Boundaries And How To Manage Them

I’m not sure whether this is going to work because I’ve got it sideways and Facebook doesn’t seem to like it. But anyway, good morning everybody, and welcome to the Secret Art of Huna Live, Facebook Live on a Saturday morning. Bit late this morning for two reasons.

One is, I lost track of time while I was doing my last minute Christmas chores, and the other is, I had the washing machine on and it went into spin mode. Now I could have lied and I could have said it was all about technology, but actually nothing to do with the technology. I just lost track of time, as sometimes happens.

Anyway, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Dr. Jane Lewis, and I am a coach and a teacher of Huna, and I help women who are stuck or burnt out or not realising their potential or feeling just generally miserable, to overcome these things by helping them identify and release their baggage, and get a sense of purpose. And I do this mostly using Huna, the secret, carefully guarded teachings and practices of the ancient Hawaiians.

So today, boundaries. Now, the ancient Hawaiians didn’t have a lot to say specifically about boundaries. But there’s a lot about boundaries that’s kind of inherent in the teachings of Huna. So why are boundaries important?

Well, many of us, particularly women, we’re brought up, or if you’re my age at least, you were brought up very much, there was a kind of, a little bit of a seen and not heard, and girls, well, when I was growing up, we were at the boundary of girls staying at home, getting married and having kids, and girls going out and going to work, and getting jobs and getting a proper education, getting a higher education and so forth.

But, girls weren’t really supposed to express their needs, they were supposed to take on the needs of other people. And I think that’s why feminism was so powerful, because it allowed us to start to express our needs and to express to ask to have our needs met.

So boundaries are really important in terms of stepping up and saying, this is what I need, and this is how you can meet it. Boundaries are important as well because nobody wants to be a doormat. It’s not comfortable being a doormat. It’s certainly not a great model for your kids if you’re a doormat, doormat, not a good place. But the problem is that if you don’t enforce your boundaries, you definitely become a doormat.

If you’re in a difficult relationship, expressing your boundaries and asserting your boundaries and doing what needs to be done to assert your boundaries, really, really important. So boundaries are important on so many levels. So what about them, then?

From where I sit, a boundary really, the first thing with a boundary is to understand where your boundaries are, to clarify yourself, what your boundaries are in life. What do you absolutely need, how do you need your loved ones to be with you? How do you need to be with them? Understand that.

Have a real clarity around what your personal boundaries are, whether it’s in terms of your relationships, whether it’s in terms of the work space, if you have your own company, in terms of the company. Your suppliers, your customers.

Be really clear about what your personal boundaries are because the more clarity you’ve got about your boundaries, the easier it is to defend them. One of the problems when we don’t defend our boundaries is that we end up in a kind of, somewhere between martyr and victim. We’re a martyr because, well, people do this stuff to me, nobody listens to me, nobody takes my needs into account. Nobody takes my feelings into account. And we become quite, we can become quite whiny sometimes.

So, if you want to avoid stepping into that martyrdom or that victim mode, then boundaries and holding your boundaries are really important. In the work I do with the organisation called One of Many, which is all about empowering women to become leaders and to step out of being stressed, we talk a lot about the martyr and the victim, and we talk a lot about Superwoman.

And we talk about the hearth and the realm, and the distinction between, from the space of, if you like, the mother, the hearth, who are the people close to you, who are the people who you really would sacrifice for? And then your realm, which is more a queenly space, it’s your kingdom. So you may not sacrifice for everybody in your realm, you may not totally put yourself out for everybody who is in your realm, whereas you will for those that are in your hearth.

And the more clarity you have around, who is it that I would sacrifice for, who is it that I would really go out of my way for, put everything down for no matter what, and who is it that actually, yes, I’ll help you if I can, but I’m not going to put down everything here and now in order to support you.

Having that clarity is so powerful.

Stephen Covey, who was a great management writer. He identified three kind of spheres, and there’s the sphere of control, that’s the things that you’ve got control over. There’s the sphere of influence, that’s the thing that you have, you don’t necessarily have control, but you’ve got influence.

And then beyond that, there’s everything else. And so many of us, we spend time worrying in the everything else, we spend time worrying about those areas where we have no control, and we don’t have much in the way of influence. And really, if you want to be happy, then focus on what’s in your control, what’s in your area of influence, how can you expand your area of control? How can you expand your area of influence?

But if you don’t have that clarity, it’s really, really difficult to maintain the boundaries. ‘Cause boundaries are important energetically as well, you know that feeling of, you’re dealing with, it’s almost that sort of Kafka thing, but you’re dealing with authority.

Let’s say, right now in the UK, we’re coming up to the end of the tax year. And a lot of people are having to deal with the tax office. Now the tax office can be incredibly slow and difficult to get hold of. Not much you can do about it except sit on the phone.

Now you can get really stressed about the fact that the tax office is slow and difficult to get hold of, or you can just accept the fact, put the phone on live speaker, get on with doing other things, so that when the person at the other end of the phone turns up, then you deal with them. But otherwise, you just get so stressed because I can’t get hold of anybody. Well no, you probably can’t, they’re busy, they’ll come.

So, being aware of what is in your control, and what isn’t. And letting go of that which isn’t in your control. But one of the challenges that a lot of people, particularly women find, is actually expressing your boundaries. So it’s one thing to identify your boundaries and we need to do that work. But then, how do you express them? How do you stick to them, how do you tell other people, this is a boundary for me.

In the Hawaiian system, as I say, there wasn’t a lot about boundaries, but there was an awful lot of expectation of how you should behave, so the deeper meaning of aloha, the words in Hawaiian, they’re all about humility, they’re about supporting one another. They’re about persistent perseverance, about coming from a space of love. When you come from a space of love, it’s much easier to actually express your boundaries.

When you say lovingly to somebody, you know, I know I’ve always done that for you, but it doesn’t work for me anymore. Things are going to have to change. When you do that from a space of just love and acceptance and a sense that this is the right thing to be doing or saying, it’s so much easier for the other person to accept.

If you come at it from a kind of martyry, victimy, whiny space, well, I’m sick of this, because you’re always imposing on me, and you never do anything for me. It doesn’t land in the same way.

So coming from that space of, this is how it is, this is how it’s going to be, and here’s my boundary. So have the clarity, be willing to express the boundary in a measured way, not in a whiny, whingey, not from that space of fear or that space of just stressed out, do it from a place where you’re a bit more relaxed, a bit calmer, and if you can’t express the boundary when you’re calm, wait until you are calm and then express the boundary.

Another piece is to look at your beliefs about yourself. And this is very much from the Huna tradition, because Huna’s all about identifying beliefs that limit you, identifying emotions that hold you back, emotional baggage that you’ve been holding on to.

So, identify beliefs that might stop you expressing your boundaries. If you believe you’re not good enough, if you don’t, if you believe that you don’t deserve to have the career you want, the relationship you want. If you believe that you don’t deserve to have kids who respond to you in a certain way, then that’s going to impact how you behave.

So identify the beliefs that stop you being able to express the boundaries, the beliefs that stop you being able to believe that you have the right to have boundaries in place.

So, three things really. One is, sit down and identify what you believe you want your boundaries to do, to be. Second is, figure a way of expressing them, but do it from that measured, centred, grounded place, not from a place of stressed out and shouty or whiny. And the third one is, figure out the beliefs that are holding you back from actually being able to have the boundaries that you want to have. So I hope that’s been useful.

As ever, if you want to know more, you can look at the Facebook group, which is Secret Art of Huna For Powerful Transformation, that’s the women’s group. I have various things on the page. I’ve now got a pioneers group, which is also for women, which is, you can find about from the page. And if you want to jump on a call, jump on a call and see how I can help you.

So the only thing left to do is to wish you a very, very happy Christmas and a prosperous, abundant New Year, and may your boundaries all be good ones. Take care and I’ll talk to you again in the new year. Bye.

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