Have you ever felt like every cell in your being is screaming at you to HIDE who you are or what you feel? And the opposite? Have you ever had something happen where there is no way in hell you can do anything but make sure everyone in the room is as upset about a situation as you are? In essence both of these scenarios reflect boundaries. In these case, a boundary is a method of self containment or a complete breakdown of self containment.
The roots of being able to self contain or not come from the stability of your root chakra. All issues (physical, emotional, and spiritual) begin with the ground. Your relationship to your own ground creates the foundation for how you relate to boundaries. The issues that you have around trust, sense of self, belonging, and connection are all rooted in your relationship to your root.
Boundaries and self containment stem from the preverbal ways you learned to feel safe in your body. You learned in the womb how to inhabit your body. Your initial bonding with your mother created the security that allowed you to have permission to reside in your body. This connection takes place somatically in your cells before you can verbalize needs, feelings, emotions or desires. The dilemmas you face in life and the way you work with them all come from a sense of self that is inherent, formed in utero and early life.
This is where you can start at the ground and question the primary sense of reality you have - your sense of self. How do you know you exist? Where do you start and stop in your felt sense of self? How do you feel other people in reflection of your own boundaries? How do you let others feel you? Your ability to be in a boundary that fluctuates through relationships and situationships are reflective of the permission you give yourself to be you.
Boundaries and your EMOTIONAL COMFORT ZONE
Emotions that you are comfortable feeling are the default emotions that you process life through. You have certain emotions you feel, are comfortable feeling, and are able to express. These emotions are felt up to a specific strength. If an emotion goes beyond a comfortable strength, a boundary is going to go up or down. A boundary going up will result in the emotion being suppressed. A boundary going down will result in the emotion being broadcast. Your ability to hold yourself in a contained boundary is reflective of your emotional comfort zone.
Your emotional comfort zone defines an integral aspect of how you process hurt, trauma, and pain.
Your emotional comfort zone is the launching point for how you express yourself.
Your emotional comfort zone reflects when you connect with others and when you disconnect from others.
Your emotional comfort zone depends on your degree of safety and your willingness to express your authentic self.
CONNECTION METRICS
Boundaries and the understanding of them have a strong affect on your sense of connection. Boundaries are incredibly complex energetic interactions. Boundaries are never simply spoken words. A comfort with emotion creates boundaries that are contained and relatable. A discomfort with emotion causes chaotic boundaries. Establishing boundaries with ease is a result of comfortable emotional expression. This process is internal and external. It is reflective of what you allow yourself to feel (internal) and what you allow yourself to express (external). When the internal and external are in alignment, boundaries are in alignment as well.
Your connection towards yourself mirrors how connectable you feel to others.
Boundaries always affect your ability to connect. Your boundaries decide where you connect from and what you connect with. A disconnected boundary happens when you cannot be authentic with your emotional content. When you suppress emotion, you bind into yourself. This state that serves to prevent emotional connection with the self will feel like a disconnect or unavailable to others. When your own connection to your authentic self is off, you have more boundaries. Those boundaries will be felt by others as a separation. Connection is not as possible.
Boundaries when you are unwilling to feel an emotion create a sense of being absent and withdrawn. Over containing happens when you suppress your emotions. When you cannot feel, don’t know how to feel, or do not want to feel you cut yourself off from you and from others with a boundary. There is a large component of unmet or unprocessed self in strong boundaries. The boundary that exists is not just a boundary of keeping people away from self, it is also a way of keeping self away from self. In an over contained boundary there can be suppressed emotion, missing emotion, or overdoing. There is also likely to be a sense of limited space or limited room for self within the boundaries.
Your connection towards yourself reflects how willing you are to feel yourself and your emotions.
Boundaries when you are willing to feel your emotions are connectable and flexible. They reflect the change in your emotional content and your awareness of self. Your willingness to be authentic will create a sense of presence. When you are able to fluidly be with yourself, you invite others into that flow. Optimal relatability happens when there is a combination of interest in others and interest in what is really happening inside the self.
Boundaries when you are lost in your emotions create a different connection meter. Intense or threatening emotional expression reflects a boundary explosion. This explosion is triggered by extreme emotional states as well as a belief that a need is impossible to be met by another. The lack of a boundary coupled with a deep hunger cascades into an overblown reaction that feels necessary to maintain a self identity. Boundary loss is an attempt to find the self through the other. Any way to establish a sense of self autonomy has to be big and loud to be felt and noticed. When this happens you do not know how to have your reaction, your need and your self at the same time.
Connection becomes a demand to merge when you believe a need you have cannot be met. You feel okay only when everyone feels the same as you. This creates a false sense of connection.
In Paradox I Trust
You are likely to hold back when you need to feel and feel when you need to hold back. This is just a human paradigm. An emotion can be felt and experienced without rationalization or thinking. Really. It can. If you are rationalizing or thinking about an emotion, you are creating a boundary that does not match your emotional state. You are not allowing flow. You are holding yourself back.
To have a fluid and relatable boundary, you have to build trust in you body and what it is telling you. This links back to the importance of having a sense of root chakra and ground.
The foundation of self needs to be able to trust sensate processes and see them through fully.
Your container has to trust itself for you to grow.
Surrendering to yourself entails being open to exploring the place inside you that you can’t rationalize, that can only be expressed.
Trusting your own being is not about thinking yourself into being. It is following your own current of life into flow and becoming.
You need to consciously take time to explore self away from the rational mind.
Subtle energies and awarenesses take you into the wounded disconnect from your soul and teaches you how to uniquely heal through your own being.
THIS FOLKS IS WHY I TEACH EMBODIMENT PRACTICES THAT ARE EASILY ACCESSIBLE. WE LITERALLY NEED THEM. THERE’S NO AVOIDING IT.
Authentic Relating = Boundary Awareness
Your ability to be authentic to yourself in relationship is how you will learn to feel fulfilled when interacting with others.
Boundary awareness requires tolerating the self being different than others and different than your own patterns dictate.
Boundary awareness requires understanding the reflexive ways you interact and attempting.
Boundary awareness needs you to be able to allow yourself to feel more emotions.
Practice ways of finding a deeper relationship to self and ground so you can surrender into who you are and the boundaries that are present.
Mindfully experiencing sensation and trusting sensation to build into emotions creates boundary awareness.
Play is a great way to build emotional fluidity and boundary awareness. So does putting yourself in paradigm shifting experiences. Allow yourself to try new things and observe how they affect you. Mess up more, think less, try to be open to feeling new emotions. Your emotional resiliency needs to be shaken up to grow you. If you do not consciously do this, life will. Your journey through life is one of awakening and growth. You can either accept it or fight it. Which do you choose?
Ground Yourself! Meditation
Journal Exercise to Deepen
What emotions do you allow yourself to feel?
Is their intensity controlled?
What emotions do you avoid?
What ways do you reject emotional expression?
When do you have too strong of a boundary between self and others?
Do you recognize when your boundaries are too strong?
Is there a trigger or is it the strong boundaries itself what soothe you?
Is there a specific emotion or situation in life that triggers a need to lose control?
What happens when you let go?
Does the response of others have any effect on your expression?
I haven’t even been able to read past 1/3 of it yet. Too tired and just have to go to sleep for now. But already, this is soooo good. In general and for me specifically Looking forward to finishing tomorrow.
Nice one, Nessa. 🌈