“I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same.”
― Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water
“Your gift will unlock doors that you prayed for God to open.”
― Yvonne Pierre, The Day My Soul Cried: A Memoir
Today after another emotional week for me spent evaluating my thoughts and feelings, I sat down and looked through an old folder of correspondence from 1996-1997 to prepare to write today’s blog entry. As I looked at my words, I was amazed at how my dreams and thoughts have expanded years later, but still are rooted in fundamental truths. I had been thinking earlier today about how our minds can be prisons limiting our thoughts and actions, as well the physical prisons of our environments. I saw in my folder I wrote a note in 1997 to myself concluding with the following, “Roberta, my neighbor, commented that people who have lived in East St. Louis and move to small towns, put bars on their windows. This is evidence of the evil that grows in our environment. We must no longer think of safety in terms of locks, but rather the absence of locks.”
When I began my journey of writing in my blog SacredSouls almost seven years ago in February of 2014, my first entry was titled the Road Not Taken and ended with the following. “God has provided me many blessings, but I am in a fork in my life where the unpaved and paved paths meet. The beauty of the unpaved path calls to my heart and I can no longer deny it. This is the beginning of my journey. I trust in God that the unpaved path is my destiny.” Similar to my words in 1997, my thoughts in 2014 were just beginning an exploration of my experiences over the last thirty years.
My blog has been a tool for processing my thoughts and emotions based on my past and current experiences, so that I could understand my life and God’s role in it and to provide healing. And I thought perhaps by publishing my thoughts in a blog, I could help others along their life journey. In writing, I let my mind wander, writing about whatever came to me. Some entries focused on a very personal experience and emotion from the past or present. And some were of how I saw God in my life and in creation. And then I noticed that it was building to an image of God and who I am as a child of God. And underlying it all, were symbols of birds flying between earth and heaven, unlocked from their cages. To understand that symbolism of that image, I need to explain how I differ from many other people, but maybe others can learn from my thoughts and experiences, although they have different gifts.
As an INFJ mystic, (less than 1 percent of the population is classified in this category within the Myers-Briggs), I process the world very differently. Susan Storm in a Close Look of the Mystic writes that brain scans by the neurologist Dario Nardi show a very unique brain activity for the INFJ. She writes “INFJs enter a “zen-like” brain state when they are tasked to envision the future or solve a complex problem. Nardi conducted EEG brain-wave tests that showed that INFJs, when presented with a novel or complex problem, would harness all neocortex regions in order to “realize” an answer.” As an INFJ, I would say based on my experience with this, I am not only realizing an answer from within, but also from a field of consciousness in which I am part. I have experienced states of mind that while I am in it, I draw thoughts from the universal with can have positive and negative energy or thoughts. While I am immersed in it, I know when I come out of that state, I will not remember individual thoughts, but will be left with an impression which will guide me in the future. And in my everyday normal experience, I usually do not remember many details unless I write them down immediately. But if I experience an event that triggers emotions from a past trauma, the details can become very vivid.
In addition, due to trauma in my twenties and thirties, my mind learned to escape the physical, emotional and mental boxes placed around me to abuse me. I escaped with what I refer to as breakthroughs which made me aware of other “realities” within a field of consciousness which others were not conscious of as well as underlying truths. Most psychiatrists classify my experiences that I have described as pathological, isolated to my brain requiring antipsychotic drugs. A few years ago, I read an academic article on transpersonal psychology titled Psychosis or Spiritual Emergence ago which confirmed that my experiences should be viewed as part of a larger field of consciousness and treated in a supportive, loving environment. For years, I had resisted psychiatrists classifying my mental states within DSM models instead reframing my mind as a gift that needs to be managed. A lesson I actually learned from a communication professor who had a license plate “reframe it.” By reframing my mental experiences, I learned to step outside of them analyzing them in a positive light which enabled me to manage my mind. My counselor Pat years ago told me I could control my mind, but she also understood it would be a learning process over time. I knew this would involve practice and therefore, risk. This ran counter to the messaging by the psychiatrists that I could never control it because it is an involuntary cyclical chemical reaction. But I realized this “chemical” reaction occurred under stress often connected to a metaphysical event. I found psychiatrists dismissed this as nonsense. But now I know as an INFJ, I am skilled in recognizing patterns, especially those in human thoughts and emotions. And it has been said we see “the pattern of the pattern” within our own minds and can project how those patterns can play out in others. I also see my insights as sometimes revealed by God through the field of consciousness which is not bound by what we know as sequential or Kronos time.
The reason I am sharing this is to explain, my mind has experience working outside the normal mental boxes most of us operate in that we do not even realize we are in. And as a consequence, I can see how paradigms and beliefs within our individual and collective psyche affect our behaviors, and why I challenge how other people think. I was listening to a podcast with Dr. Illia Delio who is a nun with PhDs in theology and in science this week, and she talked about the fact that the reality is we operate in a quantum world there is no normal, only chaos. And she said our quest to get back to normal will be our undoing. This statement is a paradigm shift and the implications are tremendous. I cannot even begin to contemplate at her intellectual level the ramifications. But I know that to change and adapt, we must first recognize this reality to change our thought processes and resulting actions.
Also, because I am an INFJ primarily driven by introverted intuition or analysis of perspectives, and because of my ability to transcend consciousness, I can experience multiple perspectives without being completely married to one. Allowing me to go to the most abstract level to summarize detailed thoughts. That is why I say God is love. God is the whole. God is eternal. Dr. Delio would state it in even higher terms. She states God is a mystery. The rest is our imagination and that is very hard for most people to accept. But if you can accept that our thoughts or imagination is the basis for what we create, together we can become anything we imagine if we love, and provide hope and faith. That is mind-blowing.
Which circles back to what I originally wrote in 1997 about people leaving a violent city for a safe town, still feel the need to put bars on the windows to protect themselves. Fear and trauma have lasting impact on our ability to trust others and imagine positive outcomes. Because I have been told I am psychotic and because I have been abused for my thoughts almost physically losing my life, sharing my thoughts is not easy because rejection opens up trauma feelings that I cannot be loved or accepted for who I am. I relived this trauma again this week after sharing one of my blog posts with a group writing memoirs I had trusted. My blog entry elicited anger from the leader whose resentment had been building because she felt I was resisting and challenging her authority, expertise, and structure as well as purpose for writing a memoir which I found limiting and not applicable to me. And although it was made clear I was not welcome in that group, like my other experiences, it will only strengthen my resolve to break open mental, physical and emotional prisons - by taking each bar off window by window, and lock by lock from each door holding us in. Even if it takes an eternity.
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