Imagine knowing yourself deeply, expressing yourself fully, and being able to give of yourself honestly.

These are the outcomes of doing the work it takes to discover your boundaries: where you end and the Other begins.

These aren't hard and fast rules — they're actions:

When you know and love yourself, you orient your time and energy toward what feels good and healthy and manageable for you in life — and you turn away from what isn't that.

You don't demand that what isn't that be different, you simply orient yourself differently.

On the journey there, we often seek to express our boundaries by making rules for the Other — in effect, asking them to protect our boundaries for us.

There's a big difference here between advising someone they're crossing our property line, and asking them to drape themselves over our figurative electric fence and zapping them over and over again.

A lot of the time, that's what we accidentally do, because we want love and connection, and we're wounded. That's ok — we're on a journey, and we are learning.

Similarly, when we talk about trust we're also deeply entrenched and wounded. We want positive trust only — God realm trust, where we expect the sun and the moon, a cosmic demonstration of this overarching and all-encompassing good-feelings-only kind of "trust".

I hope we find that, and in the meantime it's just as useful for me to know I can trust someone to lie, cheat and steal, as it is to know I can trust someone to be reliable and loving.

Guess which one I let into my inner circle?

As always, meditation and shadow work are my recommendations for getting somewhere productive here. Slow your mind, give yourself mental and emotional space to process, and learn how and why you hide or hold yourself back from expressing yourself in relationships.

❤️
- S