mahatma Gandhi  

This is #2 in a five-part series on walking your authentic path in life, a path that offers peace, meaning, well-being, connectedness and freedom. To walk this path is to free yourself from the grasp of old lessons, so you can honor your truth, instead of fighting so hard to be someone else’s. The steps: accept, discover, envision, manifest, sustain. 

Step 2: Discover: Until you know what matters most, your energy goes (unconsciously) to what matters least – upholding old lessons/beliefs of how life, and you, “should be.” (See September article) Yet all the while, there’s a creative energy deep inside you, a unique-to-you essence that wants to express itself through how you live your life. You feel this energy many times a day, pointing to your truth, asking you to listen. Discover this energy and it can light your path for a lifetime. Mostly, however, you ignore (maybe deny) such messages, caught up as you’ve learned in “making life happen.” You won’t find who you really are, however, while trying to be someone you’re not. Yet this illusion has so much power that, until you make a conscious choice to step out of it and look – so you see it for the nonsense it is – authentic you remains hidden by the noise.  

Think of your unique truth (… or soul … or life purpose … or reason for being here) showing up as “voices in your head,” inviting you to honor the quiet yet persistent pull of your deepest longing:  • longing to make sense of your life and your place in the world;  • longing to create meaning through how you choose to live, •  longing to make a difference in the world, • longing to be a part of something bigger than self.

Your longing is like a “seed” … sacred, unique to you, but that knows its own path. Evolution has endowed you with consciousness that holds amazing capacities for you to nurture this seed into being:  • curiosity and wonder, about life’s (and your own) mysteries;  • tolerance, for the unknown, the uncertain, the paradoxical;  • aspiration, to create the extraordinary;  • resilience, to be changed by life’s experiences. 

The path doesn’t involve struggle, force, stress, or “making life happen.” (Discovering the authentic you remains elusive as long as your mental clarity is muddied by the weight of old lessons about who you “should” be instead.) This path invites listening, learning, allowing, nurturing – all innate within you – but shunned by early lessons to the contrary. Here's where last month’s topic comes in. If you have adopted its suggested daily practices of self-reflection, you’ve likely now “got it” about how your mind is messing with you and have therefore been able to release much of your unconscious judgment. If you haven’t, the self-created struggle your life has become will hold you back from exploring your inner truth. (I mean, you’re too busy … trying to be someone else!)

Although I didn’t know it consciously in my early years, my “authentic self” held deep curiosity and wonder about how and why things work as they do. For maybe 30 adult years, this quest was directed toward the outer world – nature, planet, cosmos … even computers. (I was never “taught” there was any inner world to look at.) Only a morning with a bunch of monks awakened the realization that this same gaze could be turned inward … first to understand how and why I worked the way I did … and later to helping others on this same journey. (Perhaps my “get things right” upbringing had – in some odd way – prepared me to discover “help others get things right.”)

It's difficult to put into words the felt experience of this shift … partly because it wasn’t the “rational only” process with which I’d learned to greet life before. What I can say is there’s a palpable sense of inner peace that comes from realizing I’m being who I can’t NOT be. Life flows. And there’s a profound sense of gratitude I feel … for this life I’ve been given … for the rocks in the road that encouraged my learning … for the gifts of so many others that inspired me to keep walking my path … and for the [often hidden] ways I may have touched the lives of others.

Exercise: Authentic You: Bring awareness to your inner longing, dreams for how life might be; maybe the quietest “voice in your head,” the one inviting you to nurture the seed of your authentic self. See if you can connect with this deepest part of you. Just listen. Clue: the “real you” is when you feel “the MOST YOU.”  If you already know “the real you,” be with it. If you don’t, or don’t find it … just imagine for a bit. It might help to recall a time when you were so engrossed in an activity that you lost all sense of the passage of time (a clue).

This practice is a life-long inquiry into what matters to you. The practice itself creates a beacon lighting your life’s path. Daily at first, monthly after: sit quietly; for each distinct phase of life (maybe family, school, relationships, work, transitions), ask yourself: Who was I always being? What was I always drawn to? What did I wonder or imagine? What did I do whether I gained approval or not? Look for places in the always stories that ran against convention. (My insatiable curiosity about “how & why” – about everything – was often met with pushback. It didn’t stop me. Clue.) Review notes; see what you find in common across phases. When you discover who you can’t not be, you find what’s so naturally you that you may have missed your own unique essence, the “you” that got lost in life’s pressures to conform. Your truth is a “pattern” deep inside you. You learn to recognize it as you would a friend’s voice in a noisy room. With clarity and awareness, answers you struggle with today become obvious or inconsequential. Like Michelangelo, who saw David inside the marble and just removed “not David,” you are inside your own marble. (Your “marble” is an adopted self, who you have come to know yourself as being, your ego, etc). After you get a sense of your true self, begin to listen to its message. Stop several times a day for a moment of quiet reflection. Replay parts of your day; see if you can identify where your deepest longing (the first part of this exercise) spoke to you. How did you respond in that moment? Did you honor the message; did you deny/ignore it in favor of what was happening at the time? What did you learn about yourself doing this exercise?

Life Lessons from Nature: For 35 years, Hawaii has been a sacred place for me. These islands hold deep, personal meaning, well beyond the obvious draw of their enjoyment. Perhaps to honor that meaning, years ago I adopted a practice to make my experiences there more intentional – a pilgrimage of sorts. My intention, expressed simply by Phil Cousineau in The Art of Pilgrimage: “to find the sacred ground that stirs my heart and soul.” In my trip to Maui a few years back, however, I found myself struggling to inhabit that space … as if I were forcing something.

So, I took some advice from my suggested practice of quiet self-reflection:  show up  ...  shut up  ...  sit still  ...  listen. (Do nothing, be aware of everything.) Sitting quietly by the ocean, deeply connected to the 3’ x 3’ piece of ground I occupied at the time, I stared at the island of Molokai seven miles away. And I listened. What I “heard” was both clear and striking: Seek peace; we do. Be peace; we are. Teach peace; we’re trying, are you listening? Powerful simplicity. In my fight to “find” it, I’d almost missed it.

Later that day, watching a phenomenal sunset, I recalled a time weeks before, when I’d been given a few moments of pure peace and calm – moments I neither invited nor created – during which I was overcome by a deep sense of gratitude – for this moment, for my awareness of this moment, for this life I’ve been given, for the beauty in the world, for the loving kindness of so many others in my life. In that moment, too, I was aware that the 3’ x 3’ piece of planet I inhabited offered me all I could ever want or need. It was as if I was experiencing “pure self,” not tainted by my stories, my talk, my thinking, my concerns, or the world. Perhaps this is what the islands were telling me.

Book of the month: A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey to an Undivided Life, by Parker Palmer. Our external world denies/devalues the existence of the true self; so we cut ourselves off from soul, the deepest part of us … home to our essence, then wonder why we long for more. So we live “divided” lives. Soul is like a wild animal: both tough and shy. We find it the same way we experience a wild animal in nature – a glimpse of surprise in the middle of a quiet moment of openness and awareness. We must, he says, learn to stand in the gap – to hold the tension between the reality of this moment and the possibility of the next moment. (Yes, I’ve suggested this book more than once; it’s worth it.)