Episode 23: Mind Your Kaleidoscope Part 5

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.

So, we’ve been exploring the metaphor of the Kaleidoscopic Mind for about a month, now, and finding that it does seem to be helpful to us iNtuitive-Feeling (NF) women, as we look for ways to manage our multi-dimensional complexity. We have contrasted our symbols for iNtuition … which are the stationary mirrors in the tube of the Kaleidoscope … with our symbols for Feeling … which are the pieces of brightly colored glass that rotate in the far chamber. It is easy to think of ourselves as ‘most at peace’ when the glass bits are not moving ... that is, when our Feelings are not interrupting the calm wisdom of our iNtuition. For then, we can gaze calmly at the beautiful mandala created when the mirrors and the glass bits come together.

When our emotional state changes, a new mandala is formed, and because our emotions are constantly and unexpectedly changing, the complexity of such change can throw us into ‘spin’ or overwhelm. But what if we set a goal … to learn to be at peace within ourselves, even when our emotions come in and dramatically change our view of life. I know, this sounds like the stuff of trusted spiritual practices like meditation and prayer! But what if we could become so skilled at dancing in our emotional flow … that even when it rudely interrupts us, we are able to focus on the bigger picture … the beautiful ever-changing mandalas that show up within the movements of the Kaleidoscopic Mind.

We can take a first step in that direction, by noticing that Sparkle School gives us a number of metaphors, each of which has its individual value to us. And to consider, that when we integrate one metaphor with another, we are giving our complex iNtuitive minds a way to work with our complexity … even when we add in our acutely sensitive emotions. For instance, very often, our self-reflective questions for the week start with our ten areas of life. We choose one area to work with and we overlay that area on other models. Sometimes it is the You Are Here Map with its four transformational quadrants. Sometimes, it’s the Drama Queen Gameboard, or Sparkle DNA, or the Reset Tool, or Perfect Practice … or one of the many other models we work with.

In recent weeks, we have combined our ten areas of life, with the You Are Here Map, and with our metaphor of the Kaleidoscopic Mind. It sounds quite complex, but by using these three models together, in a process of self-reflection, we’ve been practicing with using complexity to create simplicity. And then, when we hear what our Sparkle sisters have to share, we add relevance to our self-reflective answers. In doing so, we are, effectively, integrating four layers of complexity, but gaining clear, simple insights! Maybe this is simply because, as iNtuitive-Feeling type women, we absolutely love collecting data points that we can use to understand ourselves more and more comprehensively.

Whatever the reason, today, we’re going to focus in, a little more closely, on what happens to our self-awareness, when, in some area of life, we are feeling the strength, the inspiration, and, yes, the challenges … of birthing some new creation, while at the same time, we are dealing with dramatically different feelings in another area of life. To explore more, let’s move on to our journal prompts.