Traits of a Janet [Janet Miles]

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As you may know, I'm engaged in Year and A Day studies with a Neo-Pagan coven. One of the exercises that I'm having a great deal of trouble with involves researching and, ideally, engaging with a totem (aka animal guide / guiding spirit). Part of my difficulty is that I am a very poor judge of my own character, and see only negative traits in myself, nothing positive.

My mentor disagrees with this assessment. With his permission, I'm posting the following lists of traits, skills, attributes, and tendencies to ask for your input on which ones I appear to have, and which ones I should strive to attain.

This list was developed by Elizabeth Barrette (

ysabetwordsmith) and is part of the Greenhaven Tradition Year and A Day study material.

[Poll #1786142]

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There are 13 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Really effing hard to only pick five, you know...

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Sorry! The original worksheet is more complicated, having the user go through the list several times to distill down to five, but I didn't think it would be appropriate, helpful, or even possible with LJ's poll technology to try to reproduce that.

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It drove me nuts too, trying to narrow this down to 5, and I wrote the exercise. Working with a group, I would probably have said "check how many you think apply" and then looked to see which ones got the most votes. But it looks like this approach is working, it's just challenging to figure out which are the most prominent traits.

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I'm thinking that I'll give it a day or so; see if any strong trends pop up. If not, I'll do a run-off.

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You're definitely seeing trends...that's really pretty neat. You should be smiling, your friends seem to agree on what a cool person you are! <3

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Can I vote for humor twice?
Only five is not FAIR!

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I've checked what seems to show through here the most.

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Oh crap, I screwed it up...I'll have to redo it. What a long day...sorry! Hang on...:)

Edited: I didn't follow instructions at first and voted for too many...I've picked just 5 now.

Edited Date: 2011-10-13 02:23 am (UTC)

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Um. Your mentor disagrees with your ability to see negative stuff about yourself, or disagrees that the stuff to be seen is all negative?

One way some shamanic folks do this is just to journey and see what power animals are calling out. The traits of the animal aren't always important, but they can turn out to be very interesting matches.

For example, I work with Raven - who legends say brought the sun to earth. Well, I didn't think "I'd like to work with a bringer of warmth" but I think it's very fitting.

I also work with snake - it's a very fitting match, though I didn't understand it at all at first.

(Clearly, I'm not suggesting this way is "better" - just mentioning that it exists.)

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He disagrees with my assessment that I have only negative traits, no positive ones.

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Okay, but....

Herm.

Okay:

Here's my guess. For whatever reason, you don't feel comfortable applying positive traits to yourself. Maybe you sincerely don't think they're true, maybe you're so afraid of being a braggart that you just can't, maybe you think the world exists based on a premise that Janet Miles is not X_Positive_Trait, and if you accept that you are X_Positive_Trait, the world will cease to exist entirely... the reason doesn't matter so much.

But if you want to work with any kind of power, you have to be willing to accept truths, even if they're outside of your comfort zone, and that includes learning to accept positive statements about yourself. Denial of reality when trying to affect it is always a bad thing.

And I'm not saying that this is a bad thing about you or that it shows some kind of failure on your part. I'm saying that, okay, if you have a sore knee, and you want to run a marathon, you have to work on fixing that knee because you don't want to run a marathon while ignoring a sore knee... it could cause a more serious knee injury, or even if it's not an injury, you might stumble because your knee hurts, hurting yourself or someone else.

Well, having a hard time accepting positive things about yourself is a sore knee in this instance. It's avoidance of a truth that might be vital.

All MHO, and so forth - but I hope you'll consider the issues I'm raising here.

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Okay, I answered the survey, but one thing that's *vitally* important here: if I said something you should acquire or develop, it does *not* mean that I consider it something you're weak at. I could say that I need to develop my math skills - that doesn't mean my math skills are weak; in fact, it means it's an advantage I need to use more.

So, what I listed was stuff that stuck out as "boy, if someone gave me attribute pills, what do *I* think, on a kind of gut level, would I think Janet should take to make Janet Miles more like the Platonic ideal of Janet Miles?"

(Does the idea of attribute pills - take them and increase this attribute - make sense or is it something that only makes sense to me? :-) )

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