INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

“When I started out, my hair had started to turn to silver. My friends thought I was crazy. There was not one word of encouragement from them. They thought I would surely kill myself, walking all over. But that didn’t bother me. I just went ahead and did what I had to do. They didn’t know that with inner peace I felt plugged into the source of universal energy, which never runs out. There was much pressure to compromise my beliefs, but I would not be dissuaded. Lovingly, I informed my well-meaning friends of the existence of two widely divergent paths in life and of the free will within all to make their choice. There is a well-worn road which is pleasing to the senses and gratifies worldly desires, but leads to nowhere. And there is the less traveled path, which requires purifications and relinquishments, but results in untold blessings.” —Peace Pilgrim*

“But to come back to what I said earlier, I know I don’t manage to persuade people to change, but I do it anyway. A story: A just man decided he must save humanity. So he chose a city and he studied and he learned the art of moving people, changing minds, changing hearts. He came to a man and woman and said, ‘Don’t forget that murder is not good, it is wrong.’ In the beginning, people gathered around him. It was so strange, somewhat like a circus. They gathered and they listened. He went on and on and on. Days passed. Weeks passed. They stopped listening. After many years, a child stopped him and said, ‘What are you doing? Don’t you see nobody is listening? Then why do you continue shouting and shouting? Why?’ And the man answered the child, ‘I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I was convinced that if I were to shout loud enough, they would change. Now I know they won’t change. But if I shout even louder, it’s because I don’t want them to change me.’” —Elie Wiesel*

“I am driven by things that I don’t quite understand. Much of what I’m about, I truly don’t know how I came to it. I mean, I know in the intellectual sense. I know that coincidences appeared and I made choices. But there is a voice—my mother was possessed of that voice. Paul Robeson was possessed of that voice. Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois and Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr. King and Fanny Lou Hamer and others were possessed of that voice. I am just one note in a chord that makes a harmonic sound that gives me the sense of what I must do and where I must go without much debate.” —Harry Belafonte*

“I feel like Joan of Arc at times. My whole becomes uplifted. I, too, hear the voices that say ‘Come,’ and I will follow, no matter what the cost, no matter what the trials I am placed under. Jail, poverty, slander—they matter not.” —Helen Keller*

“Traditional Healers are either born with their gifts or have spent much time developing their gifts. Every tribe has some form of traditional healing for their people. The concept behind Native American healing is much different than Western medicine. Native Americans looked at the person as a whole and treated the individual’s entire person instead of focusing on just the illness or ailment. As many of you know, Native Americans believe that everything is interconnected—nature, plants, animals, the Earth, sky and so on. Many Native Americans believe that everything has a spirit. If a person had an illness it was thought to be due in part to a spiritual problem.” more…

“The Hawaiians look at things in terms of energy flow, following the idea that an idea or belief can block energy flow as much as muscle tension can. Lomilomi helps release the blockages, whilst at the same time giving the energy new direction. Thus Lomilomi is not just a physical experience, it also facilitates healing on the mental, emotional and spiritual levels as well. The Hawaiians view all aspects of the body as one and believe that the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual are all part of the ‘whole’ self. When healing occurs on one level, it impacts on all levels. Rather than viewing the client as someone to ‘be fixed,’ a Lomilomi practitioner views each person as a being to be assisted in returning to harmony and balance. It is important to remember that the practitioner does not heal but is the facilitator for the healing, creating a safe place for the healing to occur.” more…

INFPs (Healer Idealists) are found in only one percent of the general population though, at times, their idealism leaves them feeling even more isolated from the rest of humanity.*

Empaths
This Gift With People
The Power of Intuition
Society’s Canaries
Stand Up and Show Your Soul

“If the healer is the one who heals us all, who heals the healer?”

The Listeners
Cancer Survivor Learns How to Say “No”
Speak Your Mind, Even if Your Voice Shakes
Empaths
The Black Sheep/Going Against the Grain
The Monastic Option
Loneliness
How I Healed Myself
Innerspace
Healing the Healer
Caring for Unmet Needs
Are You Mature?

“Several years ago, I was fortunate to meet a lady named Deborah at a fasting clinic in northern California. I had several conversations with Deborah over the course of a year, and what I remember most about her is that her kindness was amazingly genuine; the feeling for me was that she had spent a lifetime enduring great sadness and suffering, and had done much inner work to identify and strive to live according to her ideals.

“One day, I asked Deborah why she chose to eat her meals alone rather than with other fasting guests. After a beat of silence, she told me that she was getting some negative vibes from another guest, and that she felt that it was best for her resting experience to stay away from that energy. I remember her using the word ‘toxic’ to describe the other guest’s energy—not in a malicious way, but with a thoughtful and observational tone.”

“I’ve learned that to keep my sensitivities open and not get demolished by a world full of negative energy, I need to protect my energy. That’s why I got interested—because I have no desire to shut myself off or to become numb or neutral. I want to stay open to the world, but I also had to learn to protect my energy.”

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I’ve heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered, concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people. You are right in your assessments.

The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is ‘we were made for these times’. Yes. For years, we’ve been learning, practicing, training and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest.

For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over brought down by naivete, by lack of love, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme. We have a history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially, we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered can be restored to life again. In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by persevering with what’s outside our reach, what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That’s spending the wind without raising the sails. We are needed, that is all we can know.

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take ‘everyone on earth’ to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both, are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

—Clarissa Pinkola-Estes

“The souls of people, on their way to earth-life, pass through a room full of lights; each takes a taper—often only a spark—to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer—and have time to grab a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity—its poets, seers, and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers and saviors, the light-bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers and, without them, humanity would lose its way in the dark.” —Plato

“Contrary to popular belief, giftedness is not characterized by high intelligence alone…”*

“On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, INFP is a rare personality type, found in only about 4% of the general population. Yet, of the possible 16 types, it is the one most frequently found for gifted people. This scarcity, coupled with their extreme intelligence, renders them seldom understood and, thus, rarely validated in relationships. The following material is based on qualitative research involving in-depth interviews with eight highly-gifted INFP adults.

Continue reading “INFP Personality Type in Gifted People”

Characteristics of Gifted Adults
Giftedness Self-Test

Giftedness: There appears to be three sorts of childhoods and three sorts of adult social adaptations. The first of these may be called “the committed strategy.” These individuals were born into upper middle-class families with gifted and well-educated parents and often with gifted siblings. They sometimes even had famous relatives. They attended prestigious colleges, became doctors, lawyers, professors, or joined some other prestigious occupation, and have friends with similar histories. They are the optimally-adjusted. They are also the ones most likely to disbelieve that the exceptionally-gifted can have serious adjustment problems.

The second kind of social adaptation may be called “the marginal strategy.” These individuals were typically born into a lower socio-economic class without gifted parents, gifted siblings, or gifted friends. Often, they did not go to college at all but, instead, went right to work immediately after high school, or even before. And, although they may superficially appear to have made a good adjustment to their work and friends, neither work nor friends can completely engage their attention. They hunger for more intellectual challenge and more real companionship than their social environment can supply. So they resort to leading a double life. They compartmentalize their life into a public sphere and a private sphere. In public, they go through the motions of fulfilling their social roles, whatever they are, but, in private, they pursue goals of their own. They are often omnivorous readers and sometimes unusually expert amateurs in specialized subjects. The “double life strategy” might even be called the genius ploy, as many geniuses in history have worked at menial tasks in order to free themselves for more important work. Socrates, you will remember was a stone mason, Spinoza was a lens grinder, and even Jesus was a carpenter. The exceptionally-gifted adult who works as a parking lot attendant while creating new mathematics has adopted an honored way of life and deserves respect for his courage, not criticism for failing to live up to his abilities. Those conformists who adopt the committed strategy may be pillars of their community and make the world go around but, historically, those with truly original minds have more often adopted the double life tactic. They are ones among the gifted who are most likely to make the world go forward.

And finally there are “the dropouts.” These sometimes bizarre individuals were often born into families in which one or more of the parents were not only exceptionally gifted but exceptionally maladjusted themselves. This is the worst possible social environment that a gifted child can be thrust into. His parents, often driven by egocentric ambitions of their own, may use him to gratify their own needs for accomplishment. He is, to all intents and purposes, not a living human being to them, but a performing animal, or even an experiment. That is what happened to Sidis, and may be the explanation for all those gifted who “burn out” as he did.

Source: TPS

“I joke that I knew James before he was sensitive,” Danny Kortchmar chuckles affectionately, “but the truth is that James is the archetypal singer-songwriter. He’s the mould, as a solo artist backed by a consistent touring band, writing confessional songs before almost anybody—songs that remained personal even as they became universal. Dylan achieved the universal aspect, but not the personal vulnerability.

“Working and touring with James for decades, I used to want him to rock out more—until I realized that what he wanted to do was actually calm people in a unique, quirky way. His songs sound like the blues, like Christmas carols, and like a church choir too, yet it all essentially comes only from him.”

“Fundamentally,” Ike Taylor told this writer in 1981, “James is a retiring person who wants and is able to be in meaningful contact with other people. At the one-on-one level, his shyness interferes. Paradoxically, that shyness disappears on-stage. I see family allusions in much of his work and a core confidence in the rightness of exposing his inner self. ‘Fire And Rain,’ for instance, was a great expression of his sensitivity but also of his will.”

[…]

“My son ministers through his music,” says Trudy Taylor. “He picks up the themes of what’s good in the past, and he gives them a unified clarity in the present.”

Source

“For me, I don’t have much direction or control over it. I don’t write or read music. But, generally speaking, I am visited by songs. They usually happen to me either while I’m sitting and playing guitar or sometimes when I’m driving the car. ‘Sweet Baby James’ happened while I was driving down south. You have to be ready to catch those things when they come, you know, ‘cause they’ll just fall right through and you’ll forget them. I write lots of songs that I guess you could call remedial, that are sort of therapeutic. Sometimes, I feel uncomfortable with that, as though they are too sticky and sentimental; but that’s what I do, that’s the kind of song I write.” —James Taylor

“Sometimes I think of us as society’s canaries. I expect you all remember the stories of what happened in the mines in the 19th century. The little canary was taken down the mines in a cage. If the air was putrid (the system stunk), the little bird would die and this would be a warning sign for the miners to get out. Sometimes we, too, take on the attributes of the canary. We are likely to feel bad air perhaps before anyone else has even noticed that the windows are shut. We are likely to get sick and, sometimes, this can be on behalf of so-called normal people. I like to describe us in a positive way by indicating that we are the exquisitely sensitive ones. If you listen to us you may learn something about the air…” —Merinda Epstein

“MBTI types INFP and INFJ are the predominant types in the HSP community…”*

“She wasn’t all that confident herself. She knew she had this gift with people, and she used it, wisely and generously. But in fact she felt, going into a big room of people, rather drawn to those who are feeling a bit nervous—rather as she was herself.” —Frances Shand Kydd

“It is not an easy thing to look this kind of trauma in the face and hear these stories. People would pour out their heart in gut wrenching detail…and she absorbed it, took it away with her and, by doing that, transacted some healing in the process. I think it’s because, a) she’s a survivor, so she understands survivors, and b) she understood traumatic events.” —Jerry White

“This is me, this is me!” exclaimed Princess Diana when she was read Dr. David Keirsey’s portrait of an INFP. In 1991, her masseur, Stephen Twigg, had given her a copy of ‘Please Understand Me’ to help her understand the spiritual journey she was undertaking. Her excitement came as Stephen read the Healer Idealist (INFP) portrait which, in part, says:

“Healers care deeply and passionately about a few special persons or a favorite cause and their fervent aim is to bring peace to the world and wholeness to themselves and their loved ones. They base their self-image on being seen as empathic, benevolent, and authentic. Often enthusiastic, they trust intuition, yearn for romance, seek identity, prize recognition and aspire to the wisdom of the sage.”

“According to a book released in the Summer of 2004 by Andrew Morton, Diana’s unofficial biographer, Diana was astonished and amazed by […]”

Continue reading “Princess Diana: A Healer Idealist”