And everyone can develop their intuition and use it to navigate their daily lives, make fulfilling decisions and discover and realize their dreams.

That’s because “when we pay attention to our intuition, it points us in the right direction.” Intuition “provides an additional level of information that does not come from the analytical, logical, and rational side of the brain,” Robinson writes in Divine Intuition. She describes intuition as “a way of knowing, of sensing the truth without explanations.”

Intuition can take many forms. According to Robinson, it might be an image, feeling or physical sensation, like goose bumps. Or it might arrive in a dream. Also, “Some people say they just know the answer.”

Looking at your own past can help you pinpoint how you’ve used your intuition and how it appears. Think back to a significant choice you made in your life, Robinson suggested. “How did you know it was a good or bad decision?”

Robinson views listening to our intuition as a skill we can cultivate to enhance our lives. Below, she shared seven strategies readers can use to connect to their intuition and lead a meaningful life.

1. Take small steps.

You might worry that listening to your intuition means making immense, intense and, most of all, risky changes in your life. But it doesn’t. “We think big leaps when small steps would suffice,” Robinson said. For instance, when your intuition speaks, whether through an image, feeling, sensation or dream, ask yourself: “What is the right next step?”

Let’s say your intuition whispers that it’s time to leave your job. Instead of making the decision to quit right away, take small steps to gather information about your options, Robinson said. For instance, “You might rewrite your resume and talk to someone with a job you might like.” This helps you honor your intuition, while taking concrete, sensible steps toward the life you want.

2. Follow your enthusiasm.

“When you’re trying to make a new decision, pay attention to what feels exciting and energizing and what you’re curious about,” Robinson said. Enthusiasm is one way intuition guides us toward our personal path to success. If something is boring or draining, try to move away from it, she said.

3. Create a different kind of to-do list.

When Robinson gets up in the morning, she meditates and visualizes what she wants. For instance, that might be anything from growing her business to maintaining a happy relationship. Then she asks herself a key question, which serves as a kind of unique to-do list: “What three things can I do [today] to move in that direction?”

4. Seek answers in your sleep.

Before bed Robinson journals about the very topics she needs guidance on. She asks a specific question as she drifts off to sleep. Sometimes her dreams reveal her next steps. Other times she “wakes up with a knowing” about the answer or her direction.

5. Take an intuitive walk.

“People have a hard time stilling their minds,” Robinson said. So if you need to make a decision, taking a walk can help. While on your walk, Robinson suggested keeping an open mind. Your answer may come as an a-ha moment when you least expect it.

6. Journal for clarity.

It’s important to get clear on what you do want versus what you don’t, Robinson said. She suggested journaling about what you’d like your life to look like. This can be general, and you can journal for a few minutes a day. Having a clear vision gives “your inner compass the right coordinates,” so you move in the right direction for you.

7. Watch the words you say to yourself.

“I’ve made it a practice when I start to feel negative, anxious or discouraged [to consider], what am I telling myself right now?” Robinson said. That’s because when our minds become a muck of negativity, we can’t hear our intuition, she said. It gets blocked by bogus stories and what-ifs. In her work Robinson noticed that it’s common for people to “talk themselves out of what they want.” Put another way, “We talk ourselves out of joy.”

Our intuition is a wise compass that points us in the right direction toward a meaningful, fulfilling life. Robinson views intuition as a gift that’s available to all of us. Consider giving yourself the gift of listening to your inner insight.

A month ago I fetched cream for my coffee at a café in South Bend, Indiana. Naturally my family didn’t know a soul in the joint. However, by the time I returned to my table, I knew some incredibly intimate (not to mention interesting) details about the daughter of the man next to me who was reaching for a napkin: his daughter is bipolar; she was anorexic as a teenage ballerina; and she’s on some of the same meds as I am.

I ended up giving him a business card with everything but my email scratched out.

I didn’t want to have the conversation of what I do for living.

It doesn’t have anything to do with who I am.

And that’s why I get so annoyed that we have to start all of our conversations with that question.

As a country, we are obsessed with our jobs: An understatement. Our professions are central to our self-identities and our industries define who we are. We don’t even know how to vacation. It doesn’t matter that United States workers receive far fewer vacation days than other workers in other industrialized countries because American employees fail to take the time off that they have accrued. Our European friends shake their heads at that one.

I remember how refreshing it was to ask a French couple “what they did” (I plead guilty) at a swim meet for our kids.

“We are skiers,” they said emphatically. No equivocation. No insecurity. No approval-seeking.

That was who they are and were proud of being, and told me a hell of a lot more about them than had they rattled off their resumes starting with their last places of employment: “I’m an accountant with Ernst & Young.” “I’m a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton.” “I’m a program manager with Northrup Grumman.” Snore. Snore like Gramma.

My conundrum is that I wear a few different hats at the present moment, so I, in fact, don’t really know what I am. I know what my ministry or innate purpose in life is — to provide hope to those who struggle intensely with depression and other mood disorders — but it’s not related to what I do for a living as a government contractor. One pays with blessings, the other is generous with benefits. And, unfortunately in this country, most benefits are tied to your job, so while following your dream is all good and noble, you might get screwed if your appendix bursts like mine did a year ago and you need some quick medical attention. Passion, at times, has to take a back seat to medical care and other life necessities.

Upon meeting someone new, part of me hopes I will never hear the dreaded four words (what-do-you-do) because then I wouldn’t have to assess how I am going to respond — with my pragmatic communications-consultant role, or with the idealistic wanting-to-save-the-world profile.

At the least, it would be nice to delay the work conversation toward the second-half of the conversation, after the other top three questions: Where are you from? Why are you here? (conference, cocktail hour, reunion, fundraiser, Chuck E Cheese), How many kids do you have and what are their ages and when were they potty trained?

For this reason, I’ve always loved writer Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s poem, The Invitation, that went viral 15 years ago and was later published in a book. May we all share this vision one day.

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

She defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.” Think about the vulnerability it takes to love someone – whether it’s your parents, siblings, spouse or close friends. Love is filled with uncertainties and risks. As Brown notes, the person you love might or might not love you back. They might be in your life for a long time or they might not. They might be terrifically loyal or they might stab you in the back.

Think about the vulnerability it takes to share your ideas with the world, not knowing how your work will be perceived. You might be appreciated, laughed at or downright skewered.

Vulnerability is hard. But what can make it even harder — needlessly so — are the inaccurate assumptions we hold about it.

Brown shatters the following three myths in Daring Greatly.

1. Vulnerability is weakness.

According to Brown, the funny thing about vulnerability is that we love when others are open and honest with us. But when it comes time for us to share, we sort of freak out. Suddenly, our vulnerability is a sign of weakness.

Brown describes vulnerability as the core of all emotions. “To feel is to be vulnerable,” she says. So when we consider vulnerability to be a weakness, we consider feeling one’s emotions to be so, too, she says. But being vulnerable connects us with others. It opens us up to love, joy, creativity and empathy, she says.

Plus, when we look at what makes up vulnerability, we quickly start to see the opposite of weak. In the book Brown shares the various responses she received after asking her research participants to finish this sentence: “Vulnerability is ________.”

These were just some of the replies: starting my own business; calling a friend whose child just passed away; trying something new; getting pregnant after having three miscarriages; admitting I’m afraid; having faith.

As Brown says, “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.”

2. Some of us don’t experience vulnerability.

Many people have told Brown that they simply “don’t do vulnerability.” But, actually, everyone does vulnerability. “Life is vulnerable,” Brown writes.

Being vulnerable isn’t the choice we have to make, she says. Rather, the choice is how we respond when the elements of vulnerability greet us: uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.

Many of us respond by avoiding vulnerability. But when we do, Brown writes, we typically turn to behaviors that don’t align with who we want to be.  For instance, one of the ways we shield ourselves from vulnerability is with what Brown calls “foreboding joy.”

When things are going well in your life, have you felt a pang of horror that something bad will happen? For instance, you just got a promotion at work. You’re excited and happy. But then, bam, a wave of holy crap, I’m going to do something to screw this up washes over you. Or it’s oh, no! what if the company goes bankrupt? That’s foreboding joy. Brown describes it as “the paradoxical dread that clamps down on momentary joyfulness.”

(In the book Brown describes several other ways we try to shield ourselves and offers valuable strategies for taking off our ineffective armor.)

3. Vulnerability means spilling your secrets.

Some of us automatically balk at vulnerability because we assume that being vulnerable means wearing our secrets on our sleeves. We assume that being vulnerable means spilling our hearts to strangers, and as Brown puts it, “letting it all hang out.”

But vulnerability embraces boundaries and trust, she says. “Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them.”

Being vulnerable takes courage. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it to be ourselves, to connect to others. I worry when I put my writing – and thereby myself – out into the world. What will readers think? Is that sentence stupid? No, I don’t think so. OK. Maybe. Will they like the article? Will they hate it? Hate me?

But for me to stop writing– and sharing my writing — would mean losing a pivotal part of myself. So I’ll continue to put my words, my ideas, myself, out into the world.

I love what Brown concludes about daring greatly.

And, without question, putting ourselves out there means there’s a far greater risk of feeling hurt. But as I look back on my own life and what Daring Greatly has meant to me, I can honestly say that nothing is as uncomfortable, dangerous, and hurtful as believing that I’m standing on the outside of my life looking in and wondering what it would be like if I had the courage to show up and let myself be seen.

What are your thoughts on vulnerability?
Did you previously view the above myths as facts? 

“Success is 99 percent perspiration and one percent talent,” my business-savvy father told me back when I was unloading Thin Mints as a Brownie Girl Scout. “The only thing that separates the winners from the losers is perseverance.”

Dr. Seuss was rejected 43 times before his first story was published; a skinny 5’11″ Michael Jordan was cut from his varsity basketball team; Colonel Sanders drove from restaurant to restaurant with his pressure cooker and famous recipe of 11 herbs and spices before he made history with KFC; and didn’t some opinioned jerk tell Katie Couric in her early days that she didn’t have a face for TV?

I sure as heck wasn’t born with the ability to write.

My eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Kracus, read aloud my essay as an example of how NOT to write. My SAT scores were so low (especially verbal) that I lied about them for 18 years. Any aptitude test I took suggested I pursue a career in math or science. The profile of a writer fit me about as well as Dolly Parton’s bra: an intellectual permanently glued to a book, ready to discuss any classic, from Plato to Hemingway. (God showed mercy on me the day CliffsNotes went to press.)

Oh yes, and my “American Idol” moment, when I asked a professor in grad school to write a letter of recommendation for me. (I was applying for a job as an editor of a Catholic magazine.)

This man of the cloth (a priest), much like a cocky judge, took me outside in the hall to drop the bomb.

“I’m sorry,” he said, squinting his small brown eyes that shot daggers through my heart. “I can’t do that. It just that you…you don’t use words correctly.”

Had I been on a televised set, I may have responded like some weepy contestants.

“No way. Please no, please!”

But that’s not because I’m mentally ill (well not totally). It’s because I had a dream — to become a writer — and I wanted it badly.

Viewers shouldn’t mock the contestants for pursing their dreams on TV. That takes guts. They should fault the judges for their lack of tact and constructive criticism.

“You need to work on your craft, Therese,” a very wise writing mentor told me when he took me under his wing. “And this is how you do it….”

He instructed me to read books on style, take classes, and analyze the technique of writers I respected.

He didn’t sit back in his chair and make fun of me like the arrogant professor I had, like a former boss of mine did, or like a self-absorbed judge does. That’s not helpful at all.

Thinking more like my father, my mentor — a seasoned writer and an established publisher — read my essays, took a good look at my character, and came up with a plan. I’d have to apply the 99.5 percent of tenacity in my personality to compensate for the 0.5 percent of skill (and talent) provided in my DNA.

I don’t know. Maybe all dreamers are mentally ill to some extent… because dreams aren’t grounded in reality or logic. If they were, I’d be a math professor or an engineer for NASA (remember, my math and science scores were higher than English), not blogging in the middle of the night about “American Idol’s” poor suckers who just got the punch (the “forget about it” talk) that almost made me drop the pen (and my dream) back in grad school, when I had a few more neurotransmitters to spare.

I’m rooting for the underdogs. Because talent doesn’t determine who lives out their dreams. Believe me, I know.

Psychologist and dream researcher Patricia Garfield asserts that these examples are part of 12 basic dreams that all of us dream, regardless of who we are, what we do or where we live.

These “universal dreams,” as Garfield calls them, are far from a dream dictionary packed with generic terms from A to Z. On her website, Garfield writes: “Like a hearty stew that is rich with local produce, the universal dreams differ among different peoples, but they are all nourishing variants of the same wholesome meal. They are as old as humanity and as widespread as our globe. Possibly further.”

In her book The Universal Dream Key: The 12 Most Common Dream Themes Around the World, Garfield explains that dreams differ based on four factors.

She writes:

Universal patterns are all around us in the natural world, yet each is affected by the local environment. Trees branch in a consistent way, leaves take their genetic form, rivers carve a sinuous route, snowflakes fall in their basic hexameter shape. However, a tree on the coast, exposed to a constant wind from the sea, bends away from the blast. Leaves turn to the direction that provides the best local light, so they may flourish. Rivers break their banks under seasonal downpours and carve new paths. Each snowflake – a variation of the six points – is nonetheless unique.

So, too, are your dreams. The Universal Dream patterns are bent and molded by local forces in your life. Your every dream is influenced by four broad sources of influence:

• Your biological heritage
• Your general cultural heritage
• Your local subculture
• Your personal experience

So what’s the basis of Garfield’s basic dreams? She explains that the universal dreams came from her analysis of the dream literature, thousands of dreams that she collected worldwide and her own dream diary, which she’s kept for 50 years.

Her book contains a more comprehensive description of the 12 universal dreams with information on incidence, meaning and coping tips. She features a “bare-bones version” on her site, which I’ve summarized below. The negative form appears first, followed by the positive. (Negative forms, unfortunately, are more common.)

According to psychotherapist Jeffrey Sumber, who studied global dream mythology at Harvard University and Jungian dream interpretation at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Garfield “has done a good job at identifying some of the most common types of dreams that wither intrigue or upset the average person.” But he reminds us that “there is no exhaustive list or ‘key’ to solve the riddle of our individual dreams. We are all far too unique for such simplistic one size fits all keys.”

1. Being chased and attacked/Being in love or embraced

A villain is chasing you and might harm or even kill you. It could be anyone from an animal to a bad person. Garfield notes that there are cultural differences about the sorts of villains who show up in our dreams. For instance, kids in India “reported dreams of vultures chasing them, while no American child did–they were more likely to picture sharks as a predator.“

The opposite of being chased and terrified is what Garfield describes as being embraced or loved, meeting a star or having a magical animal friend (more common in kids). Here, we experience what Garfield says is “pleasurable physical contact,” whether it’s with celebrities, an angel, a talking animal or our next-door neighbor.

2. Getting injured or dying/Getting healed or reborn

You or a loved one is injured, killed or passes away. Another common dream is your teeth falling out. The reverse is experiencing rebirth or healing.

3. Having vehicle trouble

You’re in a vehicle, like a car or plane, that has some sort of malfunction, whether it’s broken brakes, no gas or a flat tire.

The opposite of vehicle trouble is driving skillfully. Garfield says that these dreams aren’t very common. But when they do happen, they tell us something very important: That we have the necessary tools to deal with a difficult situation in our lives.

4. Damaged or lost property or on fire/Property improvements

You lose a valuable possession, which might be anything from your wallet to your keys to your wedding ring. Even your entire house might vanish. People also dream about their house or another building being on fire. You might be scared, seek escape or try to save others. The alternative is when you dream about remodeling or reconstructing a space.

But dreams are actually an important part of self-discovery. (More on that later.) Below are a few fascinating facts and findings about dreams.

1. People with disabilities dream as though they don’t have them.

The following is an excerpt from a person who participated in a dream study:

“I was supposed to and wanted to sing in the choir. I see a stage on which some singers, male and female, are standing… I am asked if I want to sing with them. ‘Me?’ I ask, ‘I don’t know if I am good enough.’ And already I am standing on the stage with the choir. In the front row, I see my mother, she is smiling at me… It is a nice feeling to be on stage and able to chant.”

What’s particularly curious about this dream is that the dreamer was born deaf and doesn’t speak. Recently, two studies published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition have found that people with disabilities still dream as though their impairments don’t exist.

One of the studies explored the dream diaries of 14 people with impairments (four born with paraplegia and 10 born deaf who can’t speak). Thirty-six able-bodied individuals served as controls. August 2011’s New Scientist featured the research, stating that findings showed that:

About 80 percent of the dream narratives of the deaf participants gave no indication of their impairment: many spoke in their dreams, while others could hear and understand spoken language. The dream reports of the people born paralyzed revealed something similar: they often walked, ran or swam, none of which they had ever done in their waking lives.

Even more interesting, the article states that: “…there was no difference between the number of such bodily movements in the dream reports of the people with paraplegia and in those of the deaf and able-bodied subjects.”

The second study found similar results. Researchers looked at the dream reports of 15 people who were either born with paraplegia or had it later in life (because of a spinal-cord injury). They also included 15 able-bodied controls. Their reports revealed that 14 of the participants with paraplegia had dreams that they were physically active. And they dreamed about walking just as often as the able-bodied participants.

One of the researchers, Ursula Voss at Germany’s University of Bonn, believes that “dreams are tapping into representations of limbs and movements that exist in the brain and which are independent of our waking reality,” she told the New Scientist. She and researcher Alan Hobson at Harvard Medical School speculate that the key is genetics. According to the magazine:

The pair say the recent dream studies suggest that our brain has the genetically determined ability to generate experiences that mimic life, including fully functioning limbs and senses, and that people who are born deaf or paralysed are likely tapping into these parts of the brain when they dream about things they cannot do while awake.

2. Younger people report dreaming in color more often than older adults.

In a recently published study (one survey conducted in 1993; the follow-up in 2009), researchers found that about 80 percent of participants younger than 30 years old dreamed in color. But by 60 years old, only about 20 percent said they did. (How often participants dreamed in color increased from 1993 to 2009— but only for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s.) The researchers speculated that color TV might play a role in the generational difference.

 Another study using both questionnaires and dream diaries found older adults also had more black and white dreams than the younger participants. What seemed to be particularly noteworthy is that older people reported that both their color dreams and black and white dreams were equally as vivid. The younger participants, however, said that their black and white dreams were of poorer quality. As the BPS Research Digest blog noted, “This raises the possibility that the younger participants didn’t really have any black and white dreams at all, but were simply labelling poorly remembered dreams as black and white.”

Many people are familiar with Jung for his famous friendship and eventual split from Sigmund Freud, who considered their relationship at first to be one of father and son. Jung strongly disagreed with Freud’s sole emphasis on sex and other parts of his theories, and their relationship soon deteriorated. However, the two pioneers did agree on one thing: an individual must analyze his mind’s inner workings, including his dreams and fantasies.

Jung founded analytical psychology, which emphasizes the importance of exploring both conscious and unconscious processes. According to one of his theories, all humans share a collective unconscious. Unlike the personal unconscious, which is made up of each individual’s personal memories and personality, the collective unconscious holds the experiences of our ancestors. Proof of this can be seen, according to Jung, in mythology, which shares similar themes across cultures.

Below are four other tidbits you might not know about the man behind some of the most fascinating and controversial theories.

1. Jung coined the terms introvert and extravert.

Jung believed that there are two main attitudes that people use to approach the world, which he called introvert and extravert. People aren’t either an introvert or an extravert. All of us are usually a mix of both, but one type is more dominant than the other.

According to author Frieda Fordham in An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology:

“… Jung distinguishes two differing attitudes to life, two modes of reacting to circumstances which he finds sufficiently marked and widespread to describe as typical. [...]

The extraverted attitude, characterized by an outward flowing of libido, an interest in events, in people and things, a relationship with them, and a dependence on them; when this attitude is habitual to anyone, Jung describes him or her as an extraverted type. This type is motivated by outside factors and greatly influenced by the environment. The extraverted type is sociable and confident in unfamiliar surroundings. He or she is generally on good terms with the world, and even when disagreeing with it can still be described as related to it, for instead of withdrawing (as the opposite type tends to do) they prefer to argue and quarrel, or try to reshape it according to their own pattern.

The introverted attitude, in contrast, is one of withdrawal the libido flows inward and is concentrated upon subjective factors, and the predominating influence is ‘inner necessity’. When this attitude is habitual Jung speaks of an ‘introverted type’. This type lacks confidence in relation to people and things, tends to be unsociable, and prefers reflection to activity. Each type undervalues the other, seeing the negative rather than the positive qualities of the opposite attitude, a fact which has led to endless misunderstanding and, even in the course of time, to the formulation of antagonistic philosophies, conflicting psychologies, and different values and ways of life.”

2. Jung’s doctoral dissertation explored the occult.

In 1902, Jung published his dissertation “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,” while working at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic under Eugen Bleuler (who coined the term schizophrenia.)

In it, Jung analyzed the séances of a 15-year-old medium, which he actually attended. In The Portable Jung, editor Joseph Campbell recounts an interesting anecdote of how Jung first came into contact with the medium:

“He was in his room, studying, with the door half open to the dining room, where his widowed mother was knitting by the window, when a loud report sounded, like a pistol shot, and the circular walnut table beside her split from the rim beyond the center—a table of solid walnut, dried and seasoned for some seventy years. Two weeks later, the young medical student, returning home at evening, found his mother, his fourteen-year-old sister, and the maid in high agitation. About an hour earlier, another deafening crack had come from the neighborhood of a heavy nineteenth-century sideboard, which the women had then examined without finding any sign. Nearby, in the cupboard containing the breadbasket, however, Jung discovered the breadknife with its steel blade broken to pieces: in one corner of the basket, its handle; in each of the others, a fraction of the blade…

A few weeks later he learned of certain relatives engaged in table-turning, who had a medium, a young girl of fifteen and a half, who produced somnambulistic states and spiritualistic phenomena. Invited to participate, Jung immediately conjectured that the manifestations in his mother’s house might be connected with that medium. He joined the sessions, and for the next two years, meticulously took notes, until, in the end, the medium, feeling her powers failing, began to cheat, and Jung departed.”

According to The Guardian, this work “laid the foundations for two key ideas in his thought. First, that the unconscious contains part-personalities, called complexes. One way in which they can reveal themselves is in occult phenomena. Second, most of the work of personality development is done at the unconscious level.”

(Read the paper for yourself.)

3. Jung’s personality theory contributed to the Myers-Briggs inventory.

In 1921, Jung published the book Psychological Types, where he laid out his theory of personality. He believed that each person has a psychological type. He wrote “what appears to be random behavior is actually the result of differences in the way people prefer to use their mental capacities.” Some people, he observed, mainly take in information, which he called perceiving, while others mainly organize it and draw conclusions, which he called judging.

He also believed that there are four psychological functions:

• Thinking asks the question “What does it mean?” This involves making judgments and decisions.
• Feeling asks the question “What value does this have?” Feeling, for instance, may be judging right versus wrong.
• Sensation asks “What exactly am I perceiving? This involves how we perceive the world and gather information using our different senses.
• Intuition asks “What might happen, what is possible?” This refers to how perception relates to things like goals and past experiences.

Inspired by his work, Isabel Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator based on Jung’s ideas. They developed the personality measure in the 1940s. The Myers-Briggs consists of 16 personality types. Participants respond to 125 questions and are then placed in one of these categories.

4. Jung wrote what the New York Times called “the Holy Grail of the Unconscious.”

Jung spent 16 years writing and illustrating his Liber Novus (Latin for New Book), which is now known as the Red Book. In it, Jung delves deeply into his own unconscious, resulting in a half journal half mythological exploration.

Tucked away in a Swiss bank vault, the original copy remained unpublished until 2009. Before its publication, the Red Book had only been seen by a handful of people. According to NPR, “It took Jungian scholar Dr. Sonu Shamdasani three years to convince Jung’s family to bring the book out of hiding. It took another 13 years to translate it.”

(Readers can purchase the 416-page work on websites such as Amazon.)

According to the article:

“Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (‘I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.’) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.”

Read the fascinating New York Times article about the Red Book’s long and complex journey to publication here. And you can read an excerpt from the book on NPR.