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Introverted Intuition: Learning from its Mystery

June 30, 2021

Introverted Intuition is my dominant function as an INTJ personality type. I’ve been learning more about it through my personal journey and as a practitioner in psychological type. I share my insights to guide your own journey, whatever your personality preferences.

Introverted Intuition and your type

If you identify as an INTJ or INFJ personality type, Introverted Intuition is typically your dominant function; if you identify as an ENTJ or ENFJ, it’s your auxiliary function; for ISFP and ISTP types, it’s the tertiary function and for ESFP and ESTP types, it’s the inferior function. And it plays out in some way for all types. If you don’t know your type, it’s not a huge issue; if the words ‘Introverted Intuition’ speak to you, chances are they are natural preferences for you or areas on your radar for development.

Introversion and Intuition

Focus on introversion and working its strengths has surfaced in recent times especially as a result of Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. This has been powerful, helping introverts feel more understood and aware of their gifts; however, understanding how introversion and intuition play out together has had less attention. True to type, much of my learning about Introverted Intuition is from my intuitive, personal experiences. I’ve also found valuable insights through reading and research on the function to help make sense of how its mystery works.

What Carl Jung says

Firstly, though, I went back to Dr. Carl Jung for insights as the source, given he conceptualized the eight functions based on his work with patients. Jung’s wise thoughts have helped me to understand my experience of Introverted Intuition.

In a video interview, Jung describes the life of the Introverted Intuitive (Ni) type as ‘a very difficult life…although one of the most interesting.’ This is strangely comforting. He says the key challenge is that there is ‘something funny’ about intuition as we don’t normally consciously know how it works.

In this same interview, Jung defines Introverted Intuition as ‘a perception by ways or means of the unconscious.’ Being linked with introversion and the inner world, these perceptions are unique to the individual and not common to all. This makes it hard to explain these insights in a comprehensible way and creates a sense of mystery. He explains that Introverted Intuitive types tend to keep their insights to themselves because no one would understand.

So what is Introverted Intuition?

So how does this play out in a practical sense? Introverted Intuition works primarily via symbols and images. It involves being aware of abstract ideas and tuning into the language of dreams and the unconscious. It functions especially through an ability to see connections and associations. Through the filter of your inner world, you attach your own meaning to these symbols or images. You can’t always see how you got from A to B; you only know the result of the sequence.

Dario Nardi has applied neuroscience to see how the neocortex of the brain works for different personality type preferences. In his book, Neuroscience of Personality, he describes how people with Introverted Intuition as a dominant function enter a whole brain, zen-like state when asked to envision the future and when focusing on a single question without distraction. The Introverted Intuitive particularly accesses this state when working on a new problem.

The Introverted Intuitive function has been described as ‘Visionary Insight’, by Mary McGuiness in her book You’ve Got Personality and as ‘The Seer’, in Gary Hartzler and Margaret Hartzler’s book, Functions of Type: Activities to develop the eight Jungian functions.

Ways Introverted Intuition manifests – my learnings

Here are some of my practical learnings about Introverted Intuition and how it can manifest:

Poetry and other intuitive writing

As an INTJ, Introverted Intuition appeared early in my life via poetry. This is the perfect vehicle for Introverted Intuition to play out its magic, given it is based on symbol and imagery created in quiet space and time. Any stream-of-consciousness writing is a valuable way of tapping into what’s going on at a deep level and to resolve contrasting positions. You can work with poetry and other creative writing to perform magic not possible in real life – like bringing people back into your life, if for a moment, or resolving hurt or disappointment. And this can help move you through hard times and into a new stage of life.

Envisioning in the workplace

Working on the big picture and creating the long-term vision of what might be is something I enjoy. My auxiliary function, Extraverted Thinking, ably supports me in this. Day to day in my work role, I read the strategic landscape pretty well to know what might come up as an issue. I don’t always know why, but I often intuitively know the next thing to concentrate on as an action or project. It helps me bring together the larger vision process with identifying the next steps. It’s valuable to find the quiet time to coalesce these aspects and I’ve learned to rely on this and listen to it as a leader.

Tarot and oracle practice

Working with tarot and oracle cards has become a deep personal practice. The framework of tarot and oracle symbolism is a way of working with the unconscious in a practical and structured way. Engaging with tarot and oracle cards regularly helps to tune into intuitive guidance as a form of ongoing narrative. Finding a symbolic language that works for you can help to enter the core strength of introverted intuition that offers such deep wisdom and insight.

tarot practice

The challenges and balancing of Introverted Intuition

There are challenges in being introverted and intuitive. You can get drawn into your own world too much. You keep things to yourself. The ideas you come up with are often hard to communicate to others.

To balance the extremes, it’s useful to bring in some of its opposite functions, especially Extraverted Sensing (Se) and Extraverted Intuition (Ne), including:

  • accepting that some things just are what they appear to be;
  • spending time outside in nature to ground all that inner work in reality;
  • focusing on timeframes and what is practical; and
  • shaping visionary thoughts into a structure or framework

Ways to work with Introverted Intuition

Whatever your type and dominant function, you can learn to integrate introverted intuitive approaches into your life to help with creativity, visionary insight, connecting associations and seeing the whole.

Here are some practices for developing and applying Introverted Intuition in your life based on my own experiences fleshed out with concepts from the book, Functions of Type: Activities to develop the eight Jungian functions by Gary Hartzler and Margaret Hartzler. This book has excellent practical examples of activities to develop all the eight Jungian functions.

Ideas for developing Introverted Intuition include:

Work with symbols and the connection between ideas:

  • Notice the symbols that recur for you and work through their connections and meaning.
  • Write about the connections, tapping into stream of consciousness writing as a way of accessing the unconscious meanings for you.
  • Work with tools and media that have symbolism and imagery as their focus e.g. tarot, oracle, poetry, art, mandalas.

Envision how things could be:

  • Journal to envision how things you desire could be – your dreams, your plan, your work life.
  • Flesh the vision out in your imagination so you can see what it looks and feels like.
  • In business contexts, step out of the every day for a higher level view of the future.
  • Let images of how it all could look like in 1 year, 2 years, 10 years come to you.

Work on viewing things from a range of perspectives:

  • In a meeting or online group or in your family, see things from the perspectives of others and hold those perspectives simultaneously to see a more holistic view.
  • See how these multiple versions or viewpoints can come together into something new.
  • See how you can bring together diverse products and services into something unique.

Look behind the obvious to the more hidden meaning:

  • In a coaching or mentoring situation, listen to see the hidden meaning behind words and behaviours.
  • Reflect back what you are seeing sensitively as a platform for further insight.
  • Practise identifying what is not being said in situations such as television interviews and meetings.
  • Try to get a more holistic perspective and practice your skills of reading the unspoken.

Introversion and intuition working together can result in vision, positive solutions, and innovative insights. It’s valuable to learn how to work with its mysteries whether it is a strong preference or a less natural one. I hope these insights are valuable for flexing your introverted intuitive muscle for more holistic perspective and inspired creativity.

You can learn about Extraverted Intuition here: Extraverted Intuition – Imagining the Possibilities

Read more:

Introverted and extraverted intuition – how to make intuition a strong practice

Shining a quiet light – working the gifts of introversion

Intuition, writing and work: eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

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intuition music & images

Music, intuition and messages of songs

March 2, 2017

Before we live what’s next, it always seems like there is some answer we need to arrive at. But daring to enter, we are humbled to discover, again and again, that the act of living itself unravels both the answer and the question. When we watch, we remain riddles to be solved. when we enter, we become songs to be sung.

Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening – for 3 March

lyrics intuition

There’s a special form of intuition that comes through music and the lyrics of songs that is there if you listen.

Lines of music in the night

Recently, this intuition has been speaking to me through lines of music in the night. It’s more than just remembered music, the lines stuck in your head. It comes as random lines, perhaps from something I’ve been listening to but sometimes it’s a song I haven’t listened to for a while. This intuitive messaging via lyrics, song and music is marked by the qualities of being:

  • random
  • meaningful
  • repeated
  • a direct message
  • sometimes almost painstakingly pointed, sometimes a little more oblique
  • insistent enough to wake you night after night.

It’s a strange phenomenon. I’ve always been a lover of music, lyrics and the poetry of songs but it’s only lately that I can remember waking up with insistent and direct musical messages coming to me.

The most recent experience has been hearing the lines of  ‘New York’ by Alicia Keys coming to me in my own voice. And it’s a specific set of lines that keeps coming to me in the night over and over:

Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothing you can’t do
Now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new…

Read more: Alicia Keys – New York Lyrics | MetroLyrics

I haven’t listened to this song for ages and I’ve never been to New York but I understand its symbolism.

The main message for me is the inspiring words: ‘There’s nothing you can’t do’. It seems like an intuitive message from spirit, from angels, from ancestors. I don’t really know who it’s from, but it’s a message of encouragement from my intuition, just as rainbows appear in my life at key points. It’s saying that I’m on the right track, able to do much, and to tap into a collective creative spirit such as New York as a city might symbolise.

Intuition, symbols and learning to listen

Personality types for whom introverted intuition is a dominant or auxiliary function are the ones most likely to be finding this type of intuition coming to them. MBTI types who tend to rely on or experience this type of visionary insight are: INFJ, INTJ, ENFJ and ENTJ. People with these personality types can find that answers come from an interior intuitive kind of knowing. This can be via symbolic ways such as images, metaphors, lines of songs, words and dreams. And all people can learn to strengthen this type of intuitive insight whatever their type.

It tends to come as a whole piece that summarises the answer, feeling or thought succinctly in a kind of code you can hear or read if you learn to listen. It’s similar to how we can learn the language and symbolism of dreams. But like dreams, you almost have to go through an education or opening to its wisdom which is collective in nature but individual in context and application.

Intuitive Friday and intuitive music

I launched a hashtag project a while ago called #intuitivefriday about taking time to celebrate intuition in a mindful and deep way on Friday.

@todorf shared a particularly beautiful piece on considering intuition from the perspective of lyrics that move you, the poetry in compositions and people’s stories of lives changed by a piece of music or song:

20 Pieces of Music That Changed the World  is the most amazing series on music and influence and its impact to make change from an interior to a wider world. It is about “feelings which coalesced in music first then moved out into the rest of society”. I am so thankful to @todorf (nod) for sharing this.

I was struck by the comments in the introduction to the first episode by Robert Harris about music as an “emotional package”, which has the “ability to crystallise emotional states”. He talks about how music:

has the power to show us a future that we only dimly understand intellectually but understand emotionally.

Music is unmediated and “beyond the power of words” but “our brains understand it instantly.”

Lyrics and intuition

So lyrics, lines of songs, coming to me in this way unmediated in the middle of night, through words somehow beyond the power of words, is a kind of intuition.

When I wake in the middle of the night, I get up to capture the words in my notebook in the dark because I know I will lose them if I don’t. They are a knowing without knowing, words beyond words, and a dialogue with spirit that I need to heed and listen to. They are messages from beyond that we need to get in some way though we do not always fully understand.

As I finish this piece, the lyrics singing out in the room from my own Spotify playlist are from The Stranglers’ ‘Skin Deep’:

Some days there’s things on your mind you should keep

Sometimes, it’s tougher to look than to leap

better watch out for the skin deep…

It’s a song I have listened to over and over, nodding and smiling, watching out for the skin deep, going deeper, leaping rather than looking and understanding that some days there truly are things on my mind I should pay close quiet attention to.

That power of music, lyrics, songs to reach from the beyond – or into the future –  has a magical ability to make you smile, understand or get a sense of something.

Every life is a language no one knows. With every heart-break, discovery and unexpected moment of joy, with every lift of music that touches us where we didn’t think we could be touched, with every experience, another letter in our alphabet is decoded. Take a step; learn a word. Feel a feeling; decode a sign. Accept a truth; translate a piece of mystery written in your heart.

Mark Nepo – The Book of Awakening – for 3 March

Thought pieces

Love to hear your thoughts on music and intuition:

  • When has a song or music come to you in the night? What did it say and what does it mean to you?
  • When have you sung words, listened to lyrics knowing they deliver something deeper that you don’t as yet understand ?
  • What music, songs, lyrics takes you back to a special moment you can hardly put into words? One that enables you to be able to capture exactly where you were, what you felt: the tears, the laughter, the grief, the purest emotion that you could not put into words if you tried?
  • What song has changed the world for you?
  • What’s your favourite song and you don’t even really know why?
lyrics music intuition

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Intuition, writing and work – eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

Being a vessel or working with introverted intuition

Lyrebird: spirit animal for Quiet Writing

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