Setting Boundaries – Are You Sick?

We understand or at least I thought we had, that it is important to ‘Guard Our Energy.’

Guarding our energy basically means to preserve our energy. If we don’t do that, we will run out of fuel and wear ourselves down. It’s self-preservation. We need work time, chill time, downtime, social time and so on.

If we lower those boundaries of what each of us needs for a productive day, with time for work and time for everything else, we can soon find ourselves overrun by more or less needy demands.

Some time ago I posted this very interesting article on “Needy Friendships”.

If you need to set boundaries, do it while knowing that you are not signing up for a Popularity Contest. People will sometimes feel themselves entitled to trespass the boundaries you have set up. Perhaps they just want your attention. (Our attention is our strongest tool, which is why everybody wants it.) They can have it – on your terms – not their terms. Or better: on a co-working term that serves both well.

If this sounds selfish to you, I would advise you to reflect a bit on the concept of selfish and maybe reach the conclusion that if selfishness is the same as self-preservation it’s OK – it’s called Consciously Selfish. That is miles from the mainstream meaning of the word Selfish, which is: I only do things for myself – self-serving.

And speaking of serving…

This problem is really toxic if you are into spirituality, because that seems to equal being ‘boundaryless’: serving others when they see fit – not you. It’s a slow, slow, exhausting death of our energetic body until there’s nothing more than an empty shell left. Those who thought: “Wow-cool, she´s spiritual, that means that she can’t say no,” will long ago have moved on to the next host to suck their energy. And you’re left with a spiritual spine that resembles overboiled spaghetti.

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