STRONG BOUNDARIES are the best medicine – for pets, people, health, behaviour, you name it!

Strong boundaries are one thing that you can start working on today. It’s simple (but not always easy) to create, express, and maintain strong boundaries with yourself, with other humans, with your beloved animals, and with all of the world. The more challenging life and the world is, the more important strong boundaries become.

I speak from quite a lot of experience here. I lived a lot of my life with weak or non-existent boundaries in many facets of my life, and that caused a lot of pain, suffering, and dysfunction for me, for my beloveds, and for all of the animals who shared my life.

You simply have to have boundaries, healthy edges, to have a healthy life. Anywhere you lack strong boundaries, there will inevitably be dysfunction, chaos, and stress.

Humans can be good at boundaries in one place in their life, and terrible in other places. A lot of this is learned in our families of origin, or as a survival mechanism to deal with the human jungle.

For example, if you have a parent who has a bad temper, you may have learned to never express a boundary, for your safety. Or you might have had a parent who taught you to express boundaries that were too strong, too rigid, so you isolate yourself and aren’t available for healthy connection and love.

Strong boundaries need to also be kind boundaries. There is never any justification to use your boundaries to be unkind or abusive towards others. However, boundaries need to be HELD. And this can be challenging for the other beings who you are expressing them with!

It’s ok for others to get a bit upset about you expressing strong boundaries. I know my Whippet was a bit upset with me over the weekend. She had started testing my boundaries a bit too much. Rushing into my space. Jumping on me. Not asking for permission to come into my space. So I did some serious ‘outing’ work.

She found that more than a little bit emotionally challenging. She got frustrated. Then sulky. But I just held my space, and allowed her to work her own way through all of that. It took a little while, but there was a beautiful reset, and now she is much more of a joy to live with.

Practical tips for creating, expressing, and maintaining strong boundaries

The first thing you need to do is work out what a healthy, strong boundary is, and what it looks like and feels like. If you have not had much experience, with this it can take a bit of exploration.

You can:

• Refuse to accept anything less than kindness in your life.
• Start to have a conversation with your dogs, and let them know you have a personal space, and you’d like some respect and for them to ASK to come into it!
• You can write down an extensive list of everything that you will no longer tolerate in your life.
• Be curious about what health boundaries are, what they look like, and how they feel. Start observing people and animals to research this!
• Start small, and keep on building your boundaries muscles.
• Be curious about what’s in the way of you have strong boundaries- what inner blocks or traumas might need healing?
• Use your pets as a fertile practice ground! (I see people who start this with their pets then generalising what they’ve learned out into all of the world!)
• Be willing to fail and try again, as many times as it takes.
• Ask for help!!! This one might be the most important of all. There’s nothing like a skilled teacher to help you get better results sooner. (Contact me for help if you like, I’m very good at teaching you to have kind, strong boundaries with your pets!)

This is one of the most beautiful and important things you can do for your pets, and for you! So get stuck into it.

Here’s a short video of me discussing this topic.

– Enjoy this article? You can check out last week’s one at this link.

– Want to work with me to create harmony for your pets (and maybe for you) with holistic veterinary consultations, intuitive insights, and energy healing? Drop into www.thehealingvet.com and book a free call with me. And if you’d like to learn how to heal your pets (and yourself) with loving touch and energy healing, check out www.wholeenergybodybalance.com

Gem, being a good girl and respecting my personal space!