The Intelligence of Boundaries
living in the land of both/and
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living in the land of both/and 〰️
Yesterday my children and I watched “Asteroid Hunters,” an IMAX National Geographic film. Lately, when I watch these films (it’s become a monthly visit to IMAX since we have a membership to our local science museum), I feel like a child lost in the world of discovery. I also feel moved to tears when I become immersed in the world of listening with a new awareness. I watch with amazement and awe at how vast and infinite space is, how it all just exists and interacts. It led me to wonder about boundaries, our interconnection, and our separateness, what happens when our boundaries get crossed and how we re-stabilize and reestablish safety.
The Beginnings
We begin bounded and connected, fastened to and contained. We are birthed into space and caught by others’ hands. Other bodies nurture us; we are always intertwined and interconnected, even in our separateness.
When our safety is disrupted by others, our sense of connection becomes precarious and unstable. As dependent beings, experiencing connection as harmful can shake our fundamental understanding of reality. It's akin to feeling invaded by a foreign object that threatens our existence as it enters our energetic field. Just as an unhinged asteroid journeys, potentially altering the landscape of another celestial body, our own bodies can experience this disruption. We instinctively shift into hyper-protection mode, particularly when we face the constant threat of impact.
We begin to unconsciously pivot, driven by the knowledge that we must erect boundaries to protect the life that requires protection, our life.
We effort to defend what remains, adapt to the understanding that risk to self still exists, and assemble structures inside and around us to prepare for what might happen again.
We begin this process early, and we are glorious in our intelligence because we still manage to maintain a connection to those we depend on for our survival while blanketing ourselves with the space needed not to disappear entirely.
What Boundaries Can Look Like
Often the behaviors, habits, compulsions, inner worlds, and expressions we construct can appear problematic or concerning. We can become dependent on others’ approval, conditioned to making ourselves quiet or small, attached to repetitive actions that soothe, or become fantastical story makers highlighting only our perceived failures or limited potential. What truly is here are the breadcrumbs leading us back to the pain of disconnecting from our essence so as to remain connected to the wounded other.
What we often label as symptoms, problems, patterns, or challenges are, in fact, beacons guiding us back to ourselves. These are soul instructions, illuminating our path in the darkness, gently nudging the parts of ourselves that have been overlooked and discarded yet remain energetically alive, patiently waiting for our return.
Boundaries as Soul Guides
This is the intelligence of boundaries, protecting our most delicate threads of life so that we can find our way back to them. Our inner soul work requires us to fully honor this wisdom and begin to find space to create again. Through our feelings of separateness, our safety shield of survival, we begin to establish more significant contact with our unique soul print. When we start to design our life around honoring our unfelt and under-spoken desires, we get to start each day again.
We are given a chance to travel through our primal birthing process and experience our existence as essential; this allows us to embody our fullness and establish our sovereignty. The past drive to exert energy to separate oneself from the world lessens. We can now begin to feel, from the inside, that others no longer can infringe on our potential anymore. Others no longer pose a threat to our expressive existence. This is not to say that life will not challenge this notion; there are plenty of reminders of how cruel systems and people can be and how easily we can be knocked back into fear and a need to protect. After we emerge from hiding, what remains is the understanding that we don’t have to live there; in the cave, we can pause and emerge once more. As we anchor into our remembering, we begin to have space to wonder how others are an opportunity for our greater unfolding. We imagine that others can be activators for our creative spark or reminders to return to stillness. In some events, others will serve as an invitation to enshroud our sacred with protection by returning to the womb and resting.
Of course, this surge of survival energy and the subsequent constructs can only be undone over time and in the presence of newly established safety. Those safe spaces come in so many forms. Good people, kind acts, heart-evoking experiences, nature-filled journeys, books that transport, art that excites, structures that comfort, homes that welcome, arms that receive. The most important work of all is the act of listening to our own souls’ cries, the sounds of our composition before any interruptions came to exist.
Tarot as Teacher
The Fool is the first and last card, the beginning and the end, of the major arcana in tarot. The major arcana is the communicator of significant themes, life journeys and lessons, and archetypes we all encounter on the road to our fullest expression.
I sat and started writing about boundaries and decided I wanted spirit to send me a card that would offer more reflections on this theme. I pulled The Fool.
Jessica Dore, author of Tarot for Change, offers some profound reflections on this card. She imagines the fool as an invitation to connect with a pure start. To imagine a body that exists in a space without hurt, without induced mistrust or fear, without imposed limitations. The fool is the young alignment with spirit, eternally fresh, in constant creation, bound-less, without bound, not fastened to the dividing line, ready to spring forward with impetus and curiosity.
This card speaks to what is possible when connected to our longing through being. Our BE-LONG-ING. To live in the land of both/and, contained and coalescing. We are always in relation, and our existence requires it; we are interdependent beings, interconnected, wedded to and with each other. Wonder blossoms when we use the fool’s soul, our heart-storming energy of creation, and embrace the change that exists every time we inhale and exhale.
My wish for us all is that we honor our creative selves by recognizing that we don’t have to blindly agree to the stories and arrangements that once protected us. We can rewrite and reenvision a narrative that aligns with where we all started, the fool before the fall. Our ever-expanding universe requires our bravery in releasing ourselves from this imprisoned condition. I wish us joy on our journey.
