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I’ve been having a lot of conversations with women lately about boundaries (and how much we collectively struggle with them!)

Let’s say you grew up in a family where the way you learned how to cope with some dysfunction was to not have your own needs, or where you needed to take care of someone else. Your sense of safety relied upon not having boundaries that served you. 

There are a million different examples of why not having boundaries occurs, but the important thing is, when we don’t have good boundaries, we often close off our hearts. 

And then you arrive at a place where part of you really, truly wants to have an open heart. It becomes necessary for reaching the next level of your life. (A life where you love yourself as much as you love others. This happens in romantic relationships, with children, with friends, family, bosses, clients, really anywhere you are interacting with other people!)

It is is impossible to have (and keep) an open heart without solid boundaries.

So first, the desires. 

That life where you love yourself as much as you love others? That’s a desire. Put some finer details on it, like a partner that respects you, like friendships that nurture you, like work that feels fulfilling. All of those are desires. 

You must know what you want. You must put as much detail to what you want as possible. You must be clear that those wants are yours. You must be clear that they are the biggest version of the desires you have. Expansive.

Boundaries are the structure that allows you to realize those desires. 

If you want to be in a long term relationship, you may create a boundary around only dating people who are available for that.

If you want to be an entrepreneur that enjoys time off, you may create a boundary around your work hours and days off. 

If you want to create more productive time at work, you may create a boundary around how/when someone can interrupt your work. 

The boundaries support the desire…and when held, they allow for your heart – and your energy – to remain open.

All the things that we need to have boundaries around, but don’t, are the things that cause contraction. They are the places that we sense we need protection but don’t have any, so we must curl inward to stay safe. 

Boundaries allow us to remained unfurled. 

Boundaries keep us safe.

Boundaries support us in our choices. 

Boundaries are there when our conditioning compels us to cave. 

Boundaries are a way of saying that I love myself as much as I love you. 

Your turn.

What’s something in your life that you’re wanting/trying to create? What are the boundaries you need to hold around it to support that desire and really let it come alive? Leave a commetn and let me know – I read and respond to every one!

Last week when I was in Maui, the woman I was working with – Sophia – picked me up at the airport. We drove to run an errand, and then headed to our first appointment of the weekend. At some point, she turned the corner to drive parallel to the beach. As she did, she said, “I came to this beach this morning to say a blessing and to ask that the weekend serve your highest good.” 

My mouth gaped open. 

Not because of the blessing. 

But because it was the exact same beach that my ex-husband had told me that he wanted to get a divorce, 8 years ago. 

It was in that moment that I didn’t care what happened during my weekend with Sophia, I knew it was all being divinely orchestrated to give me whatever I needed.

But first, back to that day on with beach with my ex-husband.

We were on vacation with my parents, his mother, both of my brothers and their families – all celebrating my mom’s 70th birthday. It wasn’t a convenient time to announce you’d like to get divorced, if you know what I mean. 

But – and this is the part that’s important – because I didn’t want to ruin everybody else’s good time, I shed a handful of tears on the beach, then wiped them away and went back to the party. I didn’t tell anyone. I pretended like everything was ok, when I was falling apart on the inside. 

And I as I spoke about this with Sophia, it became clear that the beach moment with my ex-husband wasn’t significant in my life because of the words he told me that day, but rather, because I put everyone else’s needs above my own. 

I didn’t want people to be uncomfortable.

I didn’t want to ruin their good time.

I didn’t want to take all of the attention to deal with my problems. 

I didn’t think that the thing that was tearing me apart on the inside was worth inconveniencing them for. 

My time in Maui last week was many things, but one of the main things was about taking up space, letting my needs matter the most, claiming my right as a person to have needs. (And, trust me, I’ve done a ton of work on this, but this was next level taking up space.)

I developed the muscle memory treating myself with the love I extend to others. (And as I result, I have more love to extend to others.)

Something about doing this in a place where I had such a distinctly different experience felt like a full circle. I could see that I wasn’t that woman who returned to her family gathering 8 years ago, trying to act as if nothing was wrong. I could see that I didn’t need to carry her invisibility anymore. 

And I knew that I would never allow myself to be invisible or have a need go unaddressed again in favor of someone else’s comfort. 

The proof is in the pudding. 

Two days ago, I could see circumstances starting to swirl around me in a familiar dynamic of one where I’d typically put my needs aside with my family. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t sad; I was just really clear that I wasn’t available to participate with this kind of behavior anymore. 

I took a giant leap…and left. I don’t yet know what’s on the other side, but I do know that I’m taking up more space in the universe these days. And when we take up more space, the universe meets us with bigger things to accommodate the space we occupy. (More opportunity, more money, more love, more of what we want.)

This is the power of breaking patterns. 

We all have patterns. And it’s so easy to write them off in the day to day experience of them as no big deal. But when they influence the way you live your life so much that it keeps you small, the patterns that run you are a big deal. 

It doesn’t mean something is wrong, or that you are broken. In fact, you are human. 

It just means that breaking the pattern could totally change your life. 

And wouldn’t that be fun?

“Gah, Rachel…everything was going so great! It was like one thing led to the next, and then the next, and it all lined up perfectly. And then it all just came to a complete stop. What happened?!”

People ask me this question all the time. 

And today I’m going to answer it, because what you do when you hit this point (and we all do), matters a lot if you want to get back to that place of it all lining up perfectly again anytime soon.

The moment when you flip from lots of positive momentum to none is a crucial one. 

You feel something you don’t want to feel. 

And maybe something happens to make you feel something you don’t want to feel, but the feeling is that part that’s important here.

Let’s say you get into a car accident. And you know it was your fault. So you feel guilty. (But you know admitting your guilt will cause more problems than you care to deal with, so you pretend that it wasn’t your fault, or you make up a tiny, white lie.)

You refuse to acknowledge the guilt. You push it away. 

And before you know it, you feel stuck. Or all the things that were going so well have fizzled or slowed way down. 

What went wrong? 

It’s not the feeling that you had. It’s the failure to acknowledge it or consider it. 

On an energetic level…

To break this down from an energetic perspective, when things are flowing in your life, your energy is moving. In and out. You’re putting energy out, things are flowing in. 

And when we experience a feeling that we don’t want to feel, we have to push it away. To close up so it can’t get in any deeper than it already has. This leaves you in a closed off state of being, and you’re unable to receive – to let energy (in whatever form) in. 

We have to create separation between ourselves and that feeling we don’t want to feel…and that separation then exists between ourselves and EVERYTHING.

And that’s when everything stops. 

How to get that momentum back.

It used to take me days to notice that something was off. And I’d have no idea what caused it, and I’d end up just feeling really frustrated, like the universe just didn’t like me or something. 

Because I’ve been able to put my finger on the thing that needs to happen to shift the energy back into a reception-mode, I’ve been able to shorten that cycle, sometimes to minutes. (It depends on how tuned in to my own energy I am when I block that feeling I don’t want to acknowledge.)

So instead of wallowing in how great things were and now they’re not, all you need to do is go back to the moment when you felt something that you didn’t want to feel (and as a result, pushed away).

Go back to it. 

Feel it. 

Acknowledge that it was there.

See if you can see what it was trying to communicate with you. 

If there’s anything to do, do that. (This might be having a conversation with someone, doing something to find clarity around the particular topic, or just taking more space to feel it all the way.)

It make take a day or two or three, but this will lead you back to flow. (Because that’s really all flow is – doing the thing that feels right at the right time in a way that makes it seem like everything is conspiring for you. In order for this to exist, every kind of energy has to be available to you.)

Your turn. 

Can you see it? When’s the last time you felt some kind of flow and found yourself stopped or stuck? Can you trace it back to a feeling that needed some airtime?