Episode 50: Manage Mushroom Soup!

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Sparkle School, where together, we access our innate, iNtuitive wisdom as unique, self-valuing, and deeply Feeling women … and share who we are becoming in a safe, sensitive community.

In recent weeks, we’ve been exploring some of the limiting messages about creativity that we have received from our Sensing-majority culture. We’ve seen that creativity is not limited to acts of artistic expression, like painting and drawing, nor is it available only to those who have special so-called ‘artistic’ talents. We’ve noticed that as iNtuitive-Feeling type women, we create all of the time. Using our innate ‘possibility thinking’, we pick and choose data points that intrigue and inspire us. We form those data points into inventive ideas and theories of our own. With this imaginative activity, constantly working in the back of our minds, the very act of being fully expressed becomes a creative process for us.

As we own and consciously work with our unique capacity for innovative thought, we free ourselves up to experiment instead of getting stuck in the limiting belief that our creations only have value if they produce quantitative and qualitative ‘results’, ala the Sensing-majority world in which we live. Conversely, when we accept, and build upon, the idea that the very process of being creative, itself, has value, we stay open to the fresh ideas and actions that come with ‘happy accidents’. Happy accidents always provide us with surprising and stimulating new data points, with which to tweak and ultimately perfect whatever creative process we’re navigating in the moment.

Today, we’re going to venture even further into how creativity functions for us as complex, multidimensional women, by examining how our kaleidoscopic minds can sometimes get us into trouble. We will explore how our natural propensity for creative, possibility-thinking can sometimes draw us into confused, conflicted, Mean Girl thinking, without us realizing this is happening.

Here’s a common iNtuitive-Feeling type story: Suzy is confronted with a decision about whether to go to an impromptu gathering of her partner’s extended family. She really doesn’t want to go, but she believes her partner wants her to. As the generous, compassionate NF women she is, Suzy is in the habit of deferring to her partner’s needs, over her own. This time, though, her health will be at risk because there is a pandemic, and many members of her partner’s family have chosen not to take safety precautions. Suzy is health-compromised to the extent that if she contracted the nasty disease in question, she could get extremely sick, or even die. Still, her inner prompting to please her partner is so strong that it feels almost impossible for her to prioritize her own needs, and stay home.

Suzy’s partner is a Sensing-Thinking type person, who doesn’t really understand her complexity, or her need to talk about the many dimensions of her concerns. So, on top of feeling compelled to attend a family function that could compromise her health, she unearths doubts about whether her partner can ever truly understand who she is, or support what she needs.