Shared Wisdom

And Finding Some Validation for Our Experiences

I was inclined first to write about our relationship with food which drives our eating and health habits since I’m finding it a rather fascinating topic to explore as I talk to and observe friends’ behavior, but I’m going to postpone that for another day.

Rather, I decided this week I’m mostly wanting to share some good content I came across and a few bites of wisdom people in my life shared with me this week, so here they be.

First, I’ll note that I’m grateful to have friends with whom I regularly spend one-on-one time in deep conversation, over lunch or a glass of wine, maybe both ;) or even online if they’re distant, in addition to gatherings of small groups of us for dinner and outings. That’s our jam - deep connection - right?

As a friend and I enjoyed our glass of wine on a random Wednesday, we got to talking about the concept of ‘emotional maturity’. When I expressed some perplexity as to why plenty of people will never respond to their transgressions against others (or me) in a way that I like to think I would in their place, she suggested that most other people haven’t done the deep reading or inner work that I have trying to gain my emotional maturity. That doesn’t make me a better person per se, but I guess I keep thinking that being able to self-reflect, own your own shit so to speak, learn from it and grow is a natural human striving. Isn’t it?

Which brings me to a great video I’d seen a while back and found again this week from a life coach. She talks about our world being inhabited by what she calls “young toddler souls,” stuck in their maturity at the age they experienced trauma, reacting in ways to escape shame and accountability. It also relates to a topic I alluded to last week on how INFJs/HSPs are using our introverted intuition and extraverted (outward) feeling, called sentinel intelligence, that allows us to make connections enabling us to see into the future, even if we don’t quite understand where we got our conclusions or aren’t able to explain it.

As natural healers who care about sharing our wisdom for the greater good, but who are most often dismissed, ridiculed or made fun of for doing so, what I loved about this video is that I felt that someone else understood and could validate my own experience, maybe yours as well. Funny, she mentions toward the end how INFJs love to write to get all this out of our own heads, putting it out in the universe hoping someone will listen. It was the reason I started this blog a few years ago, shortly after my spouse suggested I stop writing meaningful stuff on Facebook in the hopes people would think, but as he said, “people don’t want to think, they just want to watch cat videos.”

I like this coach’s advice to stop trying to save the world, that if no one wants our gifts to “stop giving it away. Go get some popcorn and just watch the chaos happen.” Treat the gift like it’s special and rare rather than devaluing it by giving it away. “Make people ask for your help,” she says. She also notes that a lot of people don’t change until they’re suffering and if we’re always trying to alleviate their suffering (whether or not it works which it probably doesn’t and is really more enabling than anything), they may not reach that inflection point of suffering they need to get to in order to choose growth. Worth the watch.

Sometimes bites of wisdom happen very randomly. As my spouse and I rode home after running a few errands this week, as we chatted, he asked me how a friend of ours who complains regularly about his job was doing. My response was that as I see it, if you’re in a situation you don’t like/hate, you basically have three choices: 1) change it; 2) leave it; or, 3) accept it. Isn’t all else madness that just steals your mental health, because it’s always like you’re fighting it and yourself? But he suggested there’s a fourth option - you ignore it. “But isn’t that a subcategory of acceptance?”, I responded. “No”, he said. “Acceptance is positive. Ignoring it isn’t.”

When I thought about it, I think I agree with him. We’ll define ignoring the situation or circumstances as not attending to it/giving it your attention versus acknowledging/ attending/ mentally telling yourself it exists but you’re still ok. As he’s in the healthcare profession interfacing daily with many people and has worked many places, I sensed he’s had to employ the tactic of ignoring it a lot. Though I haven’t seen it, he says in the clinic there’s one of those jars labeled “ashes of problem patients”. The exchange yielded an unexpected bite of wisdom.

Lastly, two life coaches I casually follow put out videos on what I wrote about in last week’s blog around, as Lauren Sapala calls it here, “diminishing ourselves” in our relationships, making ourselves smaller to accommodate others. Find them here:

Never stop evolving.

Have a great weekend.

Peace.