I’m starting to discover how much this week’s flurry of posts have been part of my healing process; something momentous has shifted in me today. This includes that I have realised I am not going to baby-round in here any more; rather, I am going to say it how “just how it is” to me and you are very welcome to listen, as feels resonant, but its time to cut-free of some of the old-paradigm ways of talking about things, especially “chronic illness”.
I realise, to a lot of people, chronic illness is still part of this terrible sad story of things “going wrong” but for me, for the longest time now, its been a process of mulching through my old life and reformatting as a new-paradigm version of myself. At first it was all about breaking down into what felt like the molecules of my old life, so I could up-cycle whichever of those old building blocks I decided to keep ready to start over again, in a new-improved format. That era saw my life change almost beyond recognition as I made changes to all of my habits. Then, after that, it was as though things accelerated into another phase that was almost more bewildering than the first. I could choose to see all that as just another round of mystifying health problems but, actually, seen through the new paradigm context, the last few years have been a crystallisation process; I’ve been crystallising in the body.
In my view, personality is spirit’s vehicle; the one we have is deliberate and chosen to carry our spirit in human form, thus it can tell us a great deal about our “higher” intentions for this lifetime. Writing yesterday’s post Healing through understanding of personality type, which gave my own case-study of being an INFJ, made me realise how this particular personality type is pre-wired to spontaneously crystallise in the body; as though it is their very raison d’être. A lot of people I encounter, often through chronic health topics, some through INFJ or highly sensitive forums, seem to be experiencing the beginnings of this crystallisation process (to be clear, it’s a process of bringing spirit into matter and making a paradigm leap to become a new kind of human ready for the next era in our collective evolution) yet its far from easy, often precarious or even very dangerous to our health to undergo. Thus, no surprise, it can “look like” chronic, mystery health issues and all kinds of other breakdown scenarios but it is also something far more intriguing than that; yet its a very tough road to travel. Far easier for new generations to be born road-ready for the coming era than for those of us who have been around for a while to attempt it in the same human body; yet it can feel irresistible to some of us (more than others), like being the caterpillar that knows it is about to become the butterfly…so we just keep pushing along in that belief.
For the INFJ, it does seem to be that irresistible, or at least inevitable, process because of the way we are made. With just the slightest feeling of pressure from being a misfit or uncomfortable in their present circumstances, the INFJ will start to crystallise all on their own, from very early on in life; perhaps because we hold such high standards and can be quite stalwart in the way we grip-on to those (we don’t compromise ourselves willingly). I felt there was an appropriate word I should use for this situation, when two pressure zones that are quite different to one another are adjacent yet the end result is that something very new (not seen before) is formed, in between those two zones, out of the pressure disparity they are subjected to. In search for it, I came across a description of metamorphism, something I associate with caterpillars turning into butterflies but here it was being described in terms of geology.
“The word “Metamorphism” comes from the Greek: meta = after, morph = form, so metamorphism means the after form. In geology this refers to the changes in mineral assemblage and texture that result from subjecting a rock to conditions such pressures, temperatures, and chemical environments different from those under which the rock originally formed.” (Types of Metamophsim – Prof Stephen A Nelson.)
This is what being an INFJ feels like, every day, since we carry an entire universe around on the inside as our primary, thus dominant, Introverted Intuition (Ni) trait and yet our extroverted Feeling (Fe) and Sensing (Se) traits compel us to keep searching for meaning and a “match” with that harmonious universe “out there” in a human-physical world (where very little makes sense). Since our inner version of life is already fully whole and infinitely harmonised, we will almost certainly feel under the same kind of pressure as rocks that that were formed under one set of environmental conditions yet which are now being subjected to another; we are in the middle of a momentous squeeze all our lives!
So, over a course of many years we stretch and broaden our experiential net (even though extroverted experiences are not our comfort zone…at all) in search of harmony and balance “out there” in a physical word that, in many cases, overwhelms our feeling and sensing traits. The more experience we reach out for, in search of the underlying harmony, the less we seem to find it since the picture only gets more complex and diverse the wider we make our area of focus.
Yet with each encounter that “rubs” us, we become more and more polished, like a diamond that will glint and shine a little more with each newly added facet. However, the process is deeply painful to our introversion and can start to impact on our health, depending on the particular life path we have taken.
Nonetheless, we continue with this “mission” since it is so inherent to us that we can’t seem to resist it. For us, its is a case of “seeking to prove harmony exists in this world or die” since no other mission comes close to engaging our attention (all our other pursuits can either be seen to be extensions of this fascination or they tend to fall by the wayside). In fact, no other personality type is quite so single-minded in pursuing life missions that no body else seems to even notice or reward, let alone understand the importance of, since they are so abstract and thus hard to label or even to see. By the time we reach middle age, we are fully cognizant of having made our life’s work out of projects that are as invisible as we are, though we have achieved very much in the unseen realms; which makes the pursuit of what most-enagages the INFJ a thankless task yet, through our integrity, we can apply ourselves to no other. This “invisibility” knock to our morale does very little to improve our health status by the time we are a few decades into our life’s work, by which time we are feeling weary and depleted.
Our projects only keep on getting bigger; so we start with trying to balance and harmonise all the disparity and conflict in our families, perhaps later our friends or colleagues, and then we try to do the same with the whole world. All our efforts go into this thing though, being introverts, we are forced to find our own particular way of doing this, which is often covert to the degree nobody around us realises how much we care, or are involved in, what is going on around us. As children, we learn subtle diplomacy and trading-off our own comforts to “make others happy”. As adults, we find whatever introverted means we can to do this underground work; in my case, endless blogging from a corner where no one can particularly see me (blogging is such an introverted pastime) whilst shifting so much in the quantum field, I can’t even begin to explain what I really do.
Yet we weary ourselves with our ceaseless task since the world is never going to sit nicely, with everyone in full accord; it will always throw up more problems, push back harder, for all our efforts, and very few seek out our overview, seeming to prefer the long-hard slog of the old ways to attempt solving their messy problems. We find ourselves virtually alone in dreaming of a harmonious world since most people around us seem to enjoy diving back into the fray far too much, which leaves us baffled and lonely.
Over the course of many years, this can seem like it has broken us; our physical health takes all the knocks of the experiential net-widening we have been doing (against our introverted core) by becoming super-sensitive and triggered by nearly everything around us.
Yet if our bodies are broken, our spirit is never so; and is only just about to arrive on the threshold, wanting to come in. Because if our default personality trait is already to operate from Introverted Intuition, the realm of the unseen, we are truly ready to listen now; and to invite into our human experience that which will finally resolve what has been so our of sync in our physical (extroverted) experiences; which is the crystallisation process in a nutshell. If we allow it…
If someone even mentions “crystallisation” to us, we flinch because we imagine a crystal is hard, like a sharp pebble stuck in your shoe and our bodies already feel like that…we feel like both the foot and the pebble, all at the same time!
What we don’t know, as we fight against it, is that crystallisation is inevitable for us unless we hide away in a cave all our lives. The way an INFJ is “wired” forces us to be as extrovert in our preoccupations as we are introverted in our inclination and we become the imbalanced “thing” at the very core of our experience; at least until we notice this.
Then comes the healing. Because at some point we realise that the gift is knowing what this feels like, perhaps more so than any other person on this planet. For the extrovert, regarding a chaotic world is never going to be quite the stretch to their comfort zone as someone whose inner core “looks like” the very premise of the universe, being that all things are whole, balance is everywhere and nothing is ever right or wrong. Our leap of faith is the widest of any personality type and so we are stretched across a great chasm, by a human experience that alarms and overloads the inner processors of our Introverted Thinking (Ti) trait every day. Relentlessly, we gobble up, churn through and struggle to make sense of all this contradictory-seeming data, though we seem to be nothing more than a collapsed and ineffectual person with some sort of chronic illness that no one understands. Then, when we start to glean what makes universal sense to us; when we discern the patterns and the breakthroughs, discover the light at the end of the tunnel, no one seems to want to hear the good news that we have to share. Like some sort of uber-eccentric yet genius code-breaker, working all alone in a small cubicle away from the mainstream, we are left to our bizarre machinations and the fruit of our labour goes unheard largely and unappreciated, since very few speak our particular language (yet).
We are the very heroes of our age because we are put through far more now than we ever would have been put through in the past, even a hundred years ago, because we are literally bombarded with the feeling and sensory contradictions to our inner core, where harmony resides as though on a throne as our go-to benchmark. Though we amount to less than 1% of the population and look depleted, broken and ineffectual, we are the leading point of an army of paradigm changers…in a new paradigm where making change doesn’t have to be about making a lot of noise, being famous or rich or “doing” a lot of things. We are most effectual, in this burgeoning age, because we work on our severely out-of-balance selves and find harmony in spite of apparent disparity everywhere.
When we get to that healing point of self-understanding, thus appreciation, we find we already have our answer. Because we know now that our grand healing mission for the world is all about the healing of ourselves. In rebalancing ourselves, in drawing harmony back into our own experiences, newly perceiving it where it already exists within our own lives, we do it for all. That inner universe we carry on the inside reminds us that it is only the immediate “outer world”, our human-casing, that needs to be balanced for the two to slot together into a more comfortable state of wholeness than has ever been seen before.
This is the point when we start to work with crystallising the body; and so it now happens rapidly. We become the closed circuit of ourselves, no longer reliant on everything “out there” being OK for us to be in balance. The conditionality is thrown away at last because we can afford to, just as soon as we also have a crystal aura (which comes before, sometimes just after, the crystal body) to self-protect us from all the ups and downs of the world. Boundary drawing is a skill the INFJ needs to embrace almost more than any other. Yet our experience of being so grossly out of balance has served us well during our metamorphosis process. We know, more than anyone, just how all-over-the-place the world out there is since we have been feeling it, acutely, all of our lives “as us” and so the triumph of achieving this state of balance within our own unit is the very polish to our diamond.
Taking this cue, the chaotic body functions that have previously been entrained to the rhythms of a discordant world, start to harmonise to our own core message….from the universe we already carry within, which is our leading trait, delivered by our Introverted Intuition (Ni). All our other traits now fall into useful place, beneath the umbrella of this directive, and so we find ourselves to be more innately road-ready for being a crystal human than probably any other personality type, both for these traits and for the disharmonious experiences we have been through until this point. In this case, the crystallisation can be very swift indeed and we are there in no time. If we are capable of modeling extreme balance like no body else, it is because we have come to experience literally both sides of the see-saw, as ourselves in human form, within this very lifetime, which is like an elite academy training regime to prepare us for the crystal outcome. To rebalance ourselves is like rebalancing all the most disparate issues, feelings and sensations of the entire messy world “out there” since we have been experiencing it all, “as though it was happening to us”, for years.
Perhaps this is why the INFJ is so very rare; too many of us and the world would seem to be full of sickly introverts who were not coping very well with the outside world. Just the right amount and we become the unlikely leaders of a new paradigm; those who lead by example rather than by making a lot of noise. We can just be who we are, doing what brings us enjoyment and balance, and its enough; in fact, its perfect.
We can be aware of how we are all connected at the universal level (no one knows this more intimately than an INFJ) and we grasp how we all contribute to, and meet each other in, the quantum field. However, we will be much more effective, now we are balanced and self-protected, when we choose not to be so pushed and pulled about by the collective consciousness (whereas, before, we got drawn into it anyway, from being so invested in feeling what others feel because we thought that was our mission). This means we can start to take part more and be amongst people when we choose to be, without fear of our energy, thus our health, taking a hit. Other people can’t simply help themselves to our energy whenever they want to, thus we don’t feel depleted and frazzled all the time (these are changes I’ve really started to notice since my AuraTransformation, which powerfully supports the crystallisation process). In simple terms, we start to recover from our chronic mystery illnesses as these circumstances transform.
Living from personal choice and putting our own wellbeing first is exactly what the INFJ needs to recover themselves, bringing their propensity to spread themselves far too thin back into balance. Then, our sheer determination to stand up for ourselves, which is part of our inbuilt integrity and courage (plus life has made these skills so necessary for us to survive) makes us particularly good at modelling this new trend of self-care because, once we are on board with prioritising our own wellbeing, we are really good at showing other people how this is done (plus we are natural-born communicators). Thus we start to become less invisible, or at least more manifest, in our own unique ways; and we start to identify our dharma (life purpose), which feels so much more comfortable and true to our energy signature than our “mission” of old.
In fact, being stacked the way we are, INFJs model a willingness to take the unseen, intuitive realm of experience very seriously, in fact we are led by it, which is the remedy to a fundamental imbalance we currently have in the old paradigm, where only the seen and logical is given any real attention. When we struggle to thrive, allowing ourselves to seem like the weaklings of the personality spectrum, we reaffirm all those old distorted opinions back to that old paradigm with its addiction to extraversion. However, when we start to thrive because of the way we give as much attention to introversion and intuition as we do to the extroverted and the physical, we model the new paradigm “as ourselves”, becoming its living-breathing advert. Thus, you could say, we come to realise that our prime objective is simply to thrive in our own lives and health; which should be given top priority and attention, not all that “outside stuff” in the sensory field.
Though we remain niche in our output, since there are not so many people who truly relate to us, we are like rare crystals planted into the ground, waiting for that moment of activation when we, as it were, form a grid with others like us and those who get what I am sharing here (and you’ll know if you do). Of course there are other personality types who know just what I mean here, adding their equally unique and valuable personality mix to the transformation process (and we can all seek to achieve more balance by closely working with our traits) yet, I will claim this on our behalf; INFJs realise this transformation process with a certain amount of rapidity, determination and polish due to the very particular school of hard-knocks we tend to self-subject ourselves to along the way. I would love to know what percentage of INFJs are experiencing “chronic mystery illness” or breakdown and/or starting to spontaneously crystallise in the body these days as I can imagine it would be a fairly high number. Who knows, what we are transforming into could be the very stuff of paradigm leaping; which only occurs when an actual-physical investment is made into a new world structure, beyond the “nice” yet abstract idea of a shift, through the very act of living it. We become like a butterfly that is actually up in the sky, on its very first flight which, until then, was so abstract to the creature it once was, wrapped-up in all the dark confusion of its cocoon, that all it had was the vaguest of intuitions that “something” new and liberating was coming.
Like the butterfly, thus with no guarantees, there comes a point in your life when you just have decide…to jump or not to jump. While you keep one foot in the old paradigm, labeling what you have going on as illness or problems, you remain stuck. For me, from now on, the vernacular is that I’m crystallising and I know it has to be that way; no more explaining myself backwards to other people so they understand. When you are flying high, reverting to the label “illness” can drop your vibration in such a way that you feel like you have suddenly fallen through a trap door back into the old world structure. Thus a lifetime of making yourself fully accessible to other people and amenable to their particular world-view can be wearying for an INFJ; the transformation comes when you lead from yourself, keeping yourself in balance and applying all you have come to understand to your own life, while simply trusting that anyone who wants to will follow, but that’s entirely up to them.
Concluding anecdote – Owning your vehicle
The universe has an infinite sense of humour, as you would expect, so I often find the themes I am working on in the abstract come forward in the props and furniture of “real life” around the same time. It was only yesterday, as I received confirmation of having settled my car finance contract, which means I get to say I own my car at last after three long years of installments (about the same time that I’ve been crystallising most concertedly in the body), that I saw the beautiful synchronicity. I remember so clearly all the excitement I felt when I brought that car home and how the uplift to my spirit fuelled a week-long driving trip around the Welsh mountains that would have been more than my health could have handled beforehand; it truly marked a step-up in my recovery. I loved ever single feature of this car because I had chosen them just for me.
All week, across several posts, I’ve been using the phrase “personality is the vehicle your spirit chose for this life”, or words to that effect and, in fact, the importance of “owning your personality” has been the overarching theme of it all. For me, the metaphor went even deeper than that but I’ll keep it simple here. Why does now “owning my car” feel better than leasing it? Well, I get to do what I like with it now, it just feels better somehow, and more permanent; and the same goes for your personality type, once you fully engage with it as something that is entirely yours. When you know that you chose it, that its not an accident of genetics or fate, or the outcome of life’s conditioning, but something most particular that you chose for your higher purpose, you enjoy driving it so much more….and its self-empowering. So whatever personality type you’ve chosen for yourself, and we all have one, get to know all the features and truly enjoy driving it around…its all yours for the ride.
Related posts & information
Healing through understanding your personality type
My experience of AuraTransformation
That INFJ foible: making a full-time study of ourselves
More INFJ informaton on my Highly Sensitive Resources page on Living Whole
spinning the light 
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