How do you know when you've embodied healthy boundaries?
How do you know when you’ve embodied healthy, loving, boundaries?
When you have healthy, loving boundaries in your dreams.
Over the past year I have had unexpected visitors show up in my dreams who in real life I have placed necessary boundaries with after they have demonstrably not respected or honored me in a number of ways. In each dream my response has been something to the effect of “I appreciate your desire to be connected, and, I didn’t invite you here, so please leave.” And then they left.
As a frequent lucid dreamer and a big fan of the theta brain wave state, the intersection of boundary work and dream work is perhaps my favorite intersection.
I am happy to report that it goes more or less the same way in my “awake” life, where even when I’m saying no to someone, I’ve left them in better condition than I found them (and I still get to walk away with beautiful fodder for my own endless expansion).
I have spent _years_ working on boundaries such that I could get to a place where my yes and my no both came from the same, deeply loving and honoring place in my heart.
Because of my own lived experiences of abandonment and rejection which I brought with me into adulthood as legitimate fears, I was in a hefty pursuit to tune into and master my full body yes and honor consent at a cellular level, and, to not be so reactive in my no that I inadvertently rejected or caused harm to another. As I have healed, my aim has been for creating either neutral or positive karma.
(Others may still experience my no as a rejection, but I want to be sure my side of the street is clean.)
I have a long history of energetic, physical, emotional, spiritual, and sexual violation which I won’t get into, but which made it very challenging for me to feel safe opening up to just about anyone. Even if I said yes to someone, I spent most of my life being an energetic no, or at best, a yes with tons of hooks and conditions which were designed to ensure my safety (spoiler alert: that rarely worked out as intended).
It’s a relatively recent experience in my life that I learned what it felt like to be loved with no hooks. And that love (which is actually the only thing which is really truly love) is so liberating that I feel obliged to pay it forward. When I talk about being a Bodhisattva, this is my life’s deepest calling: to live as limitless love.
In our Facebook live yesterday Alexandra Stockwell and I briefly talked about this concept. It’s something I initially learned from her modeling, and something we both hold very deeply in our hearts.
When we were talking about what would make up the core teachings of Communication Mastery I, we agreed vehemently that this was it. Because not only do we both live this totally in our lives, we are both excellent at teaching others how to do it.
The most important communication to focus on first before anything else is the simple communication of YES and NO and whether your body’s energy is transparent in that communication, whether your words are aligned with your body’s language and transmission, and whether YOU are aware of when you’re which one in real time (and then have access to the communications you can make for either scenario).
I know for a fact because of the hundreds of people I’ve worked with that most people are not adept at this very important communication skill. And I call it a skill because I am living proof that it’s learnable.
Most are guided by their ideas and governed by a rush of chemicals and hormones in their bodies in order to make any choices, and particularly relational ones.
No one teaches us how to hear (and wait) for our authentic yes and and how to be so deeply right with our authentic no that it moves through us the way a yes would.
Until now.
Because Alexandra and I are teaching it August 13–15, in Occidental, California.
We have a limited amount of space left and are offering $100 off the fee if you enroll by June 21st in honor of both of our June birthdays.
Would you like to join us and get clear on your yes and no and how to advocate for each once and for all? Learn more here.