Boundaries

Boundaries are not about controlling the actions of others, they are about connecting with your authentic self, listening to your needs, and honoring how you can and will show up for individuals in your life. Boundaries and self-care go hand in hand. It's crucial to be aware of your well-being and safeguard it, ensuring that you can be fully engaged and attentive in your relationships. Adhering to your individualized personal boundaries empower you to establish the necessary room for self-care. Failing to do so might result in prioritizing others' needs over your own.

We all have people in our lives that in one way or another, push us to show up as less than our best selves. Sometimes no matter how hard we try to remain calm, kind, or grounded, somehow, we walk away more disappointed in ourselves than anything.

“Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious and you get to decide how you use them. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept.”

~ Anna Taylor

I used to be one of those people that believed that if I tried hard enough, I could "help" people and get them to see that there is a "better" way. What I have grown to understand is that everyone has the right and free will to show up however they see fit. My so called "helping", often caused more damage to them and me and that my presumed "better" way was simply, just one perspective and I had no right imposing my beliefs or opinions on how another should show up or behave. Welcoming the truth that we are all here on our own journeys desiring to fulfill our souls' purpose and not only do most of us spend so much of our energy trying to figure out what that is for ourselves, we have no place trying to figure out and dictate what that looks like for another.

With all that being said, there are some people we will come across that for various reasons, are not healthy for us to be around or engage with. When these people are in some way, an unavoidable figure in our lives, this is where healthy boundaries come into place. While we have no control over how others show up for us, how we allow ourselves to show up around these people and to what degree we allow them to engage with us is 100% in our control! This realization can be a liberating shift!

So how do we know when it is time to set a healthy boundary with someone in our lives? A great first step is always my first step in any decision making.

Check in with yourself. Take a moment to sit in silence and connect to the sensations in your body. Begin to quiet the stories you are telling yourself around this situation and connect to your core values and what makes you feel safe. A helpful method for this is the boundary circle. Draw a circle on a page of paper. Inside it, write down everything you need to feel seen, supported, heard, and safe. Anything that actively conflicts or distracts from that, write outside the circle. Next, ask yourself these questions.

• Do I feel seen, heard, understood, and safe?

• What do I need to feel seen, heard, understood, and safe?

• Has this person ever made me feel seen, heard, understood, and? If so, what were the circumstances, and do they have the capacity to offer this to me again?

• Are there continuous patterns of behavior that make me feel unsafe or unhealthy?

If yes, it may be time to consider some personal boundary setting.

So how do we go about setting boundaries?

1. Self-awareness: Understand your needs, values, and limits to define what boundaries are important to you. Allow yourself to make your safety and comfort a priority. When we don't care for ourselves, it can be damaging to our relationship, trust and love with ourselves.

2. Clear communications: Clearly express how you are feeling and your boundaries to others, using "I" statements to convey your feelings and needs.

3. Consistency: Maintain consistency in enforcing your boundaries to establish a sense of reliability. This is also an important step to build trust and security within yourself by keeping promises you make to yourself. We can't expect others to uphold our boundaries, that is our responsibility to ourselves.

4. Learn to say no: Don't be afraid to decline requests or commitments that may compromise your well-being or values. If establishing boundaries feels uneasy or induces anxiety, begin with small steps. You absolutely have the right to say no without carrying guilt, but like any skill, it requires practice! Initiate by setting a modest boundary in a context that feels less overwhelming, then gradually progress. If it eases your discomfort, consider providing an alternative when communicating your boundary.

5. Prioritize self-care: Make self-care a priority and ensure your boundaries support your physical and emotional well-being.

6. Be assertive, not aggressive: assertiveness helps you communicate your needs without being confrontational or disrespectful.

7. Seek support: Share your boundary-setting journey with trusted friends, family or professionals for guidance and encouragement.

8. Reflect and reassess: Regularly reflect on your boundaries and assess whether they align with your current needs and goals. Remember that boundaries can shift and change as you grow; allow this to happen and hold space to recognize and sit in these feelings. Be open to re evaluating and adjusting your boundaries based on changes in your life or relationships.

9. And remember to respect others' boundaries. Just as you set boundaries, respect the boundaries of others to foster healthier relationships.

Setting and then upholding and respecting our own personal boundaries is the most important piece. You may or may not want to share these boundaries with the individuals, but you certainly don't have to make it a conversation unless you feel it is important for you to move forward. What is important is that once you make these boundaries and set your standard to how you deserve to be treated, you hold yourself accountable and speak your truth when lines get crossed. Clear communication in these moments when they happen with the individual, can be helpful. Making and keeping promises to ourselves is an incredibly supportive and nurturing way to build trust and a healthy self-love practice. We cannot expect others to honor our boundaries if we are not willing to honor them ourselves. Chances are that if we needed to put boundaries up in the first place, this is someone we cannot trust to respect our needs without accountability.

We must first love care for and treat ourselves with the kindness and nurturing behavior we wish others would treat us with and then, in turn treat others the same way. May you go forth today in love and holding strong space for yourself and your individual needs.

All the Love,

Pamela

Humility

So often this word can have mixed feelings attached. It can sometimes have an association of feeling less than or needing to shy away from something. Maybe it has been thrown at us in an accusatory manor. The definition describes it as: A modest or low view of one's own importance; humbleness. I love the word "modest" as it offers somewhat of a surrender type of energy as opposed to getting caught up in taking on the self-sabotaging perspective of the "low view of one's own importance". In my opinion and relationship with this word, it has grown to have a beautiful essence. C.S. Lewis said it best ~ "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less." When we remove the ego from the word, it takes on a whole new meaning.

So, what does that look like, thinking of ourselves less? Often, we spend so much of our day in our heads with our thoughts, trying to manage or understand our feelings and how they dictate our actions. How are we supposed to think of ourselves less when we spend all day in our own worlds? In each moment we are offered a choice. How does this best serve me and what would serve the greater good? Whenever we have the opportunity to take the attention and obsessive thoughts off of ourselves and apply that energy to the greater good and those around us, we are walking the path of humility.

"Humility is not cowardice. Meekness is not weakness. Humility and meekness are indeed, spiritual powers."

~ Swami Sivanada

The road to humility requires a strong amount of self-reflection, self-awareness, and loving honesty. The key is to open ourselves up to where we may need to examine and check our ego while we walk the wobbly line of balance between holding ourselves accountable without lowering our self-worth in the process. For me, when I take the time to remind myself that nothing I have in my life, came to be without the support or care of someone or some situation that presented itself to me. With that reflection, I am instantly humbled knowing that there are so many factors at play in this magical world and I am just a tiny particle of the magnificent dance.

What if the next time we felt a little self-important, we took a moment to mentally acknowledge everyone and everything that supported us and made that moment possible for us to shine the way we are?

What if when we felt our ego creep up and try to convince us that our needs, wants, or desires are more important than someone else's, we simply remembered that there are many different perspectives taking place in every given moment?

Each viewpoint deserves to be seen, validated and understood or if that is not accessible to you for the sake of healthy personal boundaries with a situation or individual, at the very least, acknowledge that we are all sovereign beings on our own journey and have a place in this chess game we call life and it is not for us to decide or judge another's choices or actions.

In my journey and relationship with humility, surrendering to my spiritual practice and feeling the vastness of the energy field that is around and a part of us all, puts into perspective, the importance of my existence and the micro roll I play, on this planet as well as the massiveness of the collective that we are all connected to and a part of. The oak tree is not more important than the clover, just as the water is not more important than the air, I am no more important than any other being and yet, an invaluable component of the collective.

Each and every one of your needs and values are extremely important and deserve to be seen, heard and understood, but never at the expense or detriment of another's well-being. Know your value, know your truth, and humbly stand in your spiritual power! Shine like the star you are.

All the love,

Pamela

Perception, Perspective and Projection

I challenge you to a practice.

This practice entails seeing firsthand, on a small scale, how are our thoughts change our life. Make a list of how you wish to feel in your emotions, then practice living them one at a time, each day embodying and approaching each experience of that day fully connected to that feeling and emotion. Notice how that embodiment changes your perception of what the day is bringing you. Notice how your perspective shifts on what kind of day you are having. And furthermore, notice how you project these thoughts, feelings and perceptions on the situations and people around you and how they influence the decisions you make and the actions you take. For more details about this practice, be sure to read all of the way through!!

For example, the other day I set my intention on adventure. I often only tended to think of adventure as my vacations or trips or special planned activities. As part of my intention statement, "I intend to feel adventure on a daily and weekly basis", so I chose to notice all the adventure throughout the day. Not only did I realize that everything in my day could be viewed at an adventure, but furthermore, by having adventure as my intention, I noticed how it influenced the choices I made and the actions I took. How they would have differed if, say, consistency, or vulnerability was my intention for the day.

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” ~ Lao Tzu

Perception: The ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses. The state of being or process of becoming aware of something through the senses.

Perspective: A particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.

Projection: An estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on a study of present ones.

We take information in through our five senses all day long and most of the processing goes unnoticed and our subconscious mind is doing all the work behind the scenes. So much of the things that catch our attention are nothing more than the thoughts, feelings, and experiences that we have been exposed in our past, and thanks to our RAS, which functions as a filter to block out unnecessary "noise" or information that can interfere with the processing of messages, it is drawing our attention to a very bias understanding of the situations around us.

I believe freedom begins when we can notice and understand this process and not only rebel against it but use it to our advantage! I spend an hour or sometimes two, in the morning, nurturing my state of being. Being sure to fill my RAS with thoughts, feelings, and "experiences" (remember that our mind doesn't actually know the difference between something that ACTUALLY happened and something we play our in our right brain and attach strong physical feelings and emotions to it!) that actually create an intentional perspective on life.

Growth is not the absorption and digestion of information, it is the result of the information put into action! When I set the stage with my daily intention statement for how I plan to move throughout the day, be it, finding something loveable about everyone I interact with, a sense of freedom or blissful contentment, I am the writer of my story and I love to watch how the day unfolds as I project and share my perception and perspective with all of those that I encounter throughout the day.

What if the life you wanted and the feelings you deeply desire to experience were only a decision away? What if today, you decided to start living the life of your dreams? How does that feel in your heart just thinking about it? What are the five primary feelings you would like to feel through the course of the week? Do you even know? Have you even allowed yourself to connect to what is it you want to squeeze out of each day? What if, even when the external patterns of the previously woven life you created tried to keep you the same, you rebelled against your past life and you loved yourself enough to keep going, holding faith that in time, your external world will shift?

I invite you into a practice of perception, perspective, and projection. Spend one day, just noticing, not judging, or trying to change. Simply noticing, and allowing patterns of behaviors to surface. Maybe keep notes of all the situations you are approached with and how you perceive what happened, where that perspective could have come from and how it influenced you actions or projection. Then, for the next three days, choose a feeling or state of being you would like to experience and practice conjuring that feeling as many times throughout the day as you can. Take note of how it affects your choices which then in turn, alter your perception and perspective of the moment. Let me know how you enjoy this experiment. I like to make this a regular practice to keep me honest with myself, where I am and where I see myself going.

All of your deepest desires are waiting patiently for you to align with them. You are more powerful than you know!

All the love,

Pamela