Episode 17: Make New Patterns

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.

For the past three months, we’ve been focusing on the You Are Here Map, and in particular, the lower half of the map, where we’re engaged in a process of ‘becoming’ new within ourselves, in one or more areas of life. Now, with new wings stretched, strengthened, and ready to fly in our chosen life-area, we begin to detect new dimensions of ‘doing” that are asking for our attention. So, we want to ask ourselves if we are ready to exit the internal zone of ‘becoming’, step through the gateway between ‘becoming’ and ‘doing’, and focus our attention outward on the tasks required either to actively re-engage, or to increase our level of engagement.

The gateway we’re talking about here, sits on the left-most edge of the map circle, adjacent to the horizon line that divides the map into upper and lower halves. Like all four of the cardinal gateways on the You Are Here Map, this one is a whopper, but for a new reason. The three prior gates asked us to let go of things from the past … things that were preventing us from moving forward. They asked us to trust that if we let go, we would gain new aspects of self … new transformative aspects … and guess what? Now, at this gate, we feel those new aspects. They form the new shapes and colors that are our wings. They are the authentic qualities and preferences that once lay dormant, but are now showing themselves more and more clearly. So, as we walk through this next gateway, our job is to make sure that our fresh, new, shiny, aspects of self are securely Velcroed to us, for the journey forward. And this is a big job!!

Let’s be crystal clear about what is happening here! The ‘becoming’ half of the map, where we’ve reconnected with innate strengths and abilities, is a comfort zone for us as iNtuitive types. However, the ‘doing’ part of the map can be a challenge, not only because we’re asking ourselves to do something new, but because in most cases, moving into action brings with it a ton of Sensing-type rules, scripts and guidelines.

Most of us learned to follow those rules, scripts and guidelines at a very young age, and we did that without making it a conscious decision. We did it reactively, reflexively, because our intuition told us that if we didn’t adopt the ways of the Sensing-majority, we would suffer an endless stream of criticisms and judgments from the people around us. For the vast majority of people, the Sensing way is the only way. So, we trained ourselves to adapt, but in doing so, we colluded with the Sensing world to program the automatic processes of the brain … the parts that react instinctively.

Now, as we embrace and activate more of our innate, iNtuitive capabilities in some area of life, to create new, more satisfying outcomes, we need to be aware that the programming we did in order to survive as young, sensitive women is still in there … running on automatic. If we’re going to approach ‘doing’ new things in new ways, we want to be extremely vigilant. We must not let our automatic, habitual programs run rampant, or we’re likely to collapse … not only into operating outside of our newly remembered, more innate comfort zone. We are likely to slip into old habits of thought, you know, the ones that feed on our failures and self-doubts. Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.