Anyone who has any small amount of exploration of self-help, mental health, therapy or relationships in general must have heard of this word called boundary. But it is, I think, one of the most misunderstood concepts not only by common people but also by psychologists and mental health experts.\u00a0
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The word “boundary” gives you a visual of a house surrounded by boundaries to keep predators or people who want to harm you out. The collective consensus, the one you will find in a standard therapist’s office or a usual self-help blog, is that boundaries are primarily about learning how to say no. It is framed as an act of hardening yourself, making a rigid wall, and prioritising yourself to keep yourself safe. Most imagine the goal of boundaries is to push everything away and keep the world at a distance so that they feel safe enough. This idea is fundamentally flawed because it treats human beings as mechanical products to be protected rather than as beings who actually live. The very nature of such an idea is founded on fear, not trust. Fear that if I don\u2019t defend who I am, what I need, what I want, I somehow don\u2019t have boundaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A story from my life. Currently doing a PhD in Belgium, one of my main weaknesses is academic writing. Something I naturally feel very hesitant to do, or resist, is a lot. A few years ago, I was supposed to finish an academic paper, but I was going very slowly and procrastinating. Looking at this, my supervisor started putting pressure on me. By the ‘textbook’ definition of boundaries, my boundary should have been a hard ‘no’ to my supervisor\u2019s pressure. I should have stood my ground, protected my comfort, and distanced myself from the stress. But that kind of wall is built on fear\u2014the fear of my own discomfort. Instead, I chose trust. I trusted my supervisor that he knew what he was doing. I didn’t shut down the interaction; I allowed the friction to happen. I pushed myself, finished the paper, and in the end realised that the results came out great. I felt proud of myself. I evolved because I didn’t push the world away.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To say I will make a boundary or say “no” to anything that is slightly uncomfortable for me, or to close myself off to the world, is a very wrong way of looking at boundaries. You stop the outside world from interacting with you, and in doing so, you prevent the friction that actually shapes, transforms, and evolves you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And reading this, I understand that many will already start to feel mental resistance. Most of the time, the textbook definition of a boundary is saying “no” to things that make you uncomfortable, hurt you, or create pain. But the funny thing about life is that what actually hurts you or is bad for you will feel like discomfort and pain. In the same breath, what is good<\/em> for you – when you are just at the edge of who you think you are, at the edge of transformation – will also feel like pain, discomfort, and hurt. For example, if you are speaking publicly for the first time, the moment you go on stage, you might feel immense pain in your body because you have never been in that situation before. Or, if you are going to the gym, your body feels the pain of working out. So the bottom line is: feeling discomfort is not enough reason to set a boundary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This blog post is an invitation to a very revolutionary understanding of boundaries. Recently, life has been teaching me about boundaries and their subtlety and intricacy. In fact, I would say the word “boundary” itself is the wrong word for what most people are actually looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s say you start watching a movie. The moment you decided to watch a movie, you said yes to that movie and no to 100s of other things you could have done. So any choice in life is both yes and no at the same time. Yes to something and no to 100s of things at any moment. That is why every yes is a no and every no is a yes. And this choice of yours is the boundary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When you say you don\u2019t have boundaries, what you really, really mean is that I don’t make a conscious choice about certain things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, you saw a packet of chips lying around – and somehow you can\u2019t choose not to eat it. For some time, you would tell yourself, I don\u2019t want it, but something in you just wanted to reach out and have that chip. So after this inner struggle, you simply gave in. So you say, “I can\u2019t say no to this packet of chips.” <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You are in a relationship with someone. And slowly you realise that the other person is hurting you. But something in you simply can\u2019t say no. Can\u2019t say that I don\u2019t want that; I don\u2019t want this behaviour. In that you feel like you don\u2019t have boundaries. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You have an addiction to, let’s say, alcohol. Whenever you are near it, you simply can\u2019t stay away. Something in you, without any control of yours, moves towards it unnaturally. You feel so weak, so helpless that you can\u2019t help but go for it. So you can conclude that you can\u2019t say no to alcohol. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You are now in your late twenties. And it comes to your slow awareness that you are constantly attracted to people who are not healthy for you or who somehow end up hurting you. But you can\u2019t help but be attracted to them. So you say you can\u2019t say no to that person. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But if you look back at the examples I gave just now, you will see that every “no” is a “yes”. Maybe not a conscious yes, but something in you that says yes, not you, but something. Something in you says yes to that packet of chips, to that relationship, to that addiction and to that person you are attracted to. It is a choice that you don\u2019t make consciously – yet it is made within you. This choice is your boundary right now. So when you say I don\u2019t have boundaries, what you really, really mean is that I don\u2019t have a conscious choice about my own actions.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This lack of conscious choice is what you actually experience as having no boundary, having no control, having no agency of your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, we must confront a challenging possibility: the majority of the experiences we defend, the situations we suffer through, and the outcomes we regret are not imposed upon us by a cruel external world, but are the result of unconscious choices. It sounds incredibly harsh to point out that most of our suffering is rooted in our own choices, even if those choices happen in the dark, beneath the level of our conscious awareness. There was a point in my life when, if someone had said this to my face, I would have gotten furious. It feels like an accusation – like someone is blaming me for the very pain I\u2019m trying to escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as I\u2019ve sat with this, I\u2019ve realised that this isn’t about blame. It\u2019s an invitation to a deeper kind of awareness. It is a slow realisation that so much of our experience is shaped by actions we didn\u2019t even realise we were initiating. We are walking around, suffering through the consequences of choices we never actually sat down to make, and we don’t even know it\u2019s happening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn’t about being broken, or less-than, or inferior. It\u2019s not a character flaw. It just means that in those moments we are a little sleepy.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Those times you feel you lack boundaries, when you can’t say no to unhealthy food, people, or habits, do not mean you are broken at all. They just show that you are living in a state of sleepiness, walking around a bit blinded. It doesn’t point to the fact that you are wounded or inherently addicted; it simply means you are living unconsciously, and choices are happening without your conscious control or effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you find yourself stuck in a cycle you claim to hate, that same toxic relationship, that same addiction, that same inability to say “no”, it can feel like you have no agency. But if you look closely, there is a “yes” happening inside you. It\u2019s a “yes” that isn’t coming from your conscious mind, but from a part of you that is operating on old programming, an unconscious choice that has been made within you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you can truly see this simple fact, that most of your life, your suffering, your addictions, your pain, and even your pleasure are actually happening out of unconscious choices and patterns, you are already witnessing a revolution. You start to see things for what they really are: not some fundamental brokenness or an irreparable wound in you, but merely unconscious conditioning. I am deeply aware that this unconsciousness can run so deep that it feels like it is all there is to life. But if you can even get a glimpse that these are simply mechanical, unconscious choices on your part, something in you begins to shift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The moment you see this, the entire fight stops. You stop attacking yourself and start turning inward.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Think about the position you\u2019ve been in: everyone, from self-help books to your own friends, tells you that you should be able to just say “no.” They make it sound so simple. Meanwhile, in your own life, you find yourself doing the exact opposite. You know, on some level, that a person or a habit is bad for you, yet something inside you keeps saying “yes” anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This creates a brutal, exhausting state of inner conflict. You live trapped between what you know you should do and what you actually do. Because the world tells you it\u2019s a matter of willpower, you assume the failure is yours alone. You carry layers of heavy guilt and deep-seated shame. You start to tell yourself that you must be pathetic, weak, or fundamentally broken because you can\u2019t master this one basic thing. So, you spend years locked in this internal war. You consciously try to white-knuckle your way through life, trying to force control, but that deeper, unconscious part of you keeps moving toward those same unhealthy actions anyway. You live in a constant struggle with yourself, and the more you fight, the more ashamed you become. Because you never really win. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But when you truly realise that this isn’t a battle of good versus bad, strong versus weak, or morality versus immorality, the war finally loses its meaning. You begin to see that your inability to say “no” to unhealthy things isn’t a failure of character; it is simply the result of unconscious programming. The fight loses its power because you finally stop viewing your struggle as a moral failing. You realise that the ability to say “no” isn’t actually about force or willpower; it\u2019s about having a conscious mind that is capable of making a real, deliberate choice. When you move from “I am weak” to “I am running on old, automatic programming,” the self-judgment dissolves. You are no longer a person fighting their own nature, wherever you are right now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the very point where a revolution happens, because you stop wasting energy trying to win this inner battle. You finally become free enough to focus on real work and ask real questions: <\/p>\n\n\n\n How do I decondition myself? What do I do with my own unconscious conditioning? How do I finally arrive at a place where I have a genuine, conscious choice? And how do I stop living in this state of sleep and finally, truly, wake up?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To go from unconscious living to conscious living is to start paying attention to everything in life all the time. Pay attention to the way you walk, talk, breathe, behave around others, and behave when you are alone. Pay attention to what goes on in your mind all the time, and to how your body feels in different situations, places, and with different people. Moment-to-moment attention or awareness of whatever is happening within you, in connection with the outside world, is needed. If you simply do this for one month, you will be surprised by how much you don\u2019t know about yourself, how much you live in mechanically repetitive patterns, how much you live with unconscious choice rather than actually actively choosing consciously. And months become years, and years become decades, and looking back, you will realise life has become a tremendous revolution in its own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s take that pack of chips again. Because it is easy to talk about. In a very unconscious way, your hands are automatically going to that unhealthy packet of chips all the time. As you become aware of this unconscious choice within you, first you will see a small space in which you have a little choice – you will see that a part of you wants to go there, and a part of you doesn\u2019t want to go there. Holding that space gently within you, not condemning the part of you that wants to go there, not forcefully pushing yourself, but simply being a little more present, slowly you will start to see that you do have a conscious choice on whether you would like to enjoy those chips or not. And this experience is beautiful. In unconsciousness, you live life in a mechanical, repetitive pattern of choices that feel beyond your control. In consciousness, you become an empty space – that can choose. And I am not saying that the pack of chips is wrong; I am saying that this totally unconscious behaviour on our part is wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A real-life example from my own journey. The other day, something happened that triggered me, let’s say a deep wound in me. And you know when deep wounds get triggered, they are unconscious. You have no control over it. Something happens, and it feels as if your whole life is falling apart without your control. You become anxious, scattered, and scared. A few years ago, it would have taken me maybe a day or two to gather myself again; to be back to normal life. I would keep thinking about it again and again, day or two, how to do this, how to do that, maybe something is wrong with me and so on and so on. But that day in that space of anxiety and scattered feeling, I saw that I had a conscious choice about how my energy or my body should behave. I just told myself to let it go and started breathing. Within 10-15 minutes, I was back to normal. But you see, I might not be 100% conscious, and the wound may still be making unconscious choices, but as you become more aware, a space forms in you. And in that space, you have a choice, a conscious choice on how you would like to feel, how you would like to behave. And living in total unconsciousness, you have no choice, and that is why a few years ago it would take days to even gather myself. That is the power of consciousness: you have a choice over your feelings, emotions, and thoughts. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is a real experience within you when you start to have the capacity for conscious choice – the real boundary rather than unconscious choices. But to awaken, to move from unconsciousness to consciousness, has to be a relentless process of waking up to who you are right now, your own unconsciousness. In yoga, this very process of actually going through your own unconsciousness is called Tapascharya. Perhaps the right translation is a cleansing that occurs when you are in fire. And the attention or awareness is the fire in which the unconsciousness burns. It is painful, yet it is the healthiest pain you will ever go through. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The way forward in life is from unconsciousness to consciousness; it is tapascharya. You will fall to your unconscious choices, 1000 times, but each time, if you keep attention intact, it breaks, it burns.\u00a0 A very motivating line by Osho on tapascharya is:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to really know your life, you have to wake up. Waking up is not like going to a temple or church for 15-20 minutes and thinking it is done. No transformation in life happens in 15-20 minutes. Life is an unbroken chain of events, and your awareness has to be unbroken and total every moment of your life.\u00a0– Osho<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The post explores healthy boundaries as a conscious choice, and the work needed to move towards conscious living.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":676,"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions\/676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacreduality.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Choice is Boundary<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Unconscious Choices<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Ending the Inner Fight<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
From Unconscious to Conscious<\/h4>\n\n\n\n