Hello again, powerful you!
This is the second of my series of posts about the power that words can have and how they resonate in our bodies in different ways and different places. The first was on the word “trigger” to refer to feelings, which you can find in the previous post.
This is from The Marion Method (MM), not Aware Parenting.
In The MM, I invite us to be conscious about the effect that words have on the extent to which we experience how loving and powerful we really are.
In the MM, we are Souls of Love and Will.
I love choosing language that helps me be more deeply connected with my loving and powerful nature.
As with all my posts, I deeply support you in saying and writing whatever words resonate for you. If saying “boundary” embodies exactly the meaning you want it to, then yay! The MM work is about deep compassion and an unwillingness to judge (the opposite of Love) or coerce (the opposite of Will) ourselves and others.
I also acknowledge that saying something like, “setting healthy boundaries” has become a convenient shorthand that people understand.
Why I don’t say or write “boundaries” to refer to talking about saying “No.”
1. I feel less connected with a sense of embodied power if I say, “setting boundaries.”
2. I enjoy more direct, specific and clear descriptions that help me feel more connected with true embodied power.
I love:
1. Being specific:
Rather than saying, “I’m learning to set a boundary,” I enjoy being more specific, eg. “I’m learning to say, “no” / “I’m getting more comfortable with saying no.” / “I’m learning to say that I am not willing for that.”
2. Feeling a true sense of embodied power:
When I say, “I’m setting a boundary,” I experience it as Disconnected Domination Culture (DDC)-style power – there’s a quality of harshness and brittleness to it for me. I think of a wall, a fence, or a line on the land, ‘out there’ not connected with me. My consciousness is in my head.
I feel a contraction in the back of my neck, and my jaw tilts up. (Which is very similar to how I feel when I say “trigger.”)
In comparison, when I say, “I am not willing for…” or, “No” (as in a Neo No), I feel a deep sense of wholeness and centredness in my body. I feel the resonance of my voice, and energy in my heart and arms and hands. I feel the presence of the verticalness of my willingness channel (which is the centre of our toroidal field.) I feel powerful.
To me, true power is not a limit ‘out there’. It is not a line ‘over there.’ Neither is it aggression, blame, or power-over. It’s a deeply embodied experience of connected power within ourselves. It is that energetic embodied power which then deeply affects what we experience from others and from Life.
For me, the whole point of the ‘boundary setting’ movement is to help us reconnect with our true power. Power that most of us gave away, growing up in the Disconnected Domination Culture (DDC).
We come into the world connected with our slug wisdom – our deep embodied knowing of when we feel a “yes” to move towards something, and when we feel a “no” to move away from something.
Through our experiences in the DDC of being coerced, shoulded and powered-over, we experience Will-Hurts. These affect our ability to say “no” when we feel a “no,” because we are scared that we will not be safe, be included or be loved if we do.
To me, “learning to set boundaries” (ie. getting more comfortable with knowing when we have a “no” to something and expressing it in clear and embodied ways) is about healing from those Will-Hurts so we become increasingly able and willing to say “no” when we feel a “no,” knowing that we are safe, included and loved.
This is core to The MM, which includes listening lovingly to all the powerlessness, frustration, outrage and other will-energy of our Will-hurts. We increasingly feel a sense of true power, which is not DDC power but is an embodied experience of “I am not willing” or a Neo No.
I deeply value language that is specific and which supports us to reconnect with our embodied ‘no,’ and I find that “I am not willing” helps with that.
I love the term ‘Neo No’ for when we are expressing an energetic as well as a spoken “no.” If you’ve seen that scene in The Matrix where Neo says NO, you might understand why I developed that term (please credit me if you use the term Neo No.) The clip is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYwdzYC3uUc
The Neo No is an unwillingness to experience that thing.
It isn’t aggressive, it isn’t defensive. It’s not brittle or harsh. It’s a clear and incredibly powerful NO, that is simply unwilling for whatever it is saying no to.
I’d love to hear if you resonate, and how and where you feel in your body when you say, “I’m setting a boundary” compared to, “I’m not willing for..” or “No!” (in a Neo No way.)
Next in the series is a big one: regulation!
Lots of love to you, powerful Soul!