Creating boundaries with so much outside noise
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Been a hellava last few weeks. How are you doing? For real, you, how are you doing? And I’m not asking for your I’m fine answer, unless truly, you are in fact fine. I want to know how you are doing. Feel free to respond to this email here, or just take this note in and respond in your heart.
That’s an interesting question to ask these days isn’t it? It seems there are a lot of ways to answer this right now and that’s likely because moment to moment the answer changes. Two weeks ago for me, the change occurred moment to moment. Then last week the answer would change hour to hour. So far, and it is only Monday as I write this, it’s shifted into day by day. I’ll take it nonetheless. I’m doing everything in my power to show-up for you right now in ways that you need, and I am grateful to connect with you, and have these important conversations. So truly, how are you?
The answers I have been getting from clients in private sessions, and from my groups over the last few weeks have been a range, as to be expected, though most of them are fairly on theme with one another. Last week’s theme was feeling overwhelmed from the noise in our outside world. People had been living, breathing, feeling the intensity from Covid-19 for the last 2 weeks or so here in LA, more if you’re elsewhere, and sitting in the constant noise was too much. It’s exhausting, it’s like trying to sit in an emergency-mode for a long period of time. It’s too much of an emergency all the time, at some point you have to give your body a rest. And so together we talked about boundaries, about what those looked like. We talked about the almost yearning desire to be blissfully ignorant, and we talked about the exhaustive fear, panic swim that the world was feeling.
For many of us, this is something new that this particular set of humans who are alive on the planet today, have not experienced yet. And as with any new situation, it requires an evaluation of self, an evaluation of our life and of how we are addressing the two together. Part of this evaluation is learning about the new boundaries that you might need to put in place so you can work with the collective energy and not always be living in an emergency. Most people I worked with last week, were learning about the boundaries that they were in need of as it relates to this new world. We explored the concept of boundaries, and discovered what boundaries had been crossed based on claiming and assessing the emotions they were holding. That is how I can spot that a boundary has been crossed in a client, if I notice they are feeling triggered, and almost unclear on where it’s coming from, then it’s likely time for a good boundary to be set.
How to create boundaries with the outside noise can begin with noticing how you’re feeling. Take stock of what emotions have been coming up for you lately. Is there anything there that you might be able to support, protect, and not in a defensive kind of way, but rather, hold, or care for? Then ask yourself, what do you need to do to care for you? I’m sure you will get some clear boundaries coming from this place.
To be clear, a boundary isn’t something you ask someone else to do or hold for you, but rather something you set, and take action on to uphold. You are the sole human responsible for upholding your own boundaries. If a boundary has been crossed, you have an action you can take in order to best support yourself. Though it can be set out of self-protection, it is best if the boundary is set with love, firm love included in the ‘with love’ category. Here’s an example of a specific boundary :: COVID-19 text message threads were causing my client anxiety, specifically with the way in which a certain friend was handling it, so she set a boundary around engaging or participating in those threads. She told the people on that thread that she would not like to receive any more text messages about this subject, removed herself, and started a new thread with friends for other conversations to happen. If she still gets sent text messages, she can choose to block that friend, and tell her she is being blocked with love because not talking about this is her boundary, or she can simply choose to not read them.
Usually I know when the new boundary that I’m setting is right because it makes my whole body take a deep breath. You might feel your body feeling a little lighter, or stronger because it feels taken care of, heard. Pay attention to the shift in your body when you’ve landed on the boundary itself, if it doesn’t feel supportive, keep creating, you’ll get there.
I thought I would share with you some of the boundaries we discovered were best for these clients. These boundaries will of course be different from person to person depending on who you are, what you hold, how much you want and/or are able to hold, and what works for you and your body. Keep that in mind as you read through these boundaries, but feel free to use some of them if they support your well-being too.
Staying off social media in the morning, and at night.
Limiting social media use to 2 hours per day, and setting screen time allotment to notify you when you arrive there.
Informing friends and family that you will not be responding to COVID-19 text messages throughout the day, or at all, but you would be happy to FaceTime or talk about something else together
Morning’s (can claim a certain time) are dedicated to you and your self-care
Make a list of trusted news sources, and unfollow all other accounts/limit engagement with other accounts so you are only taking in news from your trusted news source
Consciously choosing what energies to engage with both in your personal virtual world and digital presence world
With so much outside noise, we must be taking care of ourselves, setting boundaries is a beautiful and empowering way to do just that. We have a choice on how much we let that outside noise affect our inner world. And what a beautiful choice we get to make, because I don’t know much else that is as empowering as taking care of myself, my body and my heart.
Stay safe out there. Here to support you however I can.
All the love,
Jenna
