Embracing Boundaries

It turns out, they’re very important, if you want to live authentically.

It’s a question I’ve wrestled with many times over the years, and I’ve generally concluded that since I’m in a better position than most when it comes to self-worth, confidence, self-acceptance and all that jazz, I can let myself say yes when I’d rather say no. So I fail to mention when people are intruding on my time or annoying me.

The problem is that when you do this repeatedly, you build up resentments. And resentments don’t always think clearly and logically. You can end up resenting what you see as behaviours or character traits in another person that aren’t actually there. If you haven’t told your mother-in-law you don’t enjoy small talk, for instance, you can’t blame her for repeatedly talking inanities - she didn’t know, did she?

I didn’t realise how much I’d been blurring my boundaries until I came to do some work on my sacral chakra. I recently bought a short course in Chakra and Tarot Coaching - yes, it’s a thing, and I’m so excited to start practicing it with friends and family! Anne-Marie, who runs the Soul Awakening Academy, suggests practicing on yourself first, and I would have done that anyway, because I want to know how it works as a lived experience.

I had no great trouble with the root chakra work, though I know there’s more to be done there, so that may change. But when it came to the sacral (just below the belly button), I hit a massive pothole.

The sacral chakra is mainly about creativity and social issues. Where the root deals with survival and safety, the sacral takes that into the realm of community, connections, networking. Relationships with friends, family, neighbours and colleagues.

I’ve been with my partner, Rick, for 15 years, and we’ve had our ups and downs. I’ve learned that whenever I have a major issue with him, it’s not about him - it’s about me, and how I’m thinking and perceiving and interpreting. And this time is exactly the same as all the others, although I always think it isn’t, at first.

What I was getting resentful about this time was communication, or the lack of it. He’s a techie at heart, and his major preoccupation for the last few years has been home automation. I can take it or leave it and frankly, given its propensity for frequent failure, I’d rather leave it. But he’s obsessed (or so it appears to me), and can spend an entire evening fiddling about on his MacBook, trying to coax a single light to come on and turn off when someone’s in the room and the light level is dim.

The result, as far as I’m concerned, is that I spend the entire evening glancing at his half-turned back as he hunches over the laptop, wondering when and whether he’s going to have any time for me. I daren’t interrupt him or he may get grumpy with me. I don’t want to start something that’ll take time, because I don’t know when he’ll be free - and I figure, given the law that says the worst will usually happen, I’ll likely start something and get interrupted after five minutes.

So I sit and play games on my phone, getting increasingly annoyed at the lack of conversation. Or, and perhaps worse, he’ll spend the entire evening droning on about some techie subject that doesn’t interest me in the slightest. He’s the child of teachers, and it shows! Again, he gets huffy if I try to stop him before he’s finished.

He hates being interrupted, yet he does it to me whenever the impulse takes him. He’ll walk into the room and start talking before even checking what I’m doing. I know I can read and listen at the same time, unless it’s something I need to concentrate on, so I generally let him do it.

But here’s the thing - even though I haven’t told him about these boundaries I have, I resent the fact that he so often violates them. So when the sacral chakra questions started asking me about boundaries, I froze. I didn’t expect that. I found I couldn’t answer the questions straight away, because it felt too close, personal, and difficult. So I let it settle for a while and came back to it when that initial feeling calmed down.

That’s when I realised how badly I’d been compromising my boundaries. Oddly, since this publication is all about embracing your sovereignty, I hadn’t realised how integral boundaries are to that. (They say you should teach what you need to know!) Turns out, they’re vital. Because if you never tell people how you’d like to interact with them, they’ll never know, and they’ll violate your boundaries all the time because they don’t know what they are. And if your boundaries are constantly being violated, you can’t be yourself. You’re letting yourself be pushed out of shape, without a murmur of protest.

So last night, we had a serious conversation and we sorted out some of my misconceptions. With a bit of luck, my sacral will be feeling brighter, happier and calmer in a few days, as the changes start to take effect.

When I thought that conversation had run its course, I asked what he’d like to do for the rest of the evening. He didn’t know. I gave him three options, and he said, ‘I don’t know - you decide.’ And that’s when it hit me. This was all about sovereignty!

I told him. He looked puzzled. I retold the tale of Gawain and the Loathly Lady (see this post for the story). The main message of that legend is that people (women, in this case) want to be free to make their own decisions. That would have been a revolutionary idea when the tales were written down, and it still is today, for so many reasons.

Because we don’t really, do we? We make most of our decisions based on what’s good for others (or what we think is good for them), rarely considering our own needs. Yet, if we truly want to serve others, we need to do it from a place of peace. From contentment with our life. From the generosity of our heart. Not from a feeling that we’re always putting them first, because that breeds resentment, and resentment often erupts at unwelcome moments.

The energy of our feelings will always seep through in every interaction. So if you do something with resentment, the person receiving it will pick up on that resentment, if only at a subconscious level. That may be why you don’t get the thanks or praise you think you deserve. Perhaps the receiver doesn’t feel so grateful because of your unwillingness - or perhaps they didn’t really want the help in the first place. As I said in my last post, ‘being helpful’ isn’t always as helpful as we think it is.

So ultimately, being able to say no (in a non-confrontational way, of course) serves both you and the other person. You get to maintain the integrity of your boundaries, so that when you do show up, you do it authentically and happily. And the receiver gets only the help they want, and they can feel the warmth of your intention and show genuine appreciation.

How do you say no without heat, worry, or confrontation? That’s a subject for a future post, but until that’s ready for publication, if this resonates with you, your task may be to confront your own lack of boundaries and think about what pushes your buttons and how you can start to disable them.