So I want to have better boundaries. To have good boundaries, I would say, is a practice of locating and addressing your own inner experience while honoring and recognizing the experience of other people and the world around you in a responsive, interactive way That doesn't abandon yourself and doesn't abandon relationship.
Am I?
Hi. Welcome to the lettuce loves you, the Podcast where we explore belonging and nourishment through the perceptions of body, Earth and community. I'm your host. Jeanell Innerarity, for over 25 years, I've been helping people come home to themselves through somatic or body based practice, dream work, nature, connection and relationship with self, other, humans and spirit. I want to get beyond belonging as a buzzword and beyond nourishment as a fitness strategy, and get to the heart of what it really means to belong and what it really means to be nourished. Each of my guests has a unique take on these ideas, and I hope you'll take home a greater sense of what belonging and nourishment mean to you. I hope you benefit from listening to the lettuce loves you, and if you do, it would mean a great deal to me, if you would like rate and share the show so that more people can discover it and get The same benefit. Now let's dive into today's episode.
Hi, hey, y'all Jeanell Here. This is a solo episode, and I'm actually on the road, so I'm just recording straight into my computer today. But I really want to talk about boundaries. One of the most common reasons that people come to me, they fill out their intake form and they say, Hey, I really want to work with you, what I really want to work on is how to have better boundaries. And this is so common that I want to address it in a way that maybe you haven't heard before, because people will often say to me, how do I have better boundaries? And what they mean, A lot of times when when people say, I want to have better boundaries, I find that as we dig deeper and as we really work on boundaries, what does it mean to have boundaries? What are boundaries? Often what people mean is, I don't want people to hurt me anymore. I want to be able to see far enough into the future to be able to sense my environment in a different way, so that I don't get hurt so much, or so I don't allow myself to be taken advantage of, or so I don't enter into harmful or damaging or abusive relationships. And that's what people are meaning by boundaries. Maybe you mean that by boundaries and boundaries can help with those things, but I'd like to really unpack what it means to have boundaries and what boundaries actually are. So Merriam Webster classic dictionary says a boundary is something that indicates or fixes a limit or extent, and the Cambridge dictionary includes the limit of what someone considers to be acceptable behavior in its definitions. So the issue of boundaries is splashed all over the internet in this profoundly unbounded way. And I want to get back to what it really means, because I think that it's not this hard line, and often people are talking about boundaries, and particularly when I see like memes or videos online, or when clients come to me and they're talking about how they think about boundaries, it's like this hard line, like I need to be able to say no. I need to be able to push people out of my life. I need to be able to not get into situations. And the reality is, you're a living organism. And by nature of being a living organism, your job is to interface with the world and maintain homeostasis. So you're always taking In new input and sensing your environment and putting things out there and interacting and things have to come in and things have to go out, or you wouldn't be alive if that wasn't happening physically and energetically. So having good boundaries is not about having a hard brick wall between yourself and the world to keep yourself safe, unless that's what you need in a specific moment, right? Like in this moment, I need to put up my shell. I need to put the shields up, hard, hard. Now, there are moments when that's absolutely appropriate and called for. But if you're walking around the world like that. That's not what I would call good boundaries. That's what I would call guarded, shielded in a constant state of hyper vigilance. And sometimes that's what you need to get through something. Sometimes that's how you need to respond until you have another option. But it's not restorative. It's not regenerative for your nervous system, and it's not relational. It's not going to help you have better relationships. It's going to keep you in a state of high stress and push people out of your life. And what boundaries mean? Actually differs cross culturally quite a lot. So the issue of boundaries becomes even more complicated when we speak cross culturally. So how we touch each other, what we define as our personal space, what we think is okay to say or not say in a given situation, or how involved your mother in law should be in your parenting, for example, is highly subjective and culturally significant. So one culture's really clear boundary about not kissing someone you just met without consent might be the height of rudeness and a really cold rebuff to someone from a culture where you kiss both cheeks and maybe the lips of someone you just met. So boundaries are not universally fixed. How we define what our boundary is, what is okay, what comes in, what comes out, what our sense of self is, what our sense of safety is, what our sense of space is, is highly subjective, it's highly cultural, it's highly situational, and it's about awareness. So during the pandemic, for example, when when it was really the height of it--I know we're still in it, but the height of the the lockdown and the confusion and the what's happening, and there's this scary virus, and how do we figure it out? Many of our boundaries changed, our personal boundaries, our social boundaries were challenged and were redefined, because suddenly what we felt was safe and what we felt kept us healthy, physically, socially, emotionally was radically different for each person given this new challenge that we hadn't had to face before in the same way, and so we're still, as a society, negotiating and renegotiating, and there will never be a unanimous agreement on what the right answer really is, because it's actually different for everyone. So in nutrition or in herbalism, we call that bioindividuality, right? Everyone the same the same herb, or the same medicine or the same food that is life saving and amazing and health giving and wonderful for one person, is toxic and debilitating and causes all kinds of problems. For another person, it's the same input, but the boundary is different because it's interfacing with a different biological ecosystem that person. And so the same thing is true in this renegotiation of what it means to live in the post pandemic world, what is safe for you, what you perceive to be a good idea, might be radically different than the person next to you. And it's not necessarily that, I mean, there are some really off the wall things that are kind of definitely wrong biologically, but within the realms of reasonability, there are things that are right for you because you're you, and there are things that are right for somebody else because they're them, and it's not wrong on either side, but you have a different boundary, and so the relationship part becomes how you negotiate both of you having your needs met, and both of you feeling reasonably as Safe and met and seen and comfortable and healthy as possible, given the complexity of the situation. So nutritionally, an example, that's really common, and that comes up a lot is allergies, right? And this is such a great example of boundaries. And I have a sort of a funny, not funny, personal story. Worry about allergies. I'm severely allergic to cats, and I was living with my now husband, who had a cat at the time, and I was having a big reaction when we I think this was when we first started dating. I wasn't even living there, but I was having this big reaction to the cat, and we went to the health food store to try to get some herbs and supplements to help reduce the reaction that my immune system was having to this allergen, to this cat dander. And the person working at the health food store said, Oh, I don't really know, but I think it's sort of like with the peanut allergy, where you take a bunch of peanuts and then eventually you're not allergic to peanuts anymore. So if you just rub your face in the cat every day, you will eventually just not be allergic to the cat. So I'm glad I didn't take her advice. I probably would have died like I was covered in hives already, and the good advice was not for me to go home and cross my boundary and take in more of the allergen, just like when someone has a peanut allergy, the advice is not to go home and eat a jar of peanut butter. The advice is to go to your doctor and have very, very microscopic doses slowly building up to something like a teaspoon or a tablespoon of peanut flour in a controlled setting, where you're making sure that you're not having a big reaction, because you're trying to titrate, you're trying to
get just enough response that it doesn't go over your boundary, over the edge of your immune system, And it reduces your immune system's sense of threat. So this is also and a certain point, your immune system goes, Oh, maybe this peanut allergen is not actually such a massive threat. Maybe, maybe we can tolerate it a little bit without having a huge reaction. It's like that, personally, socially, emotionally as well. If you are pushing yourself over an edge, oh, I should be okay with this. I should want to socialize in this way. I should feel safe and comfortable in this. And you're going like all the way over the edge without titrating, without sort of sensing, well, what's actually okay in a microscopic dose? What's okay in a very small dose, a little bit at a time, what can I tolerate? And build up from there just pushing a little bit at the edge, then you're going to have this huge backlash. You're going to cross your own boundaries, you're going to want to shut down, you're going to want to put up that wall. I actually see this a lot in open relationship questions, where people have an internal, a mental idea of, I'm more open, I'm more liberated, If I can push myself to be in a more open relationship, or have more partners, or go to a sex party or something that that that really, it's like expansive, and I'm more open, and that's great If you're genuinely open in that way, right? If that feels aligned and energizing and you feel fulfilled, that's great. You're titrated to a point at a level, bio, individually, where you feel enlivened by that, then, by all means, follow that. But if you are pushing yourself over the edge because of a mental idea of how that's supposed to be, you're crossing your own boundaries and not actually listening to what your nervous system is saying in the moment, which in one moment or one time in your life maybe, yeah, go for it, and at another time in your life, maybe, whoa, back off. Let's be with one partner or just with yourself. All of that is okay. The same thing happens in monogamy as well, where, if somebody's like, really pushing themselves to stay in a relationship that actually doesn't feel safe, relaxed, comfortable, but they have the idea that they're supposed to be there and they can't explore and kind of go to where their nervous system actually feels aligned and refreshed and rejuvenated and able to respond and interact with the world In a healthful way.,Then it's sort of an ongoing contraction, and that's going to have to come out somewhere else, whether in health or in an affair or in relationship conflict or in nightmares or chronic pain or overeating, like these things come out somewhere if you're not attending to your own sense of boundary and responsiveness to the world, that energy is going to go somewhere, and that's happening at the cellular level all the time as well. So your cells, like individual cells, have these little lipid bilayer membranes, and they have all these little gating channels that Say yes or no to different molecules, different substances coming and going. Yes, we'll open to that one. No, we won't open to that one. Yes, we need to receive more of that. No, we need to keep that out. And all day long, this is happening billions and billions of times throughout your body, and if you don't have the right nutrients, or if you're under a high level of stress, or you have certain patterns set in place in your body, those channels get funky. They get disrupted in a way that allows in things that maybe shouldn't come in, and doesn't allow in things, or doesn't have enough of something that you actually really need, or if you don't have enough nutrients to maintain that lipid bilayer in a good way, particularly really healthy fats, you have fuzzy, fuzzy boundaries at the cellular level. And so this is microcosm and macrocosm, right? This is happening all the time, and we can from the cellular level, we can zoom out to the Earth's atmosphere. We have this atmosphere, this ozone layer, that is a boundary. When we released a lot of chemicals into the atmosphere that made that boundary a little bit too open, Suddenly there was too much UV coming through. And we need UV. It's important. But there was too much of it coming through. We had to reassert that boundary. We had to change the chemical output we were putting out into the world. So this negotiation of boundary is happening all the time, on every level, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, ecosystem wide, universe wide, and it's a constant negotiation. We're constantly re evaluating what the right boundary is based on maintaining homeostasis, based on maintaining health and vibrancy. But when there's a pattern set in place that says something like the world is dangerous and terrifying, and therefore I must have very hard boundaries up against everything. Then there's almost like a calcification that takes place where actually the good things can't get in either. And the same thing in the other direction, if a boundary has been so violated that there's not even a sense that you can hold a boundary, There's so much permeability, all kinds of things get in that aren't really supposed to get in because there's not enough of a boundary in place. There's not the pattern, there's not the template for that boundary in the first place. So the negotiation of boundaries in relationship means that we have to figure out, on one hand, how to tolerate differences and how to allow for the beautiful diversity of life and perspective that's around us all the time, and interface with that without losing ourselves, and on the other hand, not force ourselves to tolerate something that's causing us harm. And harm is different for every person. Harm
looks really different for every person. So some people might have a very high threshold for extreme sports and really aren't harmed by something like that, and somebody else might be doing really well if they manage to walk around the block that day where their body's at. And so everybody has a different threshold and a different a different need. So if we go back to the cat example, right? I'm allergic to cats. I've tried all the conventional approaches, I've tried all the holistic therapies, I've tried all the things. I'm just allergic to cats. Maybe that will change in the future. It actually wasn't that bad when I was younger. Some stuff happened with my immune system. That's where I'm at right now. It could change, but right now I have a pretty hard boundary about hanging out with cats, because it's really unpleasant for me. Some people have nine cats in their house, and they're healthy, and it makes them happy and they don't have a reaction. And I can't go to those people's houses because I would be covered in hives from head to toe, and I'd probably have an asthma attack, and it would just not be fun for anybody. But there's nothing wrong with loving cats. There's nothing wrong with sharing their home with cats. If that feels good to you, it doesn't feel good to me. It's the wrong thing for me personally. So I have a really clear boundary with going to your house if you have a bunch of cats, even if you have one cat, really, it's kind of a challenge. But I can still love you. I can still love cats. I can still give you a cat themed gift for your birthday, if I want to, I can still scratch your cat behind the ears, go wash my hands and take some nettle tea, but I don't have to judge you for loving cats. But if you brought your cat to my house when you visited because you didn't want to be away from your cat, you'd then be crossing my boundary, and you'd then be violating the terms of our Relationship, and I would have to ask myself some questions. I'd have to wonder, did you want to harm me? Like, why? Like, if you know this about me, what were you thinking? Or are you just so in love with your cat that you can't see anything from anyone else's perspective. You can't be away from your cat, and your need for that is stronger than your awareness of my need to breathe, or is there something else going on? I don't know, but I would have to ask you what that was all about, and that would be me being in relationship, navigating boundaries together, or I could just sit there and I could have hives building up on my body and make polite small talk and build resentment the whole time and then complain about you and your cats when you left my house and never ask you what it was all about. And that would be me violating my own boundaries for fear of disturbing the relationship, which is a valid survival tactic in certain situations, right? Sometimes we don't feel safe, whether it's an imagined lack of safety or an actual lack of safety, to hold our boundaries in certain situations, and we kind of wait out until something's over. That's a really complex interaction. I would say that more often than not, you have more agency than you think you do, and that it's often more about being able to tolerate the other person's reaction. Like, if I say, Wow, you brought your cat to my house. I don't know if you remember that I was allergic to cats. And if you're emotionally attuned and not so attached in that way and able to kind of hold the big picture, you might say, Oh, I totally forgot. Let me put my cat in the carrier. It's a good temperature outside. I'm gonna crack the windows of my car. The cat will be okay in that space for a little while. We'll keep checking on it, make sure that the cat's safe and you're safe and so sorry, I totally forgot about that, right? You can stay in relationship if you're so attached to that experience in your own like your own sense of safety and boundary that you have to have the cat and you don't appreciate my boundary, you might have a big reaction. You might say, Oh, it's so rude, why don't you love my cat? You don't even love me if you don't love my cat like, I can't believe you said that. That's so rude. You clearly don't want me over here and damage the relationship. But that's not on me, right? That's that's your reaction, and you can have your reaction, but my boundary and communicating it is simply, hey, I have an allergy to this. It gives me hives. I don't know if you remembered that. It's not really okay in my in my home, in my physical space, a lot of times, the way that we perceive that we're unsafe, like we don't want to say something, is actually a fear of tolerating the other person's reaction. And there's a really fine line, because sometimes the other person's reaction is actually unsafe for us and and we are genuinely safer just kind of waiting out something uncomfortable or even a little bit toxic and then setting the boundary later, making the space later. So that comes with practice, that comes with nuanced discernment, staying in touch with your own body, knowing the scenario that you're in, how much emotional work you want to do in a certain situation. So I don't want that to be a hard line thought process either. And I see that a lot in online conversations about boundaries, and people say that they should be able to, in every situation, communicate exactly what they need and know their feelings and know their needs and say it to anyone at any time, and that's this marker of perfect attunement and health. And I really don't agree with that, because we're always navigating, we're always negotiating, we're always figuring out what's right for us in the moment, sometimes we don't know until after an interaction what's really right for us, and we learn from that, and the next time we apply what we learned. And I look at situations that I navigate now in my 40s, that in my 20s, I wouldn't have been able to say anything about or ask anything about, or even know how I really felt about them, necessarily. And now it's quite I don't even think about it. It's quite easy, because I've had all this life experience and practice and worked on myself and explored my capacity. And it's it's very easy to navigate certain things now that would have been almost impossible for me 20 years ago. So
we're always evolving. We're always learning. But I love what one of my teachers, my process work, teacher, Dr Arnold Mindell, says about this, this type of dynamic where we're figuring out what's internal, what's external, what do we communicate? What do we not is, and I'm paraphrasing here. Right? But basically, if you avoid a conflict in a relationship or in the outside world, you start a war inside yourself. And what he means by that is if you are struggling, struggling, struggling with something, but you don't hold your own sense of, your own boundaries, your own needs, your own sort of right to have a presence in the relationship, Then you will take that inside of yourself and you'll wrestle with it, and you'll say, oh, I should have said this, and they said this, and how dare they say this? And why didn't I say this? And oh, maybe I'm the problem, or maybe they're the problem. And you have this whole sort of inner battle that really could have been taken into the relationship channel and worked on there. That's actually where it exists again. That's very situational in terms of your capacity and safety to do so, but I think it's a really important point, especially if you have a history of abuse or if you tend to be a people pleaser, or if which is a valid coping mechanism to navigate the world and can be really helpful in reducing conflict in certain ways, but then you can't just let the conflict totally go away. If you tend to be responding to the world rather than taking up your own space in the world because it that has been unsafe for you at some point or never been accessible to you. You'll you'll sometimes take that war inside yourself and at the physical level, sometimes this goes very far down the rabbit hole into actual autoimmune processes. On the flip side of this. I actually see this a lot in activist oriented spaces, where people have experienced so much internal repression or societal repression or pain or trauma that they take it fully externally and don't take it internally at all. And so there's this big impulse to change the world, to go to battle with the powers and the systems and the bureaucracy and the government and and to really like fight at the systems level constantly, to be in this constant fight. I'm going to change the world. I'm going to change other people. I'm going to change the system without actually addressing the internal the internal conflict, the internal pain, the internal boundary crossing that's happening. And so there's an impulse to go out and cross boundaries externally and again, sometimes that's warranted. Sometimes that is exactly the thing that has to happen. But if that's an ongoing thing where there's no feedback loop, there's no sense of, oh, actually, I've become the aggressor now, or I'm insensitive to the people who are sitting right next to me, because I'm so focused on the big picture that I've lost my empathy for someone who's just sitting right next to me and may have a need or may have a different opinion or value than I have, That's just externalizing the conflict, and it's the opposite side of the same coin. And so sometimes that comes out really passive aggressively or provocatively in a way that is also unbound. Read this demand for peace, this demand that the world make peace happen, this demand that the world become the parent figure that didn't meet you individually can can look like a desire for peace and a desire to stop injustice and fighting and war, but it's actually externalizing the inner war.
It's not an absence of anger or conflict.
It's actually an absence of internal harmony. The same way that a healthy one on one relationship, a friendship or a romantic relationship, when it's healthy, it doesn't mean there's an absence of conflict. It means that there's an attunement and a constant conscious renegotiation of boundaries that allows the system to maintain a type of homeostasis that promotes life and health. And so if you're looking internally, sometimes people do this through meditation, kind of an escapist way of approaching meditation. I just want to feel happy all the time. I just want to feel at peace all the time. If you're doing this internally or externally, demanding that the world understand everything about you and make sure that everything is met to your specifications and that the world meet you in this perfect kind of way, whether you're internalizing or externalizing it, It's still a rigidity that doesn't allow for a real, responsive, alive, regenerative negotiation of boundaries that support life, that support relationship. So what does it mean to have boundaries? It means to have good boundaries, right? This question that people come up with a lot, I want to have better boundaries. To have good boundaries, I would say, is a practice of locating and addressing your own inner experience while honoring and recognizing the experience of other people and the world around you in a responsive, interactive way that doesn't abandon yourself and doesn't abandon relationship. So how do you do that? I believe, fundamentally, it starts with the body. I've made a lot of references to bio individuality and the biological processes of boundaries and awareness of what's happening in your body. How your body is responding to a situation is really helpful and nuanced. Because if your body is accustomed to being in a state of hyper arousal, reacting to everything in a really intense way, or hypo right, arousal being very sort of non reactive, when maybe it would benefit you to have more responsiveness. If you're if you're stuck in one of those patterns, or fluctuating between those patterns, then what you sense in your body may not be
the same level of intensity
as what's coming at you from the outside world, and as you come back to your embodied awareness, you can start to notice where you're crossing boundaries, both inside of yourself and also outside of yourself. One of the things that I notice when folks tell me that they want to have better boundaries is they're often crossing their own boundaries and crossing boundaries of other people or other situations outside themselves without realizing it, because the perception is, this is how I'm keeping myself safe, or this is how I'm maintaining relationship. So maybe you're pushing yourself too hard. Maybe you're saying yes when you want to say no. Maybe you're pushing limits in your relationships and kind of testing the boundaries of the relationship, straining the relationship in that way. So before you start thinking, how can I set boundaries with other people, and what are other people doing wrong? I want to invite you, if this is a process you're working on, to check in with yourself and first ask yourself, What are your boundaries? And again, they can be different at different times in your life. So ask yourself, what are my boundaries? Where do I actually need them to be more rigid or more loose right now, and you can always be trying that on. You can always be trying that on. It doesn't have to be fixed. You can try it on and say, Oh, no, okay, that was too much or not enough. Is it different at another time than it was at another time in your life, And why? after you become a parent, or after you've had an injury or a trauma, or you've ended a relationship, or you've re entered a relationship, all of these types of things require boundary shifts. So keep reassessing, what are your boundaries right now? And then ask yourself, Am I crossing my own boundaries? How do I know if I'm crossing my own boundaries? How do I recognize the difference? How do I know if I'm crossing my boundaries and being open and trusting in an informed and attuned way, or if I'm just throwing myself into something and not noticing what's around me, not noticing what I'm stepping into because I just want the relationship, or I want the connection, or I want something to work, and I'll cross my own boundaries to try to get there without actually assessing where I am and the parameters of the situation. And then you can check in with that yes or no in your own body. And it's different for everybody, right? Some people have a sense of calm or a sense of easy breathing, or a sense of like an internal smile or an openness for a yes, or tingliness, or like there's something that just feels really, Feels right. and a no might look something like a clenched jaw or a clenched belly or desire to look away, or shortness of breath or clenched fist. There's a often a contraction in the no or a sense of fight in the No, and sometimes they're both happening at the same time. So coming back to this idea that boundaries are not this, like hard, fixed, binary thing, it's like sometimes one part of you says yes, and one part of you says no, and sometimes in relationship, that means, oh, I say a yes to this part, but there's a no, there's a concern about this part, and that's the part that needs to be brought to awareness. And bringing that to awareness might make it available to be worked on, and then it becomes a yes, or it might make it known, and then the whole thing becomes a no. So it's important to pay attention to both parts. If you have a yes no happening, that's one part of you having a firmer boundary and one part of you feeling more open and having a less firm boundary. And they're both true at the same time. And that's okay, two things can be true at the same time. And then you can ask yourself, Am I crossing other boundaries while I'm trying to get my needs met? Do I, for example, feel uncomfortable to ask for something in relationship, so I actually just take it? or am I afraid to assert myself in relationships So then I build resentment, and then I explode and really cross somebody's boundary? Or do I keep myself from being accountable in relationship because I'm afraid of what that's going to mean, And then I actually cross boundaries in that way? Sometimes, if you're long term or chronically unable to assert yourself for some reason, to ask for what you need In relationship, there's an unconscious way in which you might assert yourself, by crossing a boundary, by actually, really going into someone's space in a way that you don't notice, because you feel small internally, or you feel afraid internally, and you don't notice the ways that you're actually crossing somebody's boundary, going into their space because, because you don't identify with that part of yourself. So it's very nuanced, but coming back to that embodied experience and and sensing what feels good to me right now, what doesn't and what am I actually responding to is a really good foundation.
So one of the ways I
like to retrain and recalibrate this embodied awareness is through sitting with plants. in every episode of the lettuce loves you, I ask my guests about a favorite herb or medicinal plant in their lives, or I share one of my own. And for boundaries, there's no better place to start than stinging nettle or Urtica dioica. I first fell in love with stinging nettles when I was woofing work trading on organic farms in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, where nettles were both a food and a weed in abundance. So in Belgium, I was sent out onto a hillside with a large, long handled traditional scythe to cut down this huge stand of nettles. And on this farm, the nettles were kind of the enemy for this farmer. And I remember that even as they were stinging me, I loved them without knowing why. And then, when I was in a small Dutch community just over the border in Germany, the day I arrived, I was served stinging nettle soup, and it was a revelation. It was delicious, it was Hardy. It transformed this plant that the other farmer considered to be a weed into something that was nourishing and convenient. And it was a vegetable. It was it was food. So nettles are amazing at boundaries. You might be surprised to learn that nettles are considered energetically cooling and drying in herbal practice, because their sting feels so hot, but they're cooling. At a deeper level, they calm an over reactive immune system, so they have these little needles that sting you with a mix of chemicals that's complex enough that we don't actually know everything that's in it yet, but some components include histamine, acetylcholine, serotonin. There's a small amount of formic acid, tartaric acid, oxalic acid, and all of these are irritating in the short term, but actually they generally help you in the long term. In fact, I almost never use gloves when I harvest stinging nettles anymore. I just approach them with respect, and I trust that where I get stung is where I need the medicine. But they're showing me what their boundaries are. But it's not a super hard boundary. It's like more like, Hey, I'm going to protect myself, but if you can hang out with me in this Space, I'll be medicine for you. And actually, historically, people use them to flog themselves spiritually, like they would actually hit themselves on the back with nettles as a way to kind of wake up their spirit. Traditionally, for arthritis, for generations, people have run their hands through the live plants. I do that sometimes. If my hands are achy, it seems painful, it is painful, but it's such a common practice that it has a name urtication, and both scientific studies and long standing anecdotal evidence indicate that the this counterintuitive practice of running your hands, your arthritic joints, through a patch of nettles can actually reduce your pain. So the plant transfers its own good boundaries over to you. It's also a tonic for kidneys, for adrenals, for reproductive organs, helps you have a better sense of energy and resiliency in the world. Like hello, good boundaries again. And the fibers of nettles can be used to make fabric, which can be made into clothing. So an actual physical manifestation of boundary between your skin and the outside world. So for sure, you have to approach nettles with respect, but when you do, you are richly rewarded. It's one of the safest general use herbs available. Has a wide range of applications, and it's it's a food herb, so it's an excellent source of iron and calcium and magnesium and silica, all essential biological components of your physical boundaries, important for your blood, for your hair, for your nails, for your bones, for your sense of embodied belonging and a sense of rootedness and grounding in the world. And they're also high in protein. So I mean, you can really it's not just an herb that you would like take a tincture of, you make a soup out of it. It's a food plant, and it reduces histamine response. So I've been talking about allergies in this episode. So if you're having a mast cell activation issue or an excess histamine response like the cat allergy I described, they can quickly bring your immune system back into a normal range, and your immune system is one of the most essential ways that your body expresses its boundaries. So an allergic reaction is often an overreaction of the immune system to something that it thinks might be threatening or that was threatening, once that isn't technically a threat, but the reaction is so strong that it actually becomes a threat, or at the very least an inconvenience. And our emotional reactions can be like that too. We can have such a strong and overly boundaried reaction to something that's actually not technically a threat, but we create a dangerous situation through our reaction. So nettles are great for that emotional, spiritual aspect too, inviting you to kind of come back to center, come back to equilibrium, really find your sense of ground in the world, and re evaluate that self-other confusion. So when you sit with the spirit of this plant, you might feel a sense that it's grounding and that there's a protection surrounding you. So nettles is a really great ally to have. So I actually want to talk about some practices that people bring to me a lot that are designed to intentionally blur the boundary lines, which can be really amazing and healing and therapeutic. And as humans, we're really we have the impulse to do that. We want to blur our boundary lines through altered states, whether that altered state is falling in love or having sex or dancing wildly or taking a psychoactive substance, or being in a dream state, or doing an extreme sport like there's lots of ways that we get ourselves into altered states and blur our--prayer ritual--these these ways that we blur the boundary lines between ourselves and the World and other people. And this can be incredibly healing, because we can get out of a stuck place and out of a rut if there's a good container to hold it and help us put ourselves back together in a new and more resilient and whole way. And these practices can be really destructive If there's not a good container, there's not a good way to put ourselves back together, and if we don't know who we are in a foundational way first. So one of the practices that people bring to me a lot is this practice of tonglen, and it's often not called that. I've had people bring it to me as, oh, I was just listening to an app on my phone, and this practice came up, and they didn't even call it this, but I found it really interesting. But it's this Buddhist practice of essentially breathing in taking in the suffering of the World, taking in the suffering of the other and breathing out goodness and light and beauty and love. And this is a very advanced practice. If you are already struggling with boundaries, if you are already struggling with your sense of self, with your sense of safety, with your sense of okayness, with your sense of taking on other people's stuff,
then imagining yourself or energetically, intentionally taking in external suffering is just adding fuel to the fire. It's just creating this sort of toxic soup of your suffering, mixing with the world's suffering and then pouring out the thing that you actually need to be giving to yourself. So tonglen is not traditionally taught to a beginner. It's a practice that you do after you have a really firm seat in your own meditation, after you're really established in your own practice, then you start to work on the world suffering and only then. So things like that blur boundary lines and can be really fuzzy. This also--this gets brought up to me a lot--I don't know if I regret writing this article or not, but I wrote an article about why I don't teach lucid dreaming, and it's not this hard line against lucid dreaming like that's great if you feel called to lucid dream as a practice, Do it. Ther are amazing teachers. Some people do it spontaneously. The reason that at least at this stage, I don't teach it is because it's this really boundaryless space. And often people have this idea of it as this pinnacle of dreaming like you have more control if you're able to control your own mind and go into dream world and control how a dream world is happening, and the reality is actually dream world is still got its own agenda, and you're opening yourself up, actually, to more energies and kind of an illusion of control in a space that really has its own sort of bigger process. So it's quite boundary less. And my belief is that you need to have a strong foundation first in how you interface with your own dreaming process, your dreaming process when you're awake, the dreams that come to you when you're asleep. You need to have a really strong foundation in that first, in your emotional, psychological, psychic boundaries, before you open up that whole other realm. That's my belief. And if it just happens for you, like there are lots of ways in, right? There are just doorways that open for people. And sometimes you come in through the big, open, vast dream door, and then you create the boundaries later, and that's your process. That's fine. Psychedelics are like this too, though they intentionally blur boundary lines. They intentionally dissolve the sense of ego, the sense of self. Ego gets such a bad rap. Ego is your sense of self. It's your ability to set boundaries. It's your ability to say, I am me. You are you. I am myself. This chair is this chair. This glass is this glass. This computer is this computer. I am them in a cosmic, universal, quantum physics kind of way, but also I'm myself, and I have a boundary, and I know that I'm Jeanell and I'm not the chair and and psychedelics really, uh, dissolve that ego sense, and you become one with everything, which, if you don't have a good sense of foundational boundary, can blur that in a lot of areas of
your life. So
the set, the setting, the container, who's holding the space, where are you? What is the right dose? What is the right timing? How are you going to integrate this experience? All of that becomes vitally important. And yes, people just stumble through the door and they have amazing experiences, and quite accidentally, and somebody gave them psychedelics at a party, and they were completely open and boundaryless, and it cracked open their awareness and everything was amazing that happens. It totally happens, but you can't count on that happening and having intentional boundaries in place where you really learn about your own self-other relationship facilitates the likelihood of a better experience. It's not guaranteed in any situation. Boundaries don't guarantee a really good experience. And I think often this is what people are hoping for in relationship, is somehow if I have better boundaries, I won't ever get hurt, nobody will ever be able to cross my boundaries again. Nobody will ever be able to take advantage of me again. And life is just life. The idea of having good boundaries is not that nothing, quote, unquote, bad will ever happen to you again. The idea is that. Have enough internal resilience, an internal resource, an internal sense of self and ability to respond to the world and reset and recreate and reorient that you don't just get taken out. You learn, you grow, you respond, you restore homeostasis, you reorient and you still have a sense of overall health and well being. So that was just a little sprinkle, a little taste, a little introduction to maybe some ways to think about boundaries that you haven't before. I hope this has been helpful if you've been working on issues of boundaries in your life and maybe feeling a bit stuck. They're not one size fit all. They're not fixed, they're not permanent. They're highly personal and cultural and situational, and having better boundaries often really just means being more aware of your internal experience and being able to communicate that and interface that with the outside world in a balanced and responsive way. So wishing you a wonderful, balanced boundaried day, and thank you for listening. And next episode is going to be an interesting take on boundaries, talking about food sensitivities. So I touched on allergies today, and we're going to touch on food sensitivities and navigating the world with that particular boundary in place, and what that means in terms of nourishment and belonging in the next episode, so hope to see you there and take good care.
Thanks for listening to the lettuce loves you. Don't forget to like, review and share this podcast so more people can benefit. Your one small action helps us get these reflections on belonging and nourishment to the people who need to hear them. And I appreciate it more than you know I have more free offerings at Eco that's eco spiritual education. https://www.ecospiritualeducation.com/freestuff This podcast provides educational information about traditional edible and medicinal uses of plants. This should never be construed as medical or dietary advice. Always consult with a medical provider before making dietary changes. The music you've been listening to is tu b'shvat by Batya Levine, used with permission and a lot of gratitude until next time, remember the lettuce loves you, You belong to the earth, and Life really does Want to nourish You.
