SYTB 27: What's In Your Boundaries?
Stop hugging feral bobcats.
We’ve been coming at this from what is inside the frame, the moving picture frame. We’ve been focusing on it. Putting all our energies into it. Keeping all our mental and physical energy on what we DO want. However, what if what you want is wrong?
Some of us may second guess ourselves and wonder if we want the wrong things. My first suggestion is to pick something and if you decide it’s not for you, redirect your attention based on what you liked or disliked toward something better.
But what if your dreams for your life aren’t yours?
What if “other voices” are speaking in your ear and coercing you to want things, even subliminally that don’t serve you?
What if one part of you wants the buffet of desserts while the other part knows you will feel awful if you eat it? Often, we begin with the end in mind. What do we want to feel after we eat?
What if it’s not as obvious? What if the entire foundation for what success looks like is based on the dreams of others or the dreams and desires handed to us through years of programming?
In Huxley’s dystopian fiction novel, Brave New World, children are taught what to think, what to dream and what to want from the moment they are embryos. They are played tapes over and over telling them who they are and what they should expect. They are meant to never dream a bigger dream than their station. They are told to want only what has been provided for them to begin with. They live in a world with no want, a world with no violence, a world with no love or deep emotions that cause pain, hurt or rejection. They can have all the sex they want. They can enjoy whatever drugs they want which make them euphoric. They can enjoy sensations of food without getting fat. Their lives are effectively perfect. What more could they want?
That’s the big question. Beyond the photos in magazines and the fancy cars, what if you could own nothing but use whatever you wanted for as long as you felt like it and be happy? What more could you want?
I have witnessed a lot of people wondering this very thing.
The question is: how do I own my own mind?
I have witnessed people thinking original thoughts for the first time, waking from the matrix, wanting authentic wants and dreaming bigger dreams than mere perfection. They want to own their own minds. They want freedom at the cost of perfection. They want to see the programming for what it is. They want to distinguish themselves from the programming so that if a guy wants a car, for example, he can recognize the programming telling him to want a car, but he can also see his own appreciation for the engineering and actually feel love around his experience of enjoying this automobile in particular. He can see the labor it took to create this car and his labor to pay those people for their efforts. He can see himself as a part of a whole that is greater than himself but an important part, a unique part: an individual part.
It’s tricky, though. People who wake up to this brave new world of commercialism, often find in forsaking the programming that they still allow the programming to define them- just in a different way. They think, I should want the opposite of what these guys are telling me to want. So, if the commercial is for all new this or all new that, one might start to see a pattern implying anything used is disposable. So one might start defining one’s likes and desires for only old, restored or even disposable things. One might say, “I want the exact opposite of what they want me to want. I think the exact opposite thoughts of what they want me to think.” Well, now you are in a box again, allowing yourself to still be defined by what they want. We have a term for that: rebellion. Rebellion just takes you out of a box, it doesn’t guarantee you haven’t found yourself in another.
Boundaries are not meant to be boxes. They are not meant to pen you in. This kind of dualistic thinking feels like a limitation and a trap.
Once again, I remind you there are limitless possibilities!
So if you have awakened to duality from single mindedness, great! Welcome! I want to encourage everyone to start to step out of the matrix we were born into (thoughts-and-all) being hoisted onto us as the one, singular way to be.
But as I called it before, the “godly” perspective is infinite, limitless and expansive. You might not want to live your whole life as a rebel always fighting against the tide to stay afloat. You don’t want to come out of a box to find yourself in another box of the same size and dimensions just flipped to face a different direction. You don’t want to exchange the life of ease where everything is handed to you to think, to want, to know and to be for a life where you constantly struggle against that programming, against those people in the other camp, against yourself and your deep desires for some basic comforts.
This is the point where many people try to straddle both worlds: aesthetic pleasure and crude struggle.
Reality encompasses so much more than that.
There isn’t a mutual exclusion clause between pleasure and pain. There’s just meaning. Life has the meaning which you give it. Life is represented as a challis or a cup. It’s meant for you to fill yourself and drink and fill again. You can change your mind. You can try things that aren’t for you. You can play in life. In fact, I think we’re supposed to. Someone said, “life is a game.” I think you get to decide what winning is for you. You get to pick who to play with. You get to pick what to play with.
The only respect you are required to give others is that you respect each other’s individuality enough to determine whether their dreams and ambitions match yours. You respect if the meaning of their life makes sense in the context of yours. If not, find other people to play with. There’s still about 8 billion of them in the world.
One of the saddest dualities we have been taught is that either others have to die or come around to my way of thinking or I have to die or come around to another’s way of thinking. This is what democracy has brought us. It sounds good in theory, but there’s no live and let live about it.
A key principle of Voluntaryism is that good ideas don’t require force.
Certainly, if an idea is good enough that someone wants to make it happen, that person can come up with the help and funding for it. If it’s truly a good idea, someone can get it done. Why would anyone ever believe one should force everyone in the world to pay or work for their idea? Just find like minds to share in your dreams, and they will happen without the force of people who are invested in their own dreams. Your dreams should never necessarily force or coerce others to participate in them.
I was talking to a friend recently. She was complaining how a cousin didn’t like her. Her family had begun to plan gatherings at her cousin’s behest where they invited him but left her out. She said, “This isn’t right. My family has a rule that if we do a family event everyone has to be invited.” She thought she should be invited to every family gathering and if her offended cousin didn’t want to be near her, he should not come. She thought he should never be able to suggest plans with his own family that excluded her.
I stopped her and said, “so they made a rule that if anyone happened to molest your kid, they’d still be invited? Pardon me if that sounds like a stupid rule.”
She said, “but it’s what we all agreed to.”
Of course, she never minded if her cousin was invited. It was just his issue. She imposed an ideal on her cousin, that “he should just get over it” or not come.
We can’t tell other people how to live.
Her family could see that rule wasn’t going to work for everyone. It was clear they hadn’t agreed to it, not in their actions. They became accommodating of her cousin. In fact, her family seemed more happy to accommodate her cousin than her.
I asked her if she had ever asked her family to plan a get together with her and her kids. Since she and her children were starting to feel neglected and left out of a lot of fun family gatherings, she should try to join a gathering of her own suggestion.
She said, “when I mentioned it, they made me organize it entirely. They put a far greater burden on me, knowing I’m a full-time working, single mother. They refused to lift a finger to help me in planning a family event, even when I included her the whole family, no exclusions.” They made it very difficult to get together. It seemed to her it was not much of a priority to gather with her as they’d all worn themselves out with a bunch of gatherings she wasn’t invited to.
I asked, “was your cousin organizing all those gatherings he suggested?”
She clarified, “if he mentioned wanting to get together, they did all the planning. He’s in his 30’s but in their eyes, he may as well be a teenager, in capable of planning a get together.”
“So,” I clarified. “They went out of their way to make plans almost weekly with him. They organized whole events around him. They left you out every week to accommodate him. When you asked to plan something, they made it seem impossible to do anything with you. They put unreasonable demands on you to make getting together with you happen, and they were completely unaccommodating. It sounds like they don’t value spending time with you as a group. The issue isn’t him. They aren’t invested in spending time with you or including you.”
You can’t make other people play by your rules. My friend was finding this out painfully. They weren’t even good or reasonable rules. But these rules “protected” her in her mind from seeing the real issues. They kept her from seeing that her family didn’t see her as a priority. She thought that if she could just get them to play by her rules (which sounded nice-not excluding people) that she wouldn’t feel excluded. Nice isn’t always good. The result was that she was being excluded. Her family hearing how they broke the rules week after week probably didn’t help her case. Unfortunately, the issue wasn’t really the rules being broken as she was so focused on, but the cold, hard reality that she was being systematically excluded from her family.
After she became really clear in explaining to me what was frustrating her, she became aware of the bigger issue in her situation. She said to me, “I made a priority out of people who see me as an option.”
I said, “perhaps.”
My friend was using her family rule as a less vulnerable way to say, “you can’t leave me out.” It was more comfortable to say, “you’re all a bunch of rule breaking hypocrites.” But they could leave her out, and sadly, it seemed perhaps, they had.
In the game of life, I only get to make the rules for me. I can’t make your rules.
I might have a picture in my mind of a family gathering. I might want everyone in my family to be there. I might think, that’s what I want inside my boundary. You can’t drag other people into your boundaries. If you have people in your boundaries who don’t want to be there, your whole life will feel wrong. It’s going to be very uncomfortable, like trying to hug a feral bobcat. You might end up with , scratches and scars. Heck, you could lose an eye!
Better to find people who want inside and make them keyholders. Give them the option to come and go at will. You know the old saying about, “if you love someone set them free. If they were meant to be yours, they’ll return to you.”
It’s important to be specific about what you want. Yet, take clues from things that spark your imagination. This makes me think of that little girl, Veruca Salt in the Willy Wonka story who had to have one of Willy’s own squirrels. She was always given whatever she demanded by her rich parents, and she never expressed gratitude for what she was given. She had to have that one squirrel right now. Her father tried to buy it, but it wasn’t for sale. Rather than be inspired to get a squirrel like that of her own later, she coveted the property of another. In chasing it down, she lost her chance to even enjoy the squirrels. In fact, she missed out on the chance to win the whole factory, including all the squirrels which she could have won by merely behaving nicely and respecting the autonomy of others. This is a good moral lesson about what happens when we let some particular thing be the only thing that can ever make us happy. More often, some one person will cloud our mind as the be-all, end-all life partner. It will keep us from seeing the greater potential we can receive in relationships when we let that person go and allow people the freedom to make their own rules.
Let things you see spark your imagination. Let them help inform you about what you truly want inside your boundaries. You might have put a picture of Brad Pitt marrying you on your vision board, but that realistically may never happen. You might even find if you met Brad Pitt, he has nothing in common with you. You might be wanting the wrong things that wouldn’t serve you. There’s nothing wrong though with writing down a list of qualities inspired by Brad Pitt in various films that you might want in a husband. That way, you are seeking qualities and not letting the undefined image of Brad Pitt in your mind stand in the way of you meeting a person with those qualities. Is it more important for you to meet Brad Pitt at some celebrity meet and greet event or to be happily married to someone who embodies those Brad Pitt qualities with you every day in your own life? Or why not both? Just don’t let hope of a one time event preclude a life of everlasting happiness.
It’s important to keep an open mind when it comes to our boundaries and other people. Right RELATIONSHIPS go in boundaries. A right relationship is how I interact in a relationship and what I give and receive in a relationship. Another person always has the option to go- even if they made a commitment or a promise (or a rule) to stay by you. Others always have the option to walk away. I could walk away from my kids and my husband or vice versa. That would be horrible! Thank God neither of us have. It’s not what either my husband nor I want. But that option is always there in a relationship.
Obviously, my children are stuck with me until such time as they are independent and safe on their own. I still must respect their boundaries. Even my children might be feeling a little bobcat energy. They might not want a hug at some given moment. They might not want what I want from our relationship at any given moment. I might want to talk to them about caring for our chickens while they may be finishing up a video design or a Lego castle. I have to respect their time and attention. If I want to ask them something, I have to respect as with any other person, that I might be interrupting something they are engaged in, which is important to them. I might find I must wait for a better time to talk to them. I might also give their minds time to transition from what they are engaged in to be able to hear what I have to say. I have to beg their pardon if I am interrupting them when they are otherwise engaged in much the same way I would want them to be polite when interrupting me. Relationships require respect, not just one way. Respect is earned, and it must be modeled. If I expect my kids are little robots that must be activated when they hear the sound of my voice to obey, I am setting them up for a life of perhaps not seeing their own desires as valid. They may also start looking to others to inform them of where meaning or validity comes from rather than trusting the wisdom within themselves.
By recognizing the freedom others have and giving them that freedom, we end up appreciating the relationships more that are working. We foster healthier relationships with respect and honor for others, and we demonstrate our respect for their choice to stay in our lives and share their time and attention with us.
What are 3 things today that inspire you and fill your mind with wonder?
If one of those things is a specific person or item, write down 5 qualities that item or person embodies for you.
Think of 3 relationships you have right now which work really well.
Write down something you can do for each person or say to each person to show you appreciate the choice they have made to be in your life. Thank them for their ability to continuously sow love, harmony and joy in your life.
Thank yourself for staying in the relationships you have. Remind yourself it is a choice to be present.
Allow yourself the permission, if a relationship does not serve you to take small steps to walk toward a healthier situation. Moreover, what does an ideal relationship look like to you, and what qualities does it hold which you can start to move toward today?