At times, the wisest, most skillful, and most compassionate action is to establish a boundary with another person. To stand up and assertively say No. To move in an empowered and swift way to protect your own integrity. To privilege your own autonomy and interiority. To meet narcissism, abuse, and neglect with a fierce and direct response.
This is not only the case with “external” others – other people in our lives – but also with the multitude of “internal” others who surge out of the psychic underworld and take form as voices and figures of the interior landscape.
You might recognize them by their predictable refrains: “There is something wrong with you. You have failed. No one will ever love you unless you change and become someone different. You are not okay. You have fallen short. You have done life wrong. You are no too slow, too fat, too much. You are uninteresting. You do not belong. You aren't lovable as you are. Your sensitivities and eccentricities are not welcome here.”
These are the voices of the past, the internalized shadow of a culture of materialism and greed, of the lineages of trans-generational trauma and trance. The voices of disembodiment, insensitivity, of a societal and global ego that has fallen out of communion with the natural world, the body, and the imaginal realms.
These internal aggressors that enter into an open, sensitive nervous system must also be met with discernment and boundaries. Realizing, through our physical sensations and emotional guidance systems those moments when we have fallen out of alignment with Source, when we drop out of the here and now and into the “there and then," enables us to engage in dialogue with these figments and figures . . . to claim and proclaim our basic goodness. Declare again and again, with sober and clear knowing, that sensitivity is not pathology, that shaky tenderness is not pathology… but path.
You will no longer accept their conclusions, reality tunnels, and the lenses through which they have come to see things. Cleanse perception with clear-seeing and the immensity of your capacity for love.
In the year ahead, take the risk of telling a newer, truer story, dreaming into life the sense of self you have always known is you. Spin out a truer tale, weave the golden thread of your wisdom into the cloth in which you wrap yourself. Allow yourself to be tuned and styled, woven into ever-changing form by the Great Weaver Herself . . . invite the true vision to be revealed. You are the vessel in which she can come alive here again and again.
