Episode 06: Notice DOING and BECOMING

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Sparkle School, where together, we access our innate, iNtuitive wisdom as unique and self-valuing women, and share who we are becoming in a safe, sensitive community.

In recent weeks, we have heard the Bravely Being You Womanifesta and explored our personal thoughts on the ideas that it is time for conflict-oriented power structures to give way to societal methods and structures that reflect women’s inherent preference to be associative, collaborative and nurturing. We saw how we women with iNtuitive and Feeling personality preferences innately relate to these ideas because of our primarily non-competitive and open-hearted natures. We considered the idea that our current, global economic structure is based on an obsession with wealth and power that enables destructive forms of competition and promotes world-wide conflicts. This helps us to more fully appreciate how Sparkle School is an ‘un-culturing’ environment where iNtuitive-Feeling type women come together to fully identify, claim, actualize, and share our natural capacity for compassion, connection and collaboration.

Today, we return to the Sparkle School tool set and, in particular, the top half of the You Are Here Map, and the repeating cycle of ‘doing’ that happens there. Until we examine it closely, the top half of the You Are Here Map seems like a closed system that mirrors the ‘normal’ life script of the Sensate-majority culture in which we live. We are born into our family of origin. We go to school. We get a job. We get married. We have children, and we work to make money, until eventually, we retire. Today we explore how this culturally embedded, Sensate script can create for iNtuitive-Feeling women, a lifetime of self-judgment and self-doubt, because we don’t really relate to it, even though we are pressured to do so.

The upper half of the You Are Here Map shows us a continual, somewhat obsessive cycle of doing, doing, doing, simply for the sake of ‘doing.’ As NF women, we have great capacity and ability for ‘doing,’ so we are able to perform well in this endless cycle, but it isn’t our best ‘fit’, when it comes to what truly interests us. However, compelled by the Sensing culture around us, we can get trapped in the endless cycles of ‘doing,’ and keep ourselves distracted from the deeper life processes that have true heart and meaning for us.

The rewards offered in the top half of the You Are Here Map are substantial, but they are almost exclusively external rewards. In childhood, they might include sweet treats and pats on the head from our parents, and gold stars, blue ribbons, and A-pluses on our grade-school papers. When we’re older, Sensate rewards for obsessive ‘doing’ include the great job, the corner office, the big home, the snazzy car, the country club membership, social status, and other expensive accoutrements that come with financial ‘success.’ These are all rewards for outward achievement, and as long as these external prizes are all that we are offered, we might accept them and even feel proud of ourselves for earning them.

However, external rewards do not draw the deep interest of iNtuitive Feeling women, because they do not nourish the profound curiosity of our multidimensional, kaleidoscopic minds. Nor, do they soothe our acutely sensitive preference for peace and harmony in life. In fact, the constant cycle of ‘doing’ to earn external rewards might move us to tears of frustration. It might give us the message that we can’t measure up, because we simply are not content to value the scripts and rewards of the Sensing-majority culture in which we live.

This reality is confusing, even confounding to NF women, because we want so much to please others and to be well-regarded and respected in the world. We might begin to feel progressively more and more strange, or weird, or just plain ‘wrong.’

But here’s the good news; this inability on the part of our deepest soul of souls to be satisfied by external rewards, eventually prompts us to turn our attention inward, where we begin to discover complex multiple universes of insight and wisdom. Instead of going around and around in the upper half of the You Are Here Map, we dip down into the lower half of the map where we meet ourselves face to face.

Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.