Cultivating good boundaries with others, work and the culture around us shifts us from feeling depleted to feeling renewed. In a state of renewal we are inspired to make sound choices for ourselves.

Here are 3 valuable steps to creating and maintaining good boundaries:

Step 1–Identify and value your own needs and emotions

Its easy to adopt habits and patterns that keep us locked in to unhelpful enmeshment with other people or conditions in our life. The lack of good boundaries is an energy drain for so many of us.

The feelings of being depleted, exhausted, confused, lost, unhappy and ungrounded are often the very energies that are calling us to change–to create life-giving boundaries with others, our work, the technologies in our life and the culture around us.

It’s important to remember:

If something is draining me, that’s my signal to inquire within myself as to what I would like to change…to ask myself what’s best for me.

Most of us have long-standing conditioned habits around valuing the feelings of others before our own feelings.

We feel obligated to stay in unhealthy relationships or jobs, or we are too scared or unsupported to leave them.

We haven’t been taught to practice deep self-respect, self-acceptance, self-love and self-care.

To change and liberate ourselves from the old patterns of enmeshment, we raise our awareness and increase our value for our own inner peace…and for feeling well in our body.

Take a moment to name the feelings in your body that you experience when boundaries are blurred.

Are you feeling scared? Ashamed? Guilty? Resentful? Frustrated? Lonely? (If you experience difficulty naming emotions, trying using an online emotion wheel or emotions chart.)

Now try to notice the habitual thoughts related to those emotions. Perhaps they are something like these:

“I am afraid of what will happen when…”

“I don’t have enough _____to leave”

“I am a horrible person for…”

“I can’t believe I want…”

“I won’t have _______ if I leave this job.”

“It’s always been this way so I can’t imagine it will ever change.”

Noticing and naming the habitual thoughts and feelings that cause us to override making choices that establish good boundaries–which are therefore most life-giving to us–can be the catalyst for change.

Now how do we change them?

Step 2–Mentally and emotionally rehearse how you want your whole body to feel when you are maintaining a boundary

How our body feels is deeply important, since it IS our moment-to-moment experience of reality. A key to establishing good boundaries is to teach our body how we PREFER to feel.

By teaching our body how we prefer to feel, we become familiar with a self-designated state and we are no longer at the whim of the people, places and conditions around us. As we teach our body what we prefer to feel, we renew and restore ourselves and align our inner being with the values we established through identifying preferred thoughts and feelings.

Suddenly, we are paying more attention to–and valuing more–what’s going on inside us, rather than all that’s going on outside us.

As we cultivate preferred states, we get better at noticing when we don’t feel the way we prefer to feel, and that’s our cue to name what’s causing feelings of mis-alignment with self. These moments are typically when boundaries are crossed.

When we mentally and emotionally rehearse preferred feelings we are “priming the pump.” The activity of imagining how we feel when we are living with good boundaries and rehearsing the emotional feelings related to those thoughts, we are getting our body in a neurological and hormonal state that feels better than the body that’s been enmeshed in those old habits and patterns.

Give it a try, if you’d like:

What does the thought “I get to choose” feel like in your body?

How about the thought, “It’s my birthright to…?”

What about the thoughts “I would prefer to…” or “I would prefer not to…?” How do these feel in your body?

If this is all new and unfamiliar to you, please be patient and keep trying. Most change takes practice. Be gentle, curious and trusting with yourself as you practice.

You’ll notice here that this work is all inner work–INTERNAL work rather than an EXTERNAL interaction with the world around you, with which those boundaries will be established.

The importance of boundaries being initiated and maintained INTERNALLY is so important. Try not to think too far ahead into how you’ll deal with or communicate your boundaries to others as you begin this practice. Predicting all that will divert your attention away from the real power–which is you becoming more familiar with you and what you value and desire.

Trust that as you sink into your own body and heart, those decisions and words will naturally follow.

Step 3–Practice objective observation in relationships with good boundaries

Our brain’s mirror neurons are powerful facilitators of learning. When we witness examples of positive boundaries, our mirror neurons help us imitate those actions.

Find someone in your life who is well-regulated emotionally or who easily sets clear boundaries. Maybe its a relative, an acquaintance or friend, or even someone portraying a role in a movie.

Allow yourself to observe what they are doing without judgement. How do you imagine they feel? Are they confident, grounded, determined, self-assured, gentle, certain, kind, clear, free? How would those energies feel in your body?

Any moment is a good moment to believe in yourself and choose change. Only practice produces self-mastery…so be gentle and loving with yourself as you build new paths to better boundaries.+

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