To receive Love from Living Spirit, your heart needs to be open. It takes practice and skill to be able to set firm, clear boundaries with an open heart.
While we sense that an open heart is soft, we may think our boundaries need to be hard. At times, impenetrable boundaries are what we need.
It would be exhausting—and shut us down to receiving love—to have hard, impenetrable boundaries all the time. The good news is that boundaries don’t always need to be hard. With practice, you can adjust your boundaries to serve your well-being according to situations as they arise.
In relationships where both people have healthy boundaries, there is a balanced give and take that can be fluid and elastic. Boundaries expand and contract in a dance of mutual respect. Misunderstandings are easily and conscientiously corrected. Both people feel safe to be honest about their needs and feelings. Both people honor their friend’s boundaries when she says ‘no’—and ‘no’ is received without loss of connection.
As an empathic person, I used to soak up peoples’ emotions like a sponge. I couldn’t tell where they began and I ended. My boundaries were weak to non-existent. I thought love was a boundary-less state of merging with another. This resembles the formless realms of pure consciousness, where our souls originate. Our bodies remember being boundaryless in our mothers’ wombs.
Ideally, we begin to develop boundaries at age 2. By age 7, our energy body is distinct from our mother’s and we are on our way to developing a sense of our own identity.
Love—incarnated in the form of a human being—needs boundaries to thrive.
Highly sensitive people with high vibrations have a strong memory of merging. Boundaries help ground our sensitivity so we function in the world better. People who have not learned to separate their energy body from their mother’s will repeat this enmeshment in other relationships.
A well-placed “no” is more loving than a false, inauthentic “yes”—or a mumbled, indecipherable answer that is not an answer. When we avoid saying no, we create confusion. We become ungrounded and lose our center. ‘No’ is a clear answer. “I want to say no, but I don’t want to make you mad/inconvenience you/lose your friendship” does not build healthy, supportive relationships.
If you have trouble saying no to family, friends or co-workers—check in with your body. Is it tense or tight in your heart, your gut, your throat? What is your level of safety in this relationship? Do you feel free to be true to yourself? Or do you feel you have to perform, wear a mask or pretend to agree? Are you afraid you will lose connection if you say no?
If you feel unsafe to say no, it’s time to take a deeper look. People who love and respect you will welcome your authentic, heart centered ‘no,’ even if they feel disappointed or have to make a different plan.
Have you ever pressured someone to say yes to you, then found you didn’t really enjoy the outing/or collaboration together? Or that they didn’t do a good job doing the task they said yes to but secretly resented? Have you ever been that person?
Some of us grow up in families where saying no is not an option. Power is confused with control. Power over others is not power—it is control. In some religions, there are deep seated beliefs that human beings are inherently “sinful” and must be controlled, bullied and intimidated into acting responsibly.
I say the opposite is true. Our inherent nature as human beings is to love and be loved. We want to help others and connect with community. We see in small children this desire to help. When we nurture this part of ourselves, we grow up with knowing how to connect. We pay attention to other people’s needs as well as our own.
Boundaries allow you to say no with love in your heart, and free you to say yes to what you love. You will attract more of what inspires you into your life. Law of attraction says that if you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘no’, you will attract mushy, uninspiring opportunities to do things you don’t enjoy with people you don’t enjoy.
Do you want to have a heart that is soft and open, and also have healthy, conscious boundaries?
Consider scheduling a series of 3 sessions to focus on boundaries specific to your current life situation and how you intend to create your life going forward. Skills for creating healthy boundaries will include:
- Learning to clear your aura or energy field of other peoples’ energies and keep it clear
- Tools to develop authentic emotional connection with yourself, based on somatic signals from your Inner Healer
- Flower essences that catalyze awareness of boundaries and help you know you deserve to have what you want—and that you have the power to teach people how you want them to treat you
- Akashic Records when indicated, for deep clearing of family patterns of boundary violations that result in enmeshment or confusion
Note: a 3-session series will give you basic skills. Creating healthy boundaries that honor your worthiness is a lifelong practice, for me and for you.
New to my work? Contact me to set up a free 30 minute phone consultation to see if my work is a match for you.
