The Power of Learning the Myers-Briggs Personality Types Can Be Found In The Medicine Wheel

When you find out how the Medicine Wheel, Myers-Briggs, and personality are used to create a better world you'll flip. - Alora

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I’m really into the Myers-Briggs personality type system (MBTI) right now. :singing: LOooOOVE IT!

Learning about the different cognitive functions is blowing me open in a whole new spiritual way. Knowing, receiving, relating. All the juicy parts of building relationships and understanding the relational world we live in. My favorite topics! Through studying Myers-Briggs my relationships are crystallizing. Insight into myself and others is popping like corn.

Here’s another epiphany. And another one! Pop! Pop! Pop!

But then the fabulously helpful book I’m Not Crazy I’m Just Not You mentions that the oldest personality type system is the American Plains Indian tradition of the medicine wheel and I practically swoon.

Of course I know about the medicine wheel. I started my journey of awareness in shamanism after all. But while I looked at the medicine wheel as a healing tool, a tool for insight into patterns and possibilities, I never looked at the medicine wheel this way before.

Check it out.

What The Book Says About The Use Of The Medicine Wheel
Each person was born into a a particular way of seeing the world.

• Buffalo: logical and analytical
• Eagle: seeing patterns and flying high above the details
• Bear: relational and connected to the environment 
• Mouse: grounded and connected to the roots and details of life

Tribal elders would observe the child and then identity their type. (Just like I've been wanting to shout from the rooftops for parents to do with their kids and the Myers-Briggs system. Look! There is nothing wrong with your child! Or you! You just recharge internally. Or you just use value-based decision making more! You’re perfect just as you are!)

​The medicine wheel also had additional colors and directions to add even more nuance to a person’s natural way of seeing the world. Like you could be a green bear who sees inwards.
The point?

This “honored the complexity and uniqueness of of the individual while showing the patterns common to all people.” Because how you enter the world with a way of perception is but a BEGINNING point to understanding each other and the world. :goosebumps:

It gets even better.

The wheel wasn't just something they used to categorize babies. The tribe used the wheel all throughout their lives.

As members of the tribe showed mastery in looking at and appreciating other people’s ways, the elders gave them stones to place on their symbolic medicine wheels. People carried their wheels with them on their shield or buckle or somewhere so that people approaching them could see how accomplished they were in seeing other people’s points of view.

These stones and the work they symbolize had great value. Huge value. Like, life-centering value.

"They saw their life work as achieving movement around the wheel to become expert at all views of life."

Can you imagine?

​A whole society geared towards understanding, tolerance, and the belief that everyone is unique yet equal? Where the greatest achievement in life (success!) is how well you can walk in another's shoes?

I. Love. It.

And it puts learning the Myers-Briggs system into a whole new light. It’s not just to learn who you are and who you are not. It’s not just to learn how to communicate with your boss so you can have a better career or with your spouse so you can work together better as a family. These things are fantastic, of course! If learning Myers-Briggs does that it will have made miracles already. But if you take it one step further, learning the Myers-Briggs system can teach you how to flex your viewpoint.

For the whole world.

And when you can do that, you can see EVERYTHING. With compassion. And understanding. And love. And ALL THAT IS.