Episode 09: Embrace Chaos

Good morning everyone, and welcome to NF Learning Lab, 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.

So, we’ve been exploring the bottom half of the You Are Here Map and the constantly renewing experience of ‘becoming’ that happens there. Last week, we saw how when we choose to enter that self-reflective, ‘becoming’ world, in some area of life, we give ourselves a break from the closed system of obsessive ‘doing’ in the top half of the map. We are free, to focus our attention inward, which feels good to us as iNtuitive-Feeling type women, even when we are faced with discomforts and discontents, because somehow, we intuit that we are coming home to ourselves in a new and deeper way.

Most of us have not felt fully supported to own and honor our innate fascination with self-reflection. In fact, we may have kept that part of us entirely to ourselves, in order to feel like we somehow belonged to the ‘doing-obsessed’, Sensing-majority culture that surrounds us. To try to ‘fit in’, we may have used our complex, intuitive intelligence to ‘perform’ for the sake of other people and/or institutions, and we may have done so brilliantly! But, as iNtuitive-Feeling type women, one of our most basic, natural inclinations is to be deeply and continually self-reflective. So even though we must navigate difficult waters, as we turn our gaze inward in the bottom half of the You Are Here Map, we seem to know that the journey is an important one, and we are likely to embrace it.

We boldly make our way through the discomforts and discontents that face us at first. Eventually, we learn to embrace grief, as the cleansing and releasing agent it can be, when handled intentionally and consciously. Grief gives us the strength and the freedom to embrace loneliness, and to see grief, not as some existential punishment for being ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’, but as a dynamic passage in our journey of becoming, one that builds our strength and self-confidence.

Eventually, as we approach the possibility of entering a transformative cocoon at the very bottom of the map, we encounter a strange state of confusion. We want to transform, but we have a hard time believing that it is truly okay to settle into a pure state of ‘becoming.’ We worry that we’re not ‘doing’ enough, but we don’t have the motivation to ‘do’ much of anything. We’ve given up our attachments to the normal, external rewards of the Sensing-majority culture, but we cannot yet see, nor fully embrace, the internal rewards that await us once we can surrender to our individual process of self-evolution. We are mired in inconsistencies, mixed motives and conflicting desires, and these polarities cause us to doubt the efficacy of our entire process of ‘becoming’. Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.