Gates, Not Thorns: Are Your Boundaries a Prison?

Q: Are you saying I should not have any boundaries?

No. Red lines between two people are healthy, and I say so in the episode. What I push back on is the wall that never comes down, and the list of rules the rest of the world is somehow meant to know.

Q: What if I am not strong enough to let the world in yet?

Then close the gate today. That is a healthy boundary: not my best today, so not today. Open it a little tomorrow. The aim is more open days each year, not fewer.

Q: Is this a Buddhist episode?

Only lightly. I mention sila, which just means your own conduct, and the fact that the old texts have no word for boundaries at all. No doctrine needed to follow it.

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boundaries · relationships · compassion · buddhism · personal-story

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Okay, I'm going to say it officially.

I've never liked boundaries and there I said it.

They really do trigger me whenever anybody says, "I'm going to set boundaries."

And every time I see a meme on Instagram or I read or I see books from therapists that say about

boundaries seems to be like a new age thing.

Set boundaries and everything will be okay.

It reminds me of the meditation bubbles that ...

Do a meditation, put a bubble around you.

Keep the world out.

And I had an email this week from Katherine and she says that she's now looking at boundaries in a

different way.

And she's 65 and she's learning this now.

And she wrote that she's building a garden around what matters to her.

And the garden she can invite people in, and they're not thorny bushes to keep people out.

And it just reminded me of gates not thorns so that's what this episode is about is

healthy boundaries.

And I'm not gonna go into details of how to set them and effort.

I'm just gonna say what they are and leave it to you.

I think you got enough wisdom to be able to do it.

So I'm Steven Webb and this is Stillness In The Storm,

the podcast that helps you through difficult times by helping you see life differently.

So I apologize I did not show up last week,

and whenever I don't show up or I'm struggling with something or like life just takes me away and I

just don't get time to do it, I'm always reminded by that Rumi poem or it could have been a lot

older than Rumi actually.

There's some sayings that it may not have been him but it's often said that he wrote it.

So it's come, come whoever you are.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times, come yet again, come."

And I just love that.

I love the fact that there's a place at the table and you always ...

Whenever I miss a week or whenever I disappear for a couple of weeks and something like that,

you always welcome me back to the table so I thank you deeply for that.

So before I get on with the actual boundaries and healthy boundaries,

I want to just thank nine people that are just incredible this week.

So it's Cheryl, Susan, Jane, Ankita, Dan, Cassie, Melanie, and Joan.

Thank you so much, 40 coffees.

That's amazing.

That really does make a difference, and all of you make a difference.

Just huge thank you.

And Reishin, an old friend of mine, and her teacher was Jun Po as well,

and always lovely to see that name pop up from Hollow Bones then.

Thank you, Reishin.

Deep bow to you.

So if you do wanna support the podcast or join my weekly calm, just head over to stevenwebb.uk.

The link is in the show notes.

But let's talk

about boundaries because that's what I really want to talk about So I often end up having

conversations with people about boundaries,

and they often ask me what do I think about them and should I, set them?

Or what do you think of these boundaries?

And I had a conversation a little while ago with my daughter about it and she said, "Oh,

you ought to make a podcast about this."

So I'm making a podcast about it.

Thank you, Kember, and thank you for the reminder.

But these are just my thoughts.

I'm not an expert on setting boundaries.

I'm not a psychologist, psychotherapist.

I'm not any of these things.

I'm just someone that, yeah, I suppose really I had to set boundaries in my life because I have carers.

I have 24-hour care.

They're in my life, they're in my business, they're in my privacy all the time.

They have to shower me, they have to do the most intimate things with me.

And I feel a lot of the time that I want to shut the world out.

You know, when I wake up in the morning to be able to get out of bed and go

and have a shower just by myself.

I think someone years ago said to me, "If you could do one thing for an hour that you're able

bodied, what you would do?"

Now, and of course when I was 20 I would have said something different to when I was 25.

And I often say something different than what people would think I say.

And it's one of two things: A, I would just run constantly until I was absolutely exhausted.

Because I feel the exhaustion in my mind but I never feel it in my body.

I miss that feeling of being so tired because when you're really tired or when you're really angry

or when you're really feeling something body-wide,

'cause I don't feel anything below my nipples and I don't feel anything...

Should I say that?

I've said it now.

I don't feel anything on the lower part of my arms, I don't feel my hands.

So because I don't feel any of that, I never really feel absolutely exhausted, and I miss that.

I

miss that wh-when you sit down in a layby, 'cause I used to run cross country,

and feel absolutely like you cannot do anything more.

That's the point when I think you feel most alive, you feel most in the body.

So it'd be that or it would be just to have a shower by myself, it's those little things that...

And I could set boundaries that if my phone goes you gotta disappear out of the house.

But I can't set boundaries about, you oughta stay away from me if I'm prickly some days.

I've got to always let the world in.

So I've learned that to get the wisdom and strength to allow the world in rather than set boundaries.

I think that's why I sit on the resistance of boundaries because I think it makes,

not so much it makes you soft, that's not the right phrase, but let me try to articulate it.

I think when you're genuinely practicing

to try to be wiser and stronger, it's no good not going to the gym if you're trying to build strength.

If you're really trying to s- build wisdom and resistance and courage,

it's no good not going to the places that are triggering you.

If you really wanna learn how to be calm, spend some time with your family.

They're the ones that trigger you most.

I'm in the council.

God, I get triggered there.

But that's where I learn most.

That's where my practice is.

So if you don't ...

If you draw the lines and you have walls so tall, and you have no gates to let anybody in,

and you don't go anywhere, you will end up not being able to deal with the world.

And then when you do go out and face the world,

you might have to go somewhere and there is people around, you don't know how to say,

you don't know what to say, you gonna think, you're gonna fumble, and you end up without the wisdom

and strength and the courage and the resistance and all those things to be able to deal with the world.

And I-- that's where I stand on the healthy boundary.

A healthy boundary is, I'm not my best today.

I'm gonna struggle today, so perhaps today I'm gonna close the gate.

But today, next day I'm feeling a bit stronger,

so I'm gonna go out into the world and I'm gonna strengthen that.

And then eventually you'll have more and more days where you are stronger, you are doing better.

So is there any place where boundaries should be?

Absolutely, and I think a healthy boundary between two people,

a healthy boundary between family maybe where you can look at each other and you can make an

agreement But again, it's not a wall.

It's not a absolute if you do this, I will do that.

And I'm trying to think of examples on the fly but y-y-you might have a boundary of, "Look,

if you go and kiss somebody, that's across the line.

That to me is cheating."

Or If you text someone i- in a certain way, that's cheating.

They're healthy boundaries to have.

They're good conversations to have.

They're your red lines.

But when you have a boundary of You know, you always have to treat me this way,

you always have to do these things, and if I get triggered by this, and this, you can never do that."

They're unhealthy boundaries.

They're ones that ...

Because let's be real, we're human, and by the time we're probably seven years old,

we've got a lot of baggage, let alone 12, and 30, and 40.

So if you're in a relationship, you're probably above 20 really or maybe a teenager,

but by then you've got a lot of triggers.

You've got a lot of stuff going on in your life.

You've got a lot of stuff from your childhood.

You're gonna be triggered.

There's gonna be something the partner's gonna say and do.

You know, the best way of dealing with that is building your wisdom and building your strengths to

be able to go, "Okay, I'm triggered here, but that's okay because I'm not gonna actually react in a bad way.

I'm gonna understand that they didn't mean to do it" Because I don't...

I really genuinely believe that people don't mean to be nasty.

No one wakes up in the morning ... i'm gonna rephrase that.

I don't think the general person, and I'm talking about really 99.9% of people wake up in the

morning and go, "I'm gonna be rude today.

Everywhere I drive I'm gonna curse and shout at people.

I'm gonna shout at my partner and I'm gonna be abusive.

I'm gonna do all these things.

I'm gonna ..."

Y- I don't believe people do.

I believe people at heart want to be compassionate and kind.

But I believe with all our baggage and all our things, I think we, we learn to react and we get

triggered, and we don't have the strength, and wisdom,

and courage to always be able to deal with these situations.

So if you're in a relationship and you start to really have too many walls, that's not loving.

That's not compassionate.

That's not saying, "Hey, I love you, and I'm gonna have compassion for you because I'm going to

understand you.

I'm going to understand that some things will trigger you, and it's not personal to me."

Because very often when someone does trigger us, it's got nothing to do with them.

It's because something else that happened to us So I think a healthy boundary is, look,

these are the things that I struggle with, and if you do these things, I might be triggered,

but it doesn't mean you cannot do them.

It just means be aware and try to be more conscious of what triggers me.

But I'm not gonna hate you.

I'm not gonna fall out of love with you

just because we make mistakes.

Apart from those red lines I said a minute ago, I'm not talking about red lines.

I think they're totally different.

And what do the Buddhists say?

What do the real wise people say about this and over the years?

Well, they didn't really have boundaries.

There's not really a word for boundary in any of the text that I looked at,

and I've never really read about boundaries, so it's a really new modern thing.

I think it's a modern word.

Same as triggers, really, but triggers, they are translatable to years ago.

I think humans have always had triggers.

Animals have triggers.

Certain things frighten my dog, and whenever that happened in future, he was triggered.

So I think they are there, but...

And the closest word they probably have is about our own conduct.

How do we respond?

The rules for me.

And they have a word

sila, which is our own conduct.

What are we responsible for?

They're not rules for you.

And we have the precepts, and they all point inwards to how we show up.

And even if someone shows up really badly,

and I've said this to many people when they come and complain about somebody else, "What should I do?"

I say, "Well, who are you?

Who are you in this situation?

Would you retaliate?

Would you do the same thing?"

"Well, I feel like it."

"But is that you?

Is that your foundations?"

No.

Be you.

It's much easier to be you.

It's much easier to be who we are because when we're not, we get in a whole lot of trouble.

That's one thing for certain And I think with Buddhism, it's very much...

Or I think with wisdom, let's replace Buddhism with wisdom.

I think wisdom is guarding the doors,

knowing what we're feeling like, how are we showing up?

And don't put yourself in the worst positions that you are gonna be triggered if someone or if a

situation is going to really push your buttons.

But again, that's down to our boundaries.

And going back to relationship, if you're in a relationship that you've literally gotta read rules

day in and day out of what boundaries are,

you may be in the wrong relationship There's no perfect relationship,

there's no perfect partner because even if the perfect partner was a mirror of us we wouldn't get

on with them at all And I've said in other podcasts, we're always attracted to what's missing within.

You know, the quiet person is attracted to the loud person.

The person that cannot make a decision is attracted to the confident person.

It's because we wanna grow those voices within and we take

the shortcut and we get other people to fill those holes.

That's why when you split up in a relationship you end up like, "Oh, a piece of me is gone.

I can't live without them," because they completed you.

That's another podcast.

We need to learn to complete ourselves, become whole, learn to have all these voices,

and I spoke about that quite often.

And I think going back to the bubble problem and the meditation,

I've seen it so many times that the bubble meditation that y- you sit and you imagine the world

keeping the world out, that you're safe, that you're okay in the bubble.

Now then, I'm not knocking them completely because sometimes you need those meditations.

Sometimes you need to be able to have some kind of thing around you to prevent the storm.

But a healthy courageous person that is in the right frame of

mind at that time that has built the courage and strength for the resistance probably wouldn't need

that on an ongoing basis because they've built the muscle to be able to cope with it.

They can sit in the storm and go, "I've got this.

I'm okay with this."

It doesn't mean to say it's not, like really frustrating.

It doesn't mean to say it's not hard.

It doesn't mean to say we don't make massive mistakes And I gotta be honest, life will not honor your bubble.

Somebody always wanders in.

Somebody's always got that something to say that you cannot get rid of.

That's the reality So about the garden and Katherine's idea about the garden, I do like that.

Grow your garden.

Grow your plants and your different things that...

Just picture a garden and picture all the different parts of it

and grow them as wisdom and strength and courage.

And just slowly take down the walls, take down the fences, open your garden up, and be ready.

Be okay with what comes in And when you grow enough, you can genuinely take that fence panel down.

A boundary that never comes down was never protection.

It becomes a prison.

So many people end up sitting in that prison 'cause they no longer have the abilities to be able to

deal with when the wall does come down.

And we see it in relationships when we build like an iron armor around our hearts.

Our hearts are the greatest muscle that will ever be.

It can feel the most amazing heart orgasms that just feel amazing in that moment where you're

driving the car and your favorite tune comes on and life cannot get any better.

But it can also feel the most anxious and the most deepest pain,

and neither one of them do any serious damage.

Only in our heads.

The heart's okay it's okay to protect something tender until it becomes stronger.

It's not okay to refuse the world So let, thank you to everybody.

Thank you to Katherine.

I really do appreciate your email, and I've got lots of ideas for meditations and podcasts.

I'm slowly getting around to doing them.

So just a question for you, where in your life has a wall quietly become a prison?

You can always head over to my website and send me a message, or just put that in the reviews or

the comments, especially on Spotify you can put comments.

But take care of yourself, and thank you for being there.

I really do appreciate it and I love you

Gates, Not Thorns: Are Your Boundaries a Prison?

In this episode

With gratitude to

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The companion meditation

The transcript

One calm email.
Every Sunday.

Gates, Not Thorns: Are Your Boundaries a Prison?

In this episode

With gratitude to

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The companion meditation

The transcript

More honest conversations

One calm email. Every Sunday.

One calm email.
Every Sunday.