Episode 21: Mind Your Kaleidoscope Part 3

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.

In recent weeks, we’ve been developing the idea of the Kaleidoscopic Mind, a concept that originally evolved out of the iNtuitive Conversations calls we‘ve been holding for almost a year now at Bravely Being You. As we saw last week, the Kaleidoscopic Mind stems from the thought, that as iNtuitive-Feeling women, we experience special challenges when we try to accomplish things in the Sensing-majority world. This makes perfect sense, because we went to schools that were designed to teach the majority of children how to accomplish things, and those children are Sensing types.

As iNtuitive type kids, we had to find our own support, which for most of us, was simply non-existent, unless we were lucky enough to have a rare, iNtuitive teacher or parent. And even then, if it was more than a few years ago, those adults probably wouldn’t have understood what was really going on for us, because they didn’t have vital information about themselves.

Our challenges didn’t end there! Not only were we iNtuitive type children whose perceptions always seemed to be ‘outside the box’ of the Sensing culture, we were also little girls, growing up in a male-dominated society. And to make things even more complicated, we were Feeling personality types, which meant that for every decision we made, our mind had to factor in a constant flow of ever-changing emotions.

For Sensing types, facts are facts, and they help give form to thoughts and actions, even for those Sensing types who also have a preference for Feeling in how they take make decisions. But as iNtuitive-Feeling women, facts comprise only a small portion of the data points we reference, when we make a decision. 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. As we have seen, a kaleidoscope is a simple tube with three long mirrors in its chamber, positioned at 60-degree angles to each other. Anything reflected in one of the mirrors will be reflected in the other mirrors, too. In our metaphor, we’re thinking of those mirrors as being our iNtuition, which is constantly collecting the multidimensional data points that bring meaning to our world. We explored these mirrors of iNtuition last week in our breakout discussions.

This week we will focus on the Feeling part of our personality preferences. 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. Metaphorically speaking, we can think of the glass pieces as our flow of emotions that constantly shift and change how we make choices, and take actions. To learn more, let’s move on to our journal prompts.