Boundaries

It’s the beginning of a new month and as you know on this platform we have a tradition, we choose a theme for the month.

Because a theme gives you direction, a framework to work with.

When you drift off, you come back to it, you redirect yourself.

July was all about self-love, that kind of love where you show up even when you don’t feel like it.

And I saw this unfolding inside 🔗my community on Skool. Women are showing up with so much love for themselves, they show up in the daily practices to support their hormones, in the workouts they now do, in the way they eat and consume.

I spent 2h in the park yesterday, just myself and my favorite book, The Untethered Soul.

(I gifted it to a few very dear people in my life too. It’s my way of saying “I love you, I want what’s best for you”.)

2h just me. The last warmth of the sun on my face, soft beats in my ears, the smell of cut grass, and unexplained goosebumps rising on my arms almost every 15 minutes.

I’ve read this book so many times, and each time I find something new in it.

And the sections I was reading yesterday led me to the word for August…

Boundaries.

Boundaries, not in the sense where you close your heart out of fear to be hurt.

Cause we do that a lot as humans. We build these tall walls around us the moment we get hurt.

I mean boundaries in the sense of protecting your energy.

I talk a lot about energy in the biological sense.

You heard me talking on my platform about how your body creates energy from what you consume through the metabolic functions and uses energy to keep you alive.

Here’s an article you might want to come back to after this one to dive deeper into the material aspect of energy.

This is the physical world.

We take care of it by supporting the lymphatic system to move waste out of the body, by supporting steady blood sugar levels through nutrition protocols, through building muscle, through releasing fascia and through adjusting lifestyle based on the cycle phase. This is what we practice every day inside 🔗my community on Skool.

All very valid points.

But if I stopped here I’d miss an important aspect of what makes us humans.

We study the energy outside and we give great value to energy resources and we ignore the energy within.

Creating thoughts, recalling thoughts, holding onto thoughts, feeling emotions, suppressing emotions, all of this requires energy.

So where does all this energy come from?

That’s what I want to explore with you today.

The truth is, every movement of your body, every thought, every emotion you feel is an expenditure of energy.

For example, if you concentrate on a thought and another thought interferes, you will have to use an opposite force to fight the interfering thought. That requires energy and it can wear you out.

Or if you want to hold a thought but it keeps drifting off, you have to willingly use energy to hold on to that thought.

You also use energy to feel your emotions.

If you have an emotion that you don’t like and it’s interfering with what you’re doing, you have to use energy to push away that emotion.

You do this unknowingly to keep that emotion out of your life so that it doesn’t come up to disturb you.

To best understand where this energy is coming from I’ll use an example that Michael Singer gives in the book.

Let’s say your boyfriend breaks up with you and you get totally depressed, so much that you start staying home alone. You can hardly get out of bed so you sleep all the time. You must be eating cause there are lots of takeaway food boxes in your home, but nothing seems to help.

Most people have been there at some point in their lives. You feel that you have no way out and it feels like you will stay there forever. Then suddenly your phone rings. It’s your boyfriend. The one who dumped you a while ago.

And he starts telling you that he’s sorry, that you are the love of his life and he wants to make things work.

How long does it take you to get enough energy to jump out of bed, take a shower and get some color in your face?

It’s practically instantaneous.

You’re filled with energy the moment you hang up the phone.

You can’t ignore these intense shifts in energy.

So where did all that energy come from?

It doesn’t come from food and it doesn’t come from sleep.

This energy is always there, available for you, and you can access it.

The only reason you don’t feel this energy is because you block it by closing your heart, by closing your mind, and by placing yourself in a container inside of yourself.

Think about what that actually means.

Every time someone hurts you, you close a little.

You put up a wall.

You tell yourself it’s protection.

Every time a situation scares you, you contract.

You pull your energy in and you brace.

And it works, kind of... The wall keeps some of the hurt out.

But that same wall keeps your energy in.

Locked.

Trapped behind the very thing you built to feel safe.

So you end up doing everything right on the outside...

The meditation, the stretches, the protein, the workouts, the sleep.

And you still feel flat.

Because this time the leak isn’t in your body.

It’s in how much of yourself you’ve closed off.

And this is exactly where boundaries come in.

But not the way we usually think about them.

When we hear “set a boundary,” most of us picture a wall.

A no.

A door slammed shut.

We think a boundary means closing.

It’s the opposite.

Closing is not a boundary.

Closing is what we do when we’ve run out of them.

A real boundary is what lets you keep your heart open without letting the world drain you dry.

It’s the difference between “I’m shutting you out so you can’t hurt me” and “I love you, and I’m just not going to spend my energy here”.

One closes you.

One protects you while keeping you open.

Because here’s the thing about that infinite energy inside you.

It’s always flowing.

The only question is whether you let it move, or spend it fighting yourself.

And most of us are spending it. All day long.

We replay the conversation from 3 days ago. We hold the grudge. We rehearse the calls we’re dreading. We carry people who take and take and give nothing back. We say yes when every cell in us means no.

That’s the leak.

You can support your hormones perfectly and still wake up empty, because you spent the whole night before clenched around a resentment you won’t put down.

Boundaries are how you stop that leak.

Not by closing your heart.

By deciding, on purpose, where your energy is allowed to go.

So that’s our word for August.

Boundaries.

And here’s how I want us to work with it this month.

That little contraction when someone says something that stings, when a message lands that you don’t want to deal with. Just notice it. That’s you reaching for a wall.

Then ask: is this a wall, or is this a boundary?

A wall shuts your heart.

A boundary protects your energy and leaves your heart open.

The people, the thoughts, the loops, the yeses that should have been noes.

This is the inner side of the same work we’ve been doing all along.

We spend so much time trying to stop the energy leaks in the body.

This month, I invite you to go inward.

Cause a woman with her drainage flowing, her blood sugar steady, her body strong, and her energy fiercely protected…

That’s a woman who finally has enough energy for the life she actually wants to live.

That’s what I want for you this August.

And I’ll be right there doing it with you.

Love, Teo

PS: We're doing this together all month 🔗 inside the community. Come set your one boundary for August with us, I read every single one. The door's open for you!