Opening your heart doesn’t mean you don’t have boundaries. When you open your heart you need boundaries to know when and how you need to make changes in relationships.
Boundaries aren’t there to control others. Your boundaries aren’t to tell others what they have to act like and who they need to be.
They give you guides on what kind of relationships you accept in your life, when you should have a talk and say that doesn’t work for me, and when you should let relationships go from your life.
Having boundaries does not mean you won’t get hurt. It means if others hurt you, you take steps to keep them from continuing to hurt you. Even if that means completely releasing them from your life.
Boundaries are one of the greatest forms of self love you can practice. Without having solid boundaries and practicing them, you will create walls, close yourself up, and push even good relationships away in fear.
While creating and sticking to your boundaries is one of the greatest forms of self love, respecting another’s boundaries is one of the greatest expressions of love.
If you are constantly crossing lines, making someone uncomfortable, and disrespecting what they need to feel safe, happy, relaxed, open, engaged, and connected, then you become untrustworthy. Anything you say or try to convince them of becomes just babbling that they shut themselves off to.
Even if you personally think you are being helpful to them and showing love by expressing yourself the way you do, if you are crossing boundaries to do so, you have proven that you do not care about them and what they need to feel loved and therefore are not truly loving them. You are trying to make them earn your attention and affections by controlling them and their emotions.
True love is giving up control, respecting another’s emotions and boundaries while also respecting yourself and your boundaries.
Your relationships with people will be similar to your relationships with your horse. If you lack boundaries with people you may lack boundaries with your horse.
Or, if you feel without boundaries and controlled in human relationships, you may take that into your horse relationships and be the one controlling and crossing boundaries in effort to feel like you have control somewhere in your life.
If you tend to want to control people and situations you probably won’t feel safe letting your horse express themselves, what they like and what they’re uncomfortable with.
Looking into ourselves, our motivations, our fears, our goals, and how our relationships human and animal work is the key to finding the balance in first ourselves and then our relationships.