The 5 sides of Healthy Boundaries

From a yogi's perspective.

To have and hold healthy boundaries, is not an easy topic. Neither is it something to be viewed and/or practised from a single perspective.

I love to see personal boundaries as a garden with lots of plants.

Some of them are annual, a choice to be resown, a choice to pick a different spot. Some of them are perennial, sown once to stay forever. Some of them are welcome invaders, and some of them are unwelcome invaders. Some are travellers from the garden of a neighbour, some from the ancestral heritage of the land, some from the geography and climate of the surrounding nature.

Some of them keep us healthy. Some of them nurse us back to health. Some of them ward of danger. Some of them are poisonous. Some bring beauty in our lives. Some of them we can hide under.             

There are a multitude of ways to take care of our garden. We need a multitude of tools and materials. Some tasks we can do ourselves, some tasks we need help with, some task we still must learn.

But one of the most important things to understand about a garden, is that it is an ever-changing ecosystem. No 2 season are alike. We change. Our expertise and experience changes. Everything interacts with everything, and we don’t need to understand it all. We learn, we grow, and we start over. We build trust, in ourselves, in the conditions, in change itself.

Personal boundaries are not the walls that surround us, build in stone and rock. It is what grows from within, what is taken care of, loved and respected.

Our garden is not a closed ecosystem, it interacts with the world wherein it was grown, stone walls or not.

And thus, I present to you a perspective from a yogic point of view, so that it may be one of the tools in your garden house <3.

1. The Negative Mind & Fear

In Kundalini Yoga, we have cultivated the system of “the Ten Bodies”. The second of those ten bodies is something we call “the Negative Mind”. This important part of us has nothing at all to do with negativity. It is our protector, that part of our intellect that scans our environment for potential dangers. It is the part that keeps us safe and guides our intuition to “belong”, to be part of something, because our largest need as human beings is connection.

A balanced negative mind makes intuitive choices that keeps our well-being in a continuous safe state. It thrust deeply upon its own being as a well-abled caretaker, listening to the true self and acting accordingly.

More often than not, we have an overactive negative mind. This is not so strange if you look at our society and our history. When it is overactive, we start to act on fear, which is nothing more than a judgement about a potential future, taken from past experiences. It doesn’t live in the now, it isn’t very good at listening to the whole body and will only consider those parts necessary for an immediate survival at the expense of continuous well-being and harmony with our surroundings. It basically says: “I only trust but those parts of me” or “I condemn and suppress this whole side of me that I judge to get me into pain”.

We must practice trusting our whole self again, to breathe through fear and calm down our nervous system.

2. Tolerance

A second step towards a caretaking of healthy personal boundaries is the growth of tolerance. Is it to accept and take into account that we are living in a consensus reality.

It starts by bringing awareness to how we react towards the boundaries of others. This in turn will teach us more about the relationship we have with boundary setting. It uses the other as a mirror to the self. How do we react when we receive a “no”? Do we internalize it? Does it harm our confidence? Does it invoke shame or anger? Or do we take it for what it is?

Cultivating tolerance is no easy feat. It requires a large capacity to sit with and fully experience one’s emotions, combined with the ability to zoom out and have the higher perspective close at hand. It is a respect and understanding of the self, while at the same time have the same amount of compassion towards the other.

It is the second step from me and you to us. Tolerance is the way from the self to the heart.

Having tolerance and the capacity to walk the path to the heart, requires a strong inner self and fierce navel centre. It requires confidence and to take once place in this life.

An amazing tool is to re-calibrate the pathways in our brain.

3. An Open Heart

The third step towards healthy personal boundaries, is to seek out the bravery of one’s heart.

The heart is one of our most important energy centres. It houses love & grief but also anger & frustration.

The key sits in the way by which we travel from the navel point upwards. The way we place “me” within the “we”. The way our self-image fits within the dynamics of the larger human ecosystem.

When open, the heart creates an immense magnetic field. When closed, it jails feelings within oneself, to bounce endlessly upon it one walls, creating sickness and depression.

However, an open heart requires a ton of bravery. And what is bravery? It is moving forward regardless. It is to take one’s feelings of fear, guilt, shame and doubt, kindly by the hand and to move forward as a whole. It is to take one’s complete being, seeing it all as an ultimate togetherness, and shining it towards the world. Being brave is a very vulnerable state. We are risking rejection and un-belonging in the space where we are being met. But what it really does, is to force us towards spaces where this wholeness will find belonging.

We only rise by sinking deeper.

The whole process of taking one’s self-worth into a space of extreme vulnerability, often leads to feelings of uncontrolledness, uncertainty and risk. When we have difficulty to transform fear, this gives a dangerous combination leading to frustration and anger moving up towards the heart.

But our biggest challenges are often our biggest teachers! Instead of throwing disapprovement and rejection of a part of oneself into the mix, we can give this anger a healthy place and channel it in a transforming way. This process will lead to a liberation of the heart!

4. The Powerful Aura

Working with the heart is a very important prelude towards the work with our very own protection field: The Aura. The strength of the heart almost determines the state of our aura. They are interconnected through divine pathways.

When weak, the aura is unable to shield us from the energies of all and everyone in our surroundings. You could even say that it will seek out the reflections of its own blackness. Weaknesses and holes in our aura, will attract and reflect the parts of the universe that is filled with doubt, fear and treat. This will make it increasingly difficult to take a higher and “zoomed out” perspective. With a weak aura, you blend easily with the chaos of the world. You will easily give away you sacred life-energy in an uncontrolled way.

Having an under-developed aura, can also be something that was learned to us, often in childhood. As a child, we learn by example and by the consequences of our actions in a given society. It is important to not judge ourselves weak or incompetent because of it. It is merely a learning perspective, set in the contrast of life itself.

All of this sounds a bit dramatic. So, I want to stress that a healthy and strong aura, can be grown and maintained as a part of a personal practice. See it as spiritual hygiene: Good habits keeps away rot and disease. Just like brushing your teeth every day and having regular dentist appointments.

Personal spiritual hygiene is non-negotiable in the life of a spiritual practitioner of any kind, whether you are a yogi, witch, channeler or any other. Understand that by reaching out to the higher divine, you are at the same time reaching larger contrasts and thus deeper lows. You are crossing barriers and cultivating a higher sensitivity and “reading-capacity”. So, it with a little bit of drama, that I urge you to take the health of your aura very seriously.

A strong aura, filled with pure light, is grown from within. However, given the circularity of the nature of the universe and thus of ourselves, you can also call upon the divine light of protection from without, because we are within ourselves. The universe is our mother, and we are her children. By calling out to her and laying our full trust and our very life, within her hands, she will come to us and wrap us in her golden light. From deep within our heart, she will come to us as if from outside of us. Lay down your shields and you will be protected.

5. A Personal Protection

The final stage of the cultivation of healthy personal boundaries, is to bring all previous 4 steps together. And to know that the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.

It’s a deep understanding that protection is an act of self-love, self-trust and confident magnetic energy. It’s a divine shield that is projected from within the universe of our heart.

It’s a humble surrendering. An unbeatable softness.

Healthy boundaries in practice

To translate all the above into practical actions, will look different for everyone. The key and challenge is to find how this can work in your life. By trial and yes, by error.

Like it wrote in the beginning. Boundaries are no stone walls. The move, change and transform. Because both we and our environments constantly change, like energy flows in any ecosystem.

It will always be your choice where you put your YES and NO. Just remember that the you therefor choose the consequences too.

Maintaining and enforcing boundaries towards strangers will always be easier than towards close family members such as your parents. But knowing how to navigate the latter will also always lead to more growth.

The “enforcing” part of a boundary is way more challenging than understanding where you should put that boundary. Enforcing means respecting your own choices and authority. It is proving towards yourself that “I can trust myself”.

In practice, this means not choosing to interact when a boundary is overstepped. It is to pull yourself away from that person or situation in order to command a mutual respect. It is to say, “If you don’t respect me as an equal in this relation, you lose the right to interact with me”.

The cultivation of healthy boundaries is difficult, painful and vulnerable. It is also incredibly opening and rewarding.

I wish you save travels,

Sat Nam,

Ellen