Meaningful Rituals Help With Maintaining Strong Boundaries
Taking ownership of your own daily paradisic moments
📣 If you feel deeply, think a lot, and find it hard to care for yourself, I’m writing this for you.
If you’re a highly sensitive, deep thinker like me, you feel things all the time. There’s nothing wrong with this. Feelings are great information on your environment. They help you recognize that you are alive. Trouble comes when you don’t know why you feel certain things in certain ways. That’s food for the deep thinker in you.
I spent a while struggling to manage emotions when I was younger. I find that having a set time to speak to my emotions is the best way I can learn to have a good, inclusive relationship with them. My secret sauce is meaningful rituals.
Let me explain how this works.
Ritual
According to APA Dictionary of Psychology, a ritual is a practice that is performed as a habit or custom. (source) I suggest that for the purpose of boundary-setting and grounding you do attach meaning to your rituals. Meaning is what validates our existence as individuals so don’t shy away from sprinkling it into your life.
Boundaries
A boundary is a psychological demarcation that protects the integrity of an individual or group or that helps the person or group set realistic limits on participation in a relationship or activity. (source) Your boundaries dictate who has access to your joy, your ideas, your love, and your energy as a whole. Your boundaries are friends. Your friends. Someone else might not want them as their friends and that’s A-ok.
The connect 🤝
Boundary-setting starts with self-reflection. Before you can place the fences to protect your energy, it’s important to decipher between the energy you want to conserve and the energy you want to spend. Lucky for you, deep thinking is your full time job so this won’t be taxing.
Boundaries are easier to set from a place of self love when you’re in tune with who you are. That’s the key. Knowing, implementing and actively noticing yourself because you are constantly changing. Boundaries are a product of paying attention to yourself in a way that is not restrictive but liberating instead.
When you know what you want, you can begin giving it to yourself. Then commit to giving it to yourself consistently. Your consistency becomes a ritual where what you’re doing means something to you. As a consequence, each time you perform this ritual, you will remind yourself of your why.
In this case, it’s love. For yourself.
Creating your own rituals.
Talking the talk is cool, but walking the walk is cooler. Which is why, I wrote down a little process to help you create your own version of meaningful rituals.
🧩 Identify your patterns.
What is it that your mind wants to think about the most and why do you stop yourself from thinking/doing/practicing that? What is it that your body wants to do that you gatekeep from it? The reasons don’t matter as much as the desires. Knowing your desires is the first step to living a life of authenticity in a way that heals you, the most important person in your life.
🕰 Make space.
Create a practice that addresses the parts of you that want to be seen and aren’t being seen. Maybe you want to do yoga and you find that you need a peaceful environment and time of day matters. Find a time of day where you can create space for this practice and schedule it in. It’s important to make space for authentic expression of self and make it a part of your daily life. This creates feelings of wholeness in a way that brings different parts of you together. It’s a shared space for the energies in you that want to be accepted.
🚦Hold boundaries.
Tricky to start but satisfying to implement overtime, boundaries are what help you keep your time and energy guarded in a responsible way. At the end of your life, you die alone. Not listening to yourself and your needs ensures you die alone, feeling alone. So start now.
👀 Stay accountable.
Now that you’ve thought about what’s important to you and how you want to incorporate it into your life, stay accountable to either yourself or a buddy. Find someone who can remind you to do the things you want to do for yourself. And if they start nagging, revisit the arrangement and tweak it. You can always adjust the environment instead of cancelling the whole thing.
🔁 Stay consistent.
Consistency reminds your body of how it feels to be taken care of and feeds into your ability to set boundaries with others. This practice has personally helped me find ways to feel good within myself and filter out things that don’t resonate. Since you are a growing, changing human, things that resonate with you will constantly change. As they change, this system will help you keep up with the changes because you will have a space to express yourself to yourself. How incredible?!
In the end.
During seasons of change, when love seems scarce and hardship seems abundant, having a refuge for recharge is useful. Your rituals can support you by providing a space to think, breathe, be creative, or whatever it is that you need to feel in control again.
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