Myers-Briggs Personality Test
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Myers-Briggs Personality Test

My lovely stepdaughter Julia entertained us over a lazy, happy Christmas morning by administering the Myers-Briggs Personality test to all of us.

It didn’t work so well for my 9-and-a-half-year old. Some of the questions didn’t apply. As she put it, “How do I know if I’m soothed by a solitary walk? I’ve never walked anywhere by myself.”

Otherwise, the test was spot on. It turns out I am an INFJ, a diplomat type. I’m not sure I’d call myself a ‘diplomat,’ but the lengthy description otherwise fit me very well indeed.

The career paths for INFJs on the website 16personalities.com was especially pertinent:

INFJs often pursue expressive careers such as writing, elegant communicators that they are, and author many popular blogs, stories and screenplays. Music, photography, design and art are viable options too, and they all can focus on deeper themes of personal growth, morality and spirituality.

INFJ strengths are their creativity and their insight, their ability to be convincing, inspiring, and decisive, and their passion, determination, and altruism.

INFJ weaknesses are their sensitivity and perfectionism, their deep seated need for privacy, their need to have a cause, and the way they can burn out easily.–But I have discovered that when I burn out, I can still be productive by cleaning and organizing something, like my awesomely messy desk or my office with its piles and stacks of books.

My husband tested as an INTJ, and the description was jaw-droppingly accurate. Maybe they interviewed him before defining this type? He certainly has a strategic, imaginative mind and high self confidence, and he is determined, hard-working, decisive, judgmental, analytical, and sometimes arrogant.

I laughed out loud when I saw “Rules, limitations, and traditions are anathema to the INTJ personality type…” and INTJs are “Clueless in romance.” I could only nod and grin when I read,

A paradox to most observers, INTJs are able to live by glaring contradictions that nonetheless make perfect sense – at least from a purely rational perspective. For example, INTJs are simultaneously the most starry-eyed idealists and the bitterest of cynics, a seemingly impossible conflict. 

My stepdaughter says that the test is based on Carl Jung’s original personality types as interpreted by Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, and I took it as a sign that my recent interest in the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich is well-founded.

Briggs Personality Test

Beautiful Movie: IN YOUR EYES
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Beautiful Movie: IN YOUR EYES

It’s been a long time since I fell in love with a movie the way I did last night with IN YOUR EYES. So here is my movie review for this richly enjoyable film.

IN YOUR EYES is the story of a woman and a man who find themselves telepathically entwined, a bond which leads them to greater and greater trust and finally to love. With grace and humor, this movie shows two people engaging the process of mutual self-revelation that is falling in love, and then finally lurching into the more humbling unburdening that is intimacy.

I felt a tender resonance with the woman Rebecca undergoing psychic events and struggling to have her vulnerability, her personhood, and her distinct agency all at once, all while married to a wealthy, controlling man who insists on seeing her as crazy. “Because he loves her.”

As if!

The writer in me loved the perfect balance of Joss Whedon’s screenplay. It was simply a beautifully written script. The two main characters mirrored, tested, and enhanced each other. They gave to each other, needed each other, and completed each other. Whedon’s Rebecca has class and education, and she must confront and integrate her losses to find her strength.  His ex-con Dylan courageously decides to grow and better himself, yet it is his criminal skills that ultimately save the day.

I laughed out loud at a scene where the main characters were dancing to music only one of them could hear aloud–while others watched. A scene where Rebecca erupts to save Dylan from a kitchen fire was scary, funny, and compelling all at once.

With delight, I recommend this movie: it’s a 5 star film.

I was never a Buffy fan, but to Joss Whedon, I say, My compliments! Well done, sir!

movie review

 

Note: The movie soundtrack is also fantastic–worth $9.99 to purchase. I particularly recommend Crumblin’. Great song!

Birthday Wishes for a Beloved Soul
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Birthday Wishes for a Beloved Soul

Dear One
I wish for you discernment
that you may see who truly is your friend
and who isn’t
who truly wishes you well
and who doesn’t.
I wish you freedom
from your entitlement, your addictions, and your demandingness
so that you may enter into the clear
sweet peace of humility
that has everything to do with your soft open
heart’s kindness and love
for your core Self
and nothing to do with the curdled ego’s insistence
on gratification.
I wish for you that you seek wisdom
alongside knowledge,
words of gratitude
rather than proof,
and opportunities to give
in the very moments that you are tempted
to take.
I send you my love and my light
in the fullness of this day, your birthday,
as I do every moment of every day
and I wish for you that you feel my love
in every angstrom of your being
and that you learn to hold love in the reverence
it deserves
instead of seeing it as an agent to serve your bidding.
May you push you away the voices of false friends
who whisper in your ear of aggrandizement,
realizing that respectfulness
and honesty
and personal responsibility
is the better path.
May all your decisions be for the highest, best good
of yourself and all living beings,
And may your Higher Self bring you to conscious awareness in this lifetime.

by Traci L. Slatton
Birthday Wishes Birthday Wishes Birthday Wishes

Recent BROKEN Spotlights; Recent Pix
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Recent BROKEN Spotlights; Recent Pix

Kindly Jackie Burris, who brims over with a love of animals, recently hosted me on her fabulous blog, HOUSEWIFE BLUES AND CHIHUAHUA STORIES. I’m grateful for the exposure and she posted my guest article about “Writing, Yoga, and Dogs.”

Busy, multi-talented Drey of DREY’S LIBRARY hosted a guest post and shared her thoughts of BROKEN in a review, concluding with this very sweet comment, “Pick up Broken for a look at the artsy scene in Paris in the early days of WWII and the story of a conflicted young woman whose truth is so much more than she thought it could ever be.”

Meantime, I had some author photos done recently. See below.

Recent BROKEN Spotlights
Recent BROKEN SpotlightsRecent BROKEN SpotlightsRecent BROKEN Spotlights

Yoga With Dogs
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Yoga With Dogs

Gabriel is my boy. He is telepathically attuned to me, so he always knows what I am feeling. I can’t count the number of times over the last six years that he’s come to cuddle me at just the right moment, just when I most needed the creature comfort of his warm yellow fur, damp nose, soulful dark eyes, and eternally wagging tail.

Molly joined us three years ago. She’s a powerfully intelligent girl, a chocolate lab, a little reserved but deeply affectionate when it suits her.

About a year ago, Molly discovered that she could have some fun with me while I was doing yoga. When I do downward facing dog, she lies down beneath me, directly under the V of my body. When I do upward facing dog, she crawls over on top of me. When I’m doing jnana shirsasana, she puts a paw or her nose over my leg.

When she hears the “Om” chiming the start of my daily Yogaglo video, she trots in, and the game is on. It continues all the way through savasana, during which she stands over me and whines for me to KEEP MOVING.

So Molly and Gabriel must have talked, because now Gabriel wants in on the fun. Yesterday I tried to take some selfies. You can’t really tell but I’m in gomukasana and a reclined twist during most of the pix.

Yoga With Dogs Yoga With Dogs Yoga With Dogs Yoga With DogsYoga With Dogs

Supporting Sam Harris
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Supporting Sam Harris

I took a year of Arabic as an undergraduate at Yale. Along with the language, we also discussed the culture of the Arab world. This was the mid-80’s, so liberal sanctimony didn’t have quite the stranglehold on conversation that it now exerts–even at Yale. We were allowed to discuss things like the terrible oppression and enslavement of women in Islam. We were allowed to consider that oppression wrong.

At the same time, I was the only woman in the class. There were undercurrents of, first, curiosity: Why would a woman study Arabic? And then there was contempt: She must be an idiot to do so. I skipped class regularly, being unable to deal with it. At that time, being naive, I was unable even to articulate to myself how bad it felt to be the target of such jeering condescension.

I realized years later that I had taken the class because of an archetype whom I admire: Scheherazade, the resourceful and intelligent woman of unending stories. There was something in that archetype for me, who would one day be a prolific novelist. My final project was a translation from “One Thousand and One Nights.” I worked hard on the story and pulled off a “B” despite my spotty attendance record and near inability to speak in class because of the sneers I encountered.

Because I have a background in the topic, I understand what Sam Harris is saying: Many individual Muslims are good people, but the faith itself is based on a book and teachings that directly lead to intolerance, the demeaning and enslavement of women, and violence.

That’s my interpretation of Harris’ message. When he says, “…One can draw a straight line from specific doctrines in Islam to the intolerance and violence we see in the Muslim world” in his blogpost “Can Liberalism Be Saved from Itself?”, Harris is correct. He’s not acting in a racist, Islam-hating way. He’s witnessing a truth that must be uttered.

Now he’s written a post about the defamation campaign to which he has been subjected, “On the Mechanics of Defamation.” His words are being taken out of context and twisted to make him appear evil. It’s dreadful, and the people who are doing it ought to be ashamed.

I have some experience in what it is to be the subject of a smear campaign. Someone from my past has gone to a great deal of trouble to distort everything I have ever done or said to make me out to be a bad person. He is obsessed with his vendetta, and he carries it on while stalking my blog and reading my posts obsessively, at all hours of the night and day, from different locations.

So I have some sympathy for what Harris is going through now, on many levels. He’s telling the truth and being scorned, castigated, and defamed for it.

The thing is, there is no reasoning with malice. Harris is trying to present a rational thesis to irrational people: knee-jerk liberals.

I have never met more close-minded, self-certain, impregnable-to-logic people than knee-jerk liberals. Especially since Obama took office, their sanctimony and self-righteousness has become a bell jar bulwark against any kind of reason or logic.

I voted for Obama the first time. However, I grew disillusioned. I believe in women’s rights, reproductive freedom, gay rights, social justice, and gun control. So far, OK.

But I also believe in citizen privacy, supporting and encouraging small American businesses (not Wall Street and not Socialism), supporting Israel, accountability and oversight for multi-national corporations that function as sovereign nation-states, and getting the Health Insurance companies to pay for universal Health care (not the states).

I also find it extraordinarily hypocritical that Obama’s tactic is to rally people against “the Have’s” when he has taken more vacations, and more expensive vacations, and played more golf, than any president in history. So many of his supporters are the Limousine liberals of Wall Street, which may be why he bailed them out.

Whenever I have been asked by liberals, “Why don’t you like Obama?” I answer with the aforementioned reasons–citizen privacy, etc–the lengthy list of policies and presidential actions with which I do not agree. Inevitably, the liberals tell me, “You are racist.”

I provide a rational explanation that has nothing to do with the pigment in President Obama’s skin, but knee-jerk liberals can’t hear the logic. They reflexively answer with their standard dismissal of all criticism for Obama: “You are racist.”

Racism is a great social evil. It’s as bad as the misogyny in traditional Islam. I stand for the dissolution of racism and misogyny. Yes, I am equating them. Shouldn’t anyone who believes in social justice do so?

Back to Sam Harris. I support his intelligent, reasonable words and I support his right to speak them. I just doubt he’ll get anywhere with them. For one, traditional Muslims don’t want to hear what he’s saying. The many peace-loving, good Muslims are probably a bit ashamed of the intolerance, bigotry, and violence–and they perhaps feel at a loss for what to do about it. After all, the necessary end to an insistence on purity is terrorism, and Islam insists on purity.

For two, knee-jerk liberals can not hear or receive Harris’ message. They are closed and unavailable to discourse. They do not want to do the research and see truthful implications. They are just about solely interested in promoting their own ideology.

But I hope Sam Harris doesn’t give up. I hope he keeps defending himself and stating his views. I support what he says.

Sam Harris