Consent. Our body. Embodiment. Unearthing, unraveling, dismantling and dislodging the messages and stories we’ve been given over and over and over. By our families. By our mentors. By our friends. By our culture.
Those stories of how our Noes don’t matter. Those stories of how our will is irrelevant. Those stories of how we need to remain silent and small to stay safe.
And then, in those moments when we gather the courage to share the truth of our own lived experience, when we open our throats and whisper or speak or yell our No or Yes or Truth, we aren’t believed.
We are told, No, it didn’t really happen like that. You must be misunderstanding. You don’t really mean what you say.
Over and over we are told we don’t know our own body. We don’t know our own mind. We don’t know our own boundaries or wishes or consent.
And, because we are told so often and from such an early age, we believe them.
And in the believing we allow others to have control over us. Over our body. Over our voice. Over our being. Our lives.
And yet.
A Truth, that is deep within our muscles and the back corners of our minds and on the wingtips of our spirit, that Truth is we do know these stories are lies. Deep within us, we know.
We know we are capable of knowing our own body, her whispers and her screams. We do know our own lived experience, the feelings and actions that we were witness to and/or victim of. We do know our own mind, our thoughts and logic and that we actually did not make it all up. We do know our own boundaries and wishes and consent.
Our body knows. Our mind knows. Our essence and being knows.
A Truth is this knowing has always been within you, within me, within all of us. Your strength and power and daring. Your Truth and voice and knowing. Your Noes and your Yeses. It is our work in this world to seek out and co-create safe and brave spaces for us to unearth, connect, explore and consciously decide what is to stay and what is to go, what to build on and what to allow to decay.
Part of the work of reconnecting to our voice, our truth, our consent, is connecting to our boundaries. Learning to know the visceral sensations we experience when our boundaries are crossed, learning how to defend our boundaries, and learning to respect the boundaries of others, without attempting to manipulate or convince the other to change their boundary because we don’t like it.
Knowing our own boundaries, and respecting those of others, allows us to connect to our consent, to voice it, and to hear the consent of others. Expressing our boundaries is an act of care, and act of connecting; it is saying to another “You matter to me, this relationship matters to me, and I can only show up in honestly within these parameters.”
Boundaries are not about telling another person what to do, nor controlling their behavior. It is about making a clear statement of what kinds of behaviors and treatment you will allow in your life. It ultimately up to us to walk away from situations and people who do not respect our boundaries, no matter how much we may care for them and want them in our lives.
We cannot do this work alone, in isolation, and it is equally true that only we can do this work for ourselves. We are in need of others who are also finding their own ways into and around themselves. Others who have similar and yet their own unique experiences. Others who are ready to be in the brave spaces to push and pull at the old comfortable stories and emerge into that which has always been within. Others to bear witness and offer support.
It can be a frustrating journey in our search for others who are also unearthing, examining, dismantling and dislodging the stories we have been told about who we are. Who are also in this deep work of reconnecting to our body, to our being, to our Truth. This deep work of feeling, knowing, honoring, and defending our boundaries and our consent.
And there are others. Finding them invites us to move ourside of our own comfort zones, to explore uncommon places, to be focused on our own inner work to shift and evolve our ways of being, so when we do find our people, we are more equipped to grow the kinds of nurturing and nourishing relationships we all crave and need.
This essay was originally published in January 2017. It has been edited for publication here.
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Recent essays on Embodied Relating:
EWG : 20. Integrating grief (Embodied Writing - Grief Series)
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What will be, will be : A stream of consciousness for the Venus-Mars Conjunction
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This piece really resonated with my own journey of trauma, finding my truth and working towards loving myself enough to know and be clear about my boundaries. Thank you for this beautiful piece of writing. ❤