by Ora North
One thing I want you to be especially aware of when you work with your boundaries is how you feel when you agree to do something out of obligation or guilt. Since empaths are natural caretakers, you might be agreeing to things beyond your capabilities because you want to be helpful in your relationships. Your body may give you a very specific sensation that lets you know you’re crossing your own boundaries.
As you become more aware of your yes and no sensations, you’ll feel your no sensations of contraction and shrinking when you agree to do things past your energy level. Eventually, you’ll get stronger and adjust to saying no to things when you’re feeling the no sensations. Even if you’re worried about how people will react, the satisfaction and power you’ll feel when you respect your boundaries will far outweigh any temporary guilt.
Know Your Reserves
When working with your boundaries, it’s important for you to know your energy reserves and what typically drains or energizes you. If you know your own history and habits, you’ll have a clearer path to empowered boundaries.
Take stock of the people who drain you, the places that drain you, the tasks that drain you. All those things that suck the joy right from your life are areas where your boundaries are needed. If you have a people-pleasing habit, you’ll find yourself giving away to others the energy you need for yourself. If you have a habit of making yourself smaller for romantic relationships, you can prepare yourself for future relationships by being aware of it. Knowing your weak spots is half the battle, and this is why we’ve spent so much time identifying and personifying your negative feelings.
Oftentimes, becoming aware is not enough, and we have to let go of some of the people and things that drain us. Consistently taking stock of your life and the people in it will help you realize what needs to be released.
Take stock of the people who bring you joy and energize you, the places and jobs that energize you. You need more of these types of people and places. This is what you need to make more space for. Feeling in flow and in joy is like an automatic exercise in strengthening your boundaries. It’s positive reinforcement for your spirit. As you let go of the draining things, you’re also making more room for the energizing things to enter into your life.
Knowing your energy reserves at all times will help you realize what you need more of and what you need less of to balance that energy. If you know you’ve spent much more time on the draining things than the energizing things recently, you’ll know it’s time to step away from some of the draining things. You’ll know it’s time to step into some more joy. If you’ve spent a lot of time in joy recently and feel energized, you may happily agree to do a few extra tasks to help someone out. Your decisions and answers to others will change frequently depending on your energy reserves. Being in tune with them will help you engage with the edges of your boundaries in every situation.
Give Yourself Permission
I know how much you’ve given to your loved ones. I know how much you’ve offered and sacrificed. You’ve ignored your own boundaries for so long that you may not even know what they are right now. And that’s okay. I know you’ve always ignored your boundaries with good intentions. You’ve always wanted to be a source of good for others. It’s a commendable act, but aren’t you tired? Aren’t you completely and simultaneously exhausted and overwhelmed?
It’s time to give yourself permission to stop. I know it feels like the world will stop if you stop, but I promise you, it won’t. Give yourself permission to let go of those things that drain you, to say no.
Give yourself permission to rest. Give yourself permission to disappoint others and to choose yourself over them. Give yourself permission to lose the relationships that aren’t good for you. Give yourself permission to be powerful.
I know it seems like having an exhausted sort of love is better than no love at all, but the love you’ll find when you give yourself permission to just be yourself is stronger than any half-love you’ve ever experienced. It’s worth it to lose the ones who won’t respect your boundaries. You deserve to make space for those who want to come into your life, fully supportive of you, respectful of your boundaries. Those people will love you more because of your boundaries, not less.
Give yourself permission.
Speak Your Truth
This is a hard one, I know. Speaking your truth takes practice, because it naturally comes along with some rejection. When it comes to your boundaries though, it’s an absolute must. You must be able to verbalize your boundaries.
Let me repeat that one: you must be able to verbalize your boundaries.
Even if you have done all the work to figure out where your boundaries are, it won’t do you any good if you can’t verbalize them. I wish I could say that people are all naturally intuitive and can pick up on your boundaries without you telling them, but that’s simply not the case. Humans have an inherent love of blindness, so they will not see your boundaries. Even with our closest loved ones, we cannot assume that they will naturally pick up on our boundaries. We have to tell them. If we cannot tell them our boundaries, how can we expect them to know and respect them?
All of this difficult emotional work you’ve done here also essentially creates a guidebook for others to understand you better. If you love yourself and understand yourself, you will be able to tell your loved ones how to love and understand you too. Knowing and communicating your boundaries will strengthen the relationships with the capacity for growth. The clearer you can be about yourself and what you need, the less room you leave for messy situations and misunderstandings, which will make your relationships easier.
This goes both ways too. If you’re unclear about someone else’s boundaries, ask. Know that for you to understand your loved ones better, you need to know their boundaries too.
When They Don’t Respect Your Boundaries
Change is hard. It’s not just hard for you. It’s hard for everyone in your life.
When you begin to assert your boundaries and show signs of change and growth, it may activate some hostility in your loved ones, especially in family members and close friends. They may be angry with you. They have become accustomed to the way you are, and it may feel unsafe for them when you consciously choose not to engage in the same patterns anymore.
If you set new rules for the relationship with your boundaries, and you no longer participate in the same patterns with them, then they can no longer participate in them with you. This is a scary thing for a lot of people. When your changing involves them changing on some level, they could reject it entirely, especially if they have no interest in changing.
On a basic level, when you change, your loved ones fear losing you. It’s a legitimate fear, because when you emotionally transform, the old you indeed dies. When you set new rules with your boundaries, you no longer hold the space for the you who settled for the old rules. When you change the rules, your loved ones have to grieve the death of the old you that existed in the old rules. You have to grieve the death of the old you. In some cases, becoming more in tune with your intuition and your boundaries means you will have to let some people go. The people who can’t or won’t adjust to and respect your boundaries are not meant to be close to you anymore, and that’s a tough pill to swallow, especially when you love those people.
Your relationships naturally transform as a by-product of you transforming. The ones that respect your boundaries and are capable of growth will bloom in new and beautiful ways, and the ones that don’t respect your boundaries and aren’t willing to grow will shrivel up and die. It’s a harsh reality, but it’s a reality. You may find yourself trying to keep certain relationships alive, and despite all the effort, they simply don’t align with you anymore.
Being able to let go of what’s dead is difficult, but it’s a sign of great wisdom and acceptance. Knowing that your new life with your new rules will be even better than all the ones before it will be the balm that soothes t
he pain.
Voluntary Energetic Blindness
Being an empath means feeling everything all the time. It’s exhausting. It’s also distracting. Feeling everyone’s feelings can take away the time and energy you need for yourself. If we’re using our energy reserves on other people’s feelings that aren’t relevant to us, we’re losing our power. No wonder we can feel so powerless and overwhelmed. We have no energy left for our own damn problems!
There’s a way to fix this. We can use voluntary energetic blindness to cope with some of the extra energy we simply don’t want to feel.
Voluntary energetic blindness is like a setting you can turn on with your higher self. You can tell your higher self that you simply don’t have the time or energy to deal with other people’s crap, so you choose to not let it in. This is a survival tool, one you can use to whatever extent you need it. At the end of this chapter, there is a helpful visualization to activate this setting.
Remember: everything is a negotiation—especially with your higher self and with the Universe. If something isn’t working out for you, you can negotiate different terms with your higher self. If the way you experience energy causes trouble for you, you can tell the Universe the ways you’d prefer to experience it. The Universe is actually fairly accommodating to those who speak bravely out loud. (This is a great exercise in verbalizing your boundaries!)
Speak to your higher self. Tell them you want to turn on your voluntary energetic blindness to the excess energy you don’t want to deal with right now. And as situations arise where you feel someone else reaching out for your energy in a way that doesn’t feel empowering to you, choose to use that voluntary blindness and walk away.
Do the Work
Knowing that you don’t have to create your own boundaries is a relief. You still need to learn, however, where your boundaries are. These exercises will help.
Get to Know Your Gatekeeper
Your gatekeeper is a version of your higher self whose only job is to take care of your boundaries. Your gatekeeper adjusts your boundaries perfectly for every situation in every relationship and encounter. Your job is to communicate with your gatekeeper so they can let you know where your boundaries lie.
To do this, close your eyes and visualize your gatekeeper. What do they look like? What are they wearing? What does the gate look like that they’re protecting? What’s their name? Notice how they speak to you. They’re an all-knowing authority on your boundaries, so they may be quite forceful in their communication. Gatekeepers usually have a pretty interesting sense of humor too, so take your time in getting to know them. Ask them their preferred method of communicating. Maybe they’ll have a certain bodily signal, or a phrase or sensation they’ll use when they communicate with you. Put all of these details in your journal, and make sure to check in with your gatekeeper on a regular basis. Your gatekeeper will have different moods for different situations, so it’s important to get to know their patterns and moods and how they relate to what’s happening in your life. The more you work with them, the more it will become an easy line of communication for you to reference every day.
Grounding Visualization
Close your eyes and spend a few minutes on deep breathing. Visualize a bright red tube of light coming up from the center of the earth. This red light, this pure earth energy, is going to be absorbed through your feet. See the red light being absorbed into your body, up your legs, and slowly rising up through your chakras. Then visualize a white tube of light coming down from the heavens. This is pure divine energy, and it’s being absorbed into your body through your crown chakra. See this energy being absorbed, moving slowly down through your chakras.
You are completely connected to the earth, and completely connected to the heavens. Notice that at your heart chakra, the red light and the white light mix, creating a beautiful soft pink right over your heart. This energy is unconditional love, and it feels soft and safe. In this moment, you are connected to everything, and your heart is the meeting point of heaven and earth.
Boundaries Checklist
When figuring out how to use your boundaries, it can be helpful to use this checklist to see where you’re getting stuck.
Are you grounded? If not, engage in a grounding activity, or use the grounding visualization above.
Can you feel your edges? Are you sensing where your energy gets prickly, or where your accommodation for others stops? If not, use your energy signatures and yes/no body intuition to find out where your edges are.
Do you know your energy reserves? Do you know how much energy you have to give? If not, take stock of your recent experiences and how energized or drained you are.
Are you giving yourself permission? Do you know where you boundaries are, but you’re afraid to use them because of how someone might react? Do you feel secretly ashamed of needing what you need? If you’re stuck in the shame or guilt, use your energy signature of those feelings and spend some time on the sacred expression of those feelings.
Have you verbalized your boundaries out loud? If you haven’t spoken your truth, you can’t expect others to respect it. If you’re having trouble speaking your truth, revisit the item above and figure out which feelings prevent you from speaking.
Voluntary Energetic Blindness Visualization
Relax and close your eyes. Spend a few minutes on deep breathing. Visualize yourself outside of a beautiful temple. A porch, which can be any style you want, wraps around the entire temple. The porch might be made of stone or of wood. This wraparound porch represents your boundaries, and it protects your temple, which represents your pure spirit. Visualize yourself walking slowly on this wraparound porch.
It’s a leisurely stroll, but you’re also doing a security check. There are steps from the ground up onto the porch, and these are the places where others can reach you. As you walk, visualize large pillars of stone on the porch. These pillars are being placed here to protect you from seeing the energies that aren’t relevant to you. With these large pillars, you cannot see that excess energy, and that excess energy cannot reach you.
You can always come back and rearrange the pillars based on what you’re experiencing, but know that you can place them there for your protection at any time.
Chapter 7:
Energetic Patterns in Relationships
I once went to the bank to make some changes on my accounts. I sat with a very friendly banker who was eager to help me. He was very chatty and seemed slightly nervous and distracted. As he told me the required documents I would need to make the desired changes, I found myself very confused. I hadn’t even heard of the documents he requested, and I knew very well what I actually needed to make the changes. When I questioned him, he reassured me that what he was saying was correct, and I found myself acting as though I suddenly had no idea what I needed for my account. My voice rose in pitch to sound more feminine and helpless, and I said things like “Oh, I had no idea!” and “Wow, that’s good to know!” and I didn’t argue when he said, “Good thing I was here to tell you these things!”
After I got home, I did some research and found out that the information he had given me was outdated and dead wrong. I had been right all along, and I felt really gross about it. I mentally replayed what had happened and realized I had completely changed my personality and my convictions. I sensed in him a need to be right and automatically responded to it. And without even thinking about it, I made myself smaller to accommodate his unspoken emotional needs.
A week later, I went to a different branch of the bank and saw a woman I’d worked with before. I brought in the proper documents and just said, “Here ya go.” She made the changes without a fuss and without expecting any sort of response from me. It was beautiful. I realized then why I’d always subconsciously accepted jobs with women bosses, and why I turned down (or quit after a short period) jobs with male bosses. My empath nature had been culturally attuned to men, especially in authoritati
ve roles, and that kind of automatic response was very unsettling. (Not to mention, it killed my productivity and creativity.) I remember thinking, If I’m changing myself this much to make a complete stranger feel better, how much am I changing for the people in my life I actually know and love?
Because empaths are naturally emotionally supportive and regularly fall into the caretaker role, it’s easy for the dynamics in relationships to get confusing or unbalanced. There are common emotional and energetic patterns experienced by most empaths, like the pattern of changing yourself to meet the emotional needs of others, even strangers. Knowing these common patterns can help you understand your own relationships and boundaries within those relationships. You’ll also be able to take an inventory of your own relationship patterns when you complete the Do the Work section at the end of this chapter.
The Accommodation Chameleon
Empaths have an uncanny ability to be able to shift and change themselves to adjust to the person they are with. Being able to feel the feelings of others can be incredibly illuminating, as you can often tap into the unspoken emotional needs of others. The problem with this skill is that in addition to feeling and knowing, empaths also have the inherent need to fulfill and address those unspoken emotional needs. This means that you’ve probably found yourself acting differently or doing things differently to meet the unspoken needs of the person you’re with.
While this automatic longing to fulfill the needs of others comes from a genuinely good place in your heart, you may also find yourself disappearing because of your ability to be an emotional chameleon. You may find yourself acting small to appease others, because you can feel it would make it more comfortable for them. If you do this long enough, you soon realize that you’re not even sure who you really are anymore. Or worse, you realize you’re betraying yourself by acting small.
Empaths often automatically change their behaviors for others when the other person’s emotions are clearly being felt. The empath’s emotional needs are then put on the back burner as they tend to the needs of others. While it’s an incredible skill to be able to tune into the needs of others around us, we need to be able to realize when and how we’re giving away our power in the name of empathy.
