​Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?

Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay 

One of my top goals or priorities in life right now, as has been the case for a while, is to come into the fullness of who I am. To allow that to happen, I have been focused on my physical and emotional health, a peeling back of all the layers of stuff that I have taken on throughout my life.

It is not until I started this process that I have gained an appreciation for just how much stuff a person can accumulate.

I began by looking at the things that triggered me, I observed the thoughts in my head and started to see the underlying beliefs that percolated beneath, a lot of them not even actually congruent with what - in the present day - I have more consciously come to believe.

Instead, when I was triggered about something, I was most often flung back to a point in my childhood. This became most obvious when I’d be reacting to something the kids had done and I’d find myself sounding just like one of my own parents on autopilot.

This last few weeks I’ve been feeling physically out of sorts, the reason why became apparent when my left kidney started aching painfully and kept me from sleep, then I could feel a stone moving down through the ureter across my abdomen the next day, and finally its release and relief the following day.

Metaphysically kidney stones represent repressed or suppressed anger and resentment, crystallising physically as a stone. Reflecting upon this deeply, and acknowledging the voices in my head of late, I could see that (as the lockdown had progressed) I’d slipped back into some old thought patterns, pointing to some healing that needs attended to.

Clearly, as Dr Jean Housten would say, I had not been doing my internal housekeeping. This was quite true, and I can see in hindsight where these thought patterns started gaining momentum and turning me sour so to speak.

Anger is a great indicator that my personal boundaries have been violated.  By boundaries I mean the things I like and dislike, what is right for me, what is wrong for me, how I let myself be treated by others. In effect, my personal boundaries are what uniquely define and separate me from everything else.

“Signs of unhealthy boundaries”, says Teal Swan, “are saying no when you mean yes (or vice versa), feeling guilty when you say no, acting against your integrity and values to please others, or not speaking up when you have something to say, and so on.”

Through the personal work I had done to date, I recognised myself as having weak personal boundaries growing up, and a pattern of eventually exploding in anger as a way to affirm myself long after they had been overstepped. While I had done quite a bit of work in this area, I wanted to do a thorough spring clean, to “blow smoke on where I begin and others end” as one of my good friends said.

For this I’d highly recommend Yvette Rose’s book Healing Your Boundaries, it was an easy and insightful read and helped me put words to things that I had long since felt and been unable to express in a way that felt comfortable and empowering.

After the kidney stone had passed I awoke the next morning to read what dreams I had recorded the night before (I often jot these down half asleep through the night) and found an intriguing statement I had written:

Our greatest weaknesses can be exploited and used against us in an orchestra of our own demise.

I had no recall of writing this, but I knew instinctively it was referencing the kidney stone that had passed, and the broader picture of what it meant. Who does the exploiting? I do. Without addressing my now unhealthy childhood (emotional or physical) survival strategies, and asserting firm boundaries calmly, I am creating my own demise.

I’m aware that many of my boundary issues arise from the relationship I had with my mother growing up. It was not an untypical parent-child relationship, she was a strongly opinionated lady who had strict views on our behaviour and morals and it did not serve me in my younger years to argue if I felt any differently.

It would have been my mother’s birthday this week if she were still here, I’ve seen firsthand what illness can do to a person’s body. While she had no interest in the metaphysical herself, I can see quite clearly how life experiences weigh upon a person and create terrible suffering.

I have no such desire to suffer. I feel it is important that I get this sacred vessel of mine, the body in which I reside for my time here in this life, into as healthy a state as possible, for there is much to do.

Earth is awakening to a new level of consciousness, and I am committed to building that bridge to a new era in enlightened human life. It seems to me that we are all so much more than we see, and it is time to see with new eyes, to hear with our hearts and to move towards our best life.

Do you have unhealthy boundaries that you need to heal?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You?, Change Unhealthy Reactions and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.