What is the Best Mindfulness Practice for Your Myers-Briggs Personality? - Mindful

• Read original article here

How to use your personality traits to help you find a mindfulness practice that works for you.

I’m an MBTI junky—which means I see the world through the mental lens of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and how our behavior is influenced by our MBTI type.

When I was trying to get back into meditating a few years ago, I read Dan Harris’s book, 10% Happier. His approach to how and why he meditates made so much sense to me. It motivated me to get back to meditating in a way that no other meditation book had. And it made my MBTI mindset start thinking about applying type to meditation. What if I could help people connect with a mindfulness or meditation practice better because it resonated with their MBTI type? Maybe that would help people to stay with the practice long enough to create a habit and reap the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.

It’s a personality type assessment based on psychologist Carl Jung’s personality theories and adapted by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs. It is a widely-recognized tool for:

The test is popular among seekers, leadership and development professionals, and HR directors, and can provide helpful insights in our personality quirks, though it should be noted the science around the reliability of the test is open to question. That said, it can be an awful lot of fun to take the test and see where you land. And while certain types of meditation have been found to resonate with certain MBTI types, there is no hard and fast matching of type to specific mindfulness or meditation techniques. People are drawn to types of mindfulness and meditation for numerous reasons beyond temperament, including first exposure, the appeal of meditation teacher, what’s in vogue at the time, what they’ve discovered in their own sampling of meditation techniques, and what they’ve found that works for them. 

Mindfulness is being fully present, non judgmentally. It’s building awareness about your emotions, physical sensations, and thoughts as well as the surrounding environment. The more you practice mindfulness, the more you can:

Mindfulness practices or activities can take many forms (i.e. meditation, yoga, listening, eating, or walking), but they all allow you to practice being in the present moment and focus on the activity at hand.

Meditation is a specific form of mindfulness, and within meditation there are many different forms—awareness of breath, loving-kindness, body scan—to name a few.

MBTI types gravitate to different activities based on their type preference. There are four scales, or dichotomies, in the MBTI model. Let’s examine each scale and its implications for mindfulness practices.

Where do you put your attention and get your energy? Do you like to spend time in the outer world of people and things (Extroversion), or in your inner world of ideas and images (Introversion)? This scale is represented by the letters E and I.

Do you pay more attention to information that comes in through your five senses (Sensing), or do you pay more attention to the patterns and possibilities that you see in the information you receive (Intuition)? This scale is represented by the letters S and N.

Thinking and feeling which describes how you like to make decisions. Do you like to put more weight on objective principles and impersonal facts (Thinking), or do you put more weight on the personal impact and the people involved (Feeling) of a decision? This scale is represented by the letters T and F.

Judging and perceiving, describes how you like to live your outer life or your lifestyle. Do you prefer a more structured and planful lifestyle (Judging) or a more flexible and spontaneous lifestyle (Perceiving)? This scale is represented by the letters J and P.

Think of these as suggestions, rather than prescriptions. Ultimately, the right mindfulness practice for you is the one you will stay with—so try them all until you find the one that resonates for you.