Tag: Eileen McKusick

The Hermit, Introverted Intuitives, and Letting Our Lights Shine

How intuitives emerge from a Hermit Phase.

As an INFJ personality type, I’ve always felt a particular affinity for The Hermit card.    After all, going into Hermit mode is one of the primary defense mechanisms of intuitives and introverts.   When we feel overwhelmed or hurt, we pull up the drawbridge, slam the gate shut, and self-isolate until we heal.  Sometimes that takes a few weeks and sometimes it can turn into years.

I’ve recently begun focusing on another part of The Hermit card, though, which is the lamp that he’s holding aloft.  He isn’t just hiding out anymore – he’s illuminating a path for others to follow.

 INTUITIVES DON’T LEAD

Doing that is NOT something that highly intuitive or empathetic people are inclined to do, for a couple of reasons.  First – and most obvious – is the fact that most intuitives are also introverts.  We’re not the sort of people who want to have a great deal to do with other people, much less try to lead them anywhere. 

In a very real sense, that’s more of the path of the extrovert.  Extroverts love, love, LOVE to charge out into society, organize everything, and tell other people what they should be doing and when they should be doing it. Which is fine, because someone has to put together the Christmas parties, right?  Better them than us.

INTUITIVES AND SELF-IMAGE

Another reason that intuitives seldom assert themselves as, “leaders,” is that many of us have really rotten self-images.  We feel as if we don’t fit in, as if we’re the original square peg in a round hole.  

Some of that flows out of the fact that society is, once again, pretty much designed by extroverts.  Starting in elementary school, we’re told that daydreaming and wanting to be by ourselves is, “bad.”  How many of us received the dreaded report card that said, “Doesn’t play well with other children?”  Yikes.  

That continues into adult life, of course.  Just look at the modern work spaces, with cubicles piled on top of each other and no sense of privacy or personal space.  They’re extrovert heaven and introvert hell and if we don’t like them there must be something wrong with us.  It turns out we don’t play well with other adults, either.

INTUITIVES AND DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES

There’s a further reason for intuitive introverts having terrible self-images, which is – guess what? – our families.  When I first started digging into intuitive personality types I was astounded at the number of people who reported that they had come from dysfunctional families.  And by, “dysfunctional,” I mean families where one or both parents had serious mental issues, addiction issues, or abuse issues.  

Frequently, a part and parcel of being a terrible parent is blaming the child for your bad parenting skills.  A classic example is a parent who gets drunk, beats the hell out of the kid, and then says, “You made me do that.  If you were a better child, I wouldn’t have to beat you.”  The end result is that the kid is convinced that he or she isn’t a, “good,” person and that they’re somehow to blame for the abuse.  We go into life with the basic premise that we’re flawed and unloveable.

INTUITIVES AND COGNITIVE INTELLIGENCE

So, all of these factors (and more) lead the introverted intuitive to feel that she’s in no position to lead anyone, anywhere.  After all, we’re odd balls and we’re just not quite good enough.  But is that borne out by facts?  Consider these statistics from Susan Storm’s article in PsychologyJunkie:

Of all of the personality types, INFJs have the second highest grades in high school.

INFJs have the highest first semester grades in college and some of the highest undergraduate grades.

INFJs are among the most persistent personality types in actually finishing college.

INFJs tend to score well above average in standardized IQ tests.

INFPs and INFJs read more than any other personality types.  While the average American reads 12 books per year, INFJs average 67 books per year.

INTUITIVES AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

While some introverted intuitives are full blown empaths, ALL of them are highly empathetic.  And by empathetic, I mean that they can, “read,” another person’s emotions so deeply and so quickly that they may appear to be psychic.  

When you meet an introverted intuitive, they are instantly scanning your body language, your eyes, your facial expressions, the tone of your voice and even the clothes that you chose to wear that day.  All of this happens so rapidly that the intuitive may not even be aware that he’s doing it.  What’s more, intuitives frequently feel that everyone else must have that same level of perception, simply because it feels so natural to them.  But, no, most people don’t do that.

As Eileen McKusick, author of Tuning the Human Biofield put it, “It’s like having an antenna that goes a little higher than everyone else’s.  We pick up information that normal people don’t.”

COMING OUT OF THE HERMIT PHASE

What usually pulls introverted intuitives out of their Hermit phase is a desire to help other people.  That can manifest as personally as wanting to help a friend who’s gone through a divorce or as broadly as wanting to make some contribution to humanity as whole.  Intuitives are, after all, highly empathetic, which means that we really DO feel other people’s pain, almost as if it were our own.  

In order to help, though, we have to get rid of that old, “I’m not good enough,” self-image.  When we combine our intellectual intelligence with our emotional intelligence, we are actually extraordinarily capable of helping others heal.

It’s estimated that up to 52% of the population may fall into the introvert section of the personality types.  BUT . . . introverted intuitives are a very tiny slice of that.  Only 1 to 2% of the world population are INFJs and only 4.4% are INFPs.  We have unique gifts and unique perspectives.  We just need the self confidence to go along with those gifts. To let our lights shine on other people’s darkened paths.

The Ten of Wands, Energy Healing, and Over-Thinking Enchiladas

Using energy healing to overcome overthinking.

I find myself understanding the poor dude in the 10 of Wands more and more as time goes by.

In the Tarot, the four suits of cards represent different realms of the human experience.  Swords = personal power.  Cups = emotions. Pentacles = material possessions.  And wands = ideas.

So we see this guy in the 10 of Wands who has SO MANY ideas that he can barely stagger along under the weight of them.  His head is pressed firmly into the bundle of wands and he can’t even see what’s going on around him.  He’s just trudging toward a distant destination, hoping he’s going in the right direction and trying to put one foot in front of the other.  His ideas own him, not the other way around.

I was watching an interview with Eileen McKusick, author of, “Electric Body, Electric Health,” and she flat out said, “Overthinking is a cultural brain virus.  Overthinking never, ever solves anything.”  Naturally, my reaction was, “I’ll need to overthink that statement.”

She’s right, though.  What we refer to as, “thinking,” usually means shuffling around a lot of different concepts, trying to make them fit some sort of a coherent pattern.  It’s like a Rubik’s Cube that we keep flipping and flipping and flipping, hoping that all of the squares will line up. 

But conceptualizing is just one part of a much larger process and when we get stuck in that one part, it doesn’t work.  We can never, ever solve anything by just thinking at it.

Somewhere along the line in human evolution -probably about the time we began to develop alphabets and writing – we started to pull out of our bodies and into our heads.  Which is to say that we started to think of our heads, our brains and thoughts, as being somehow separate from our bodies.  Philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to that as, “the ghost in the machine.”

That name is so apt because most of us suffer from this incredible, mass hallucination that there’s some separate, non-material, “self,” much like a ghost, that sort of rides around in our bodies, as if they were machines that we’re driving.  The ghost, of course, lives in our heads and we peer out at the world through our eyes, just as if they were windshields.

We call the ghost in our heads our, “selves,” or our, “personalities,” or even our, “souls.”  So there’s a ghost that’s our REAL self and then there’s the body, which we’re sort of temporarily driving around in.  That scene is very much like our real self landed at the Earth Airport and went straight to the Hertz Rent a Body so that we’d have a cool ride to tool around in.  “Hey, I’ll take something with fins and a lot of chrome.  Bucket seats.”

We even see that dualism in New Age philosophy, right?  How often have we heard that expression, “You’re not a body that has a Soul;  you’re a Soul that has a body?”  Which is a nice shift toward the spiritual, but it still maintains that strange hallucination that our bodies are somehow NOT our real selves. 

Which is exactly what McKusick was getting at:  we’re not just our brains and we’re not just our bodies – we’re our body/brains/nervous systems/emotions/thoughts/memories, Soul – the whole enchilada.

Or perhaps I should say, “the Soul Enchilada.”

She’s an energy worker who uses the energy of sound to heal us.  Like most energy workers, she heals from the outside in, which is contrary to some New Age thinking.  The basic New Age formula for life runs like this:

Our beliefs create our thoughts.

Our thoughts create our emotions.

Our emotions create our vibrations.

Our vibrations create what we draw into our lives.

New Agers have tended to jump in at the level of thought and say, “Well, if we change our thoughts, we change our emotions, which changes our vibrations, which changes our lives.”  Also known as the power of positive thinking and it’s true.

Energy healers like McKusick, though, are flipping the script on that.  They’re saying, “If we change our vibrations, we change our emotions, which changes our thoughts.”  She’s taking the same holistic approach – we’re all one great big electromagnetic vibration and if you change one thing, you change all of it – but she’s working from the vibration inward to the thoughts.

Her idea is that sound is a form of energy and so are we.  When we listen to certain sound frequencies that are coherent, solid frequencies, it reorganizes the energy in our bioelectric field into a solid, coherent vibration.  As our vibrations become more coherent, so do our emotions and our thoughts.

Does it work?  I don’t know, yet.  I’m spending a significant part of my day banging away on my Tibetan meditation bowl and grooving on the rising and falling of the sounds.  It does seem to be very soothing and it does take me out of my head and into my body.

And now that I’ve over-thought it, I like it.  I really do.

Please remember that my amazing e-book, Just the Tarot, is still available on Amazon for MUCH less than an order of enchiladas. Hell, it’s less than a side of refried beans. What an incredible bargain!