Episode 15: Kiss Your Wounds

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’ve been exploring Quadrant 4 in the bottom half of the You Are Here Map. This is where we go whenever we leave a cocoon state in some area of life. It is a place to flex our wings, get acquainted with the new aspects of our being that we became aware of in the dark void of the cocoon. Here, in Quadrant 4, we practice new parts of ourselves and then, eventually make our way upward toward the horizon line that separates the lower half of the map from the upper half. The two words we use in Sparkle School to capture the difference between the upper and lower halves of the map are ‘doing’ for the upper half, and ‘becoming’ for the lower half.

However, for us iNtuitive personality types, it is also very helpful to notice that the lower, or ‘becoming’ part of the map is our greatest place of comfort, because our job there, is to learn about ourselves, and most of us enjoy knowing ourselves more and more fully. We develop, here, our innate, super-powers of intuitive insight, self-reflection, soul-growth, and personal transformation. Conversely, the top, or ‘doing’ part of the map is where we could expect Sensing types to feel most at home, because their job is to focus outward on the conventional, practical world of solving problems and ‘getting things done’.

That means that for iNtuitive-Feeling women, the transition from Quadrant 4 upward into Quadrant 1 requires some caution, because we’re moving from a place of comfort and individuation, into a place that challenges us to hold our own, especially in the newest part of who we are becoming. There could be danger here, so let’s explore a little deeper.

In our community conversations, we have come to recognize some of the ways in which we iNtuitive-Feeling women have been wounded throughout life, and perhaps especially in childhood, because as a small minority we are essentially ‘different’. It is the very nature of any tribe, or group of people, to want all of its members to conform, and when they don’t, to judge, chastise, demonize, and even banish those who do not conform. So, as iNtuitive-Feeling type little girls living in a Sensing-majority culture, we were constantly reminded, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we were suspect, odd, inappropriate, and so on. We might have been abused by family members, neighbors, teachers or others, without anyone around us understanding that this was happening, including our abusers.

To cope, we learned to fit in by using our iNtuition. Without knowing that we were doing so, we adapted and adapted, until our lives were greatly influenced, if not largely dictated, by the norms and conventions of the Sensing-majority around us … the normal, everyday world of ‘doing’! We learned to ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ in order to conform. Put another way, we became very skilled at living outside of our innate preference as iNtuitive-Feeling people, which is to explore the multidimensional complexity of our iNtuitive minds, and fully express our open-hearts. Now that we have practiced those things in the lower half of the You Are Here Map, it is important that we hold tight to the new dimensions of self that we have discovered in the process. Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.