Episode 20: Mind Your Kaleidoscope Part 2

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 what happens for us, as iNtuitive-Feeling personality types, when we move from Quadrant 4 in the lower, or ‘becoming’, half of the You Are Here Map, into Quadrant 1, in the upper, or ‘doing’, half. Here, we re-enter the Sensing-majority world with all of its rules, roles, scripts and ‘shoulds’. Many of us have felt strangely invisible, inadequate, or even victimized, here. But now, with new strengths to carry us, we are ready to start ‘doing’ things … but only in ways that feel luscious to who we are, as iNtuitive-Feeling women. So how do we keep our bearings here?

Enter, the idea of the Kaleidoscopic Mind, a metaphor that has emerged in our Bravely Being You community, with heads nodding in recognition. It stems from the idea that as iNtuitive-Feeling women, we are challenged when operating in the Sensing-majority world, because that world is designed for people who experience life more simply than we do. For Sensing types, facts are facts, and they are all that is needed to direct thoughts and actions. But for us NF women, facts are not just facts. They are merely a few of the data points that we reference to inform our choices and actions.

We, also, consider complex systems of thought, and analyze our emotions through multifaceted filters, asking ourselves questions like: “How does this choice fit into my sense of greater purpose? How do I feel about it? How do the people around me feel? Our iNtuitive-Feeling complexity makes the Sensing-majority world with its simple rules, roles and scripts, a very challenging place; one where we, inevitably, experience some level of chronic, internal stress.

The Kaleidoscopic Mind metaphor gives us a way to break our stress factors down into manageable parts. A kaleidoscope is a simple tube of some kind, with three long mirrors in its chamber, that are positioned at 60-degree angles to each other. Anything reflected in one of the mirrors will be reflected in the other mirrors, too. We can think of those mirrors as representing our iNtuition, the N in our NF personality type, the part that is constantly scanning for the multidimensional data points that bring meaning to our world.

At the far end of our kaleidoscope’s mirrored tube, is a circular chamber holding brightly colored pieces of glass. When we turn the chamber, they shift and move, dramatically altering the picture that is reflected back to us. Let’s think of the glass pieces as the continuously changing emotions that shift and change how we experience our world. In one sense, they delight us, but they can also confuse us, especially when we want to get something done in the so-called “real”, or Sensing-majority, world!” Let’s see what insights come from our journal prompts.