Episode 79: What Rose (the plant) Taught Me About Boundaries

Hello hello creative soles! I’m so glad that you’re here. Welcome back to Never Wear Boring Socks and Happy New Year. If you’re new, Never Wear Boring Socks is a podcast about bringing more creativity into our lives. My name is Maria. I’m a visual artist, musician, poet, herbalist, and feng shui practitioner, and a lover of fun socks. One way that I infuse creativity into my daily life is with creative sock choices because I’m going to wear socks anyway, so they might as well be fun, right? My creative sock choice today is a pair of pink socks with pink and yellow details there’s polka dots and some other stuff happening and then there’s this character from one of my very favorite children’s books series, the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. If anyone’s familiar with the Moomin books I have Little My on my socks! Which is very very fun so I appreciate having a character from one of my favorite pieces of creative work on my feet with me. 

So in terms of what I want to talk about today in creativity, I want to talk about boundaries. Boundaries are a tricky topic for a lot of people, myself included. I think so many of us are raised to be nice. Which is nice, of course - I believe it’s important to be kind and considerate and compassionate and polite. Those are all things I value, and if you’re here listening to me, if my podcast resonates with you, I would guess that you probably also value these things to some extent. 

However, sometimes niceness is disguised as putting other people’s needs first, at the expense of your own. I don’t believe that this is healthy, nor do I believe it really serves the people around us that we’re trying to help. 

The idea of “self care” is a big enough part of the mainstream consciousness by now I think that this is probably not a new idea to you. We hear a lot about putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others, filling up your cup first so that you have something to give. Basically, the idea is that you need to be taken care of in order to also take care of others. 

Taking care of ourselves doesn’t need to look I think like the pretty bubble baths and manicures and pretty mugs and whatever else Instagram has told us to believe about self care. I believe that taking care of yourself really means having boundaries for yourself, and respecting them.  

Again, this gets really tricky for a lot of us, because we have big hearts and we want to help other people. I have totally been in the position where I overgive of myself and my energy because I want to make other people’s lives easier, and generally what happens to me in these situations is that I burn out. And when I’m burnt out, I’m not helpful. I’m not nice. I’m not pleasant to be around.

On the flip side, when I do take care of myself by respecting my own boundaries, which sometimes means saying no to helping other people (or, gasp! Even ignoring messages for a little while) - when I do those things, I’m a lot nicer and more willing to actually be helpful. And my help is more impactful. My energy is more generous and loving. I’m kinder to myself and I’m kinder to the people in my life. 

So you may be thinking at this point if you looked at the title, are we talking about plants? Are we talking about flowers? What does all of this have to do with boundaries? 

And I’ve been fascinated by plants and herbalism for many years, and I’ve been studying in a small group with my teacher Vanessa of Sacred Warrior for a few years. One thing that she has encouraged us to do that I really really appreciate is to work closely with one plant at a time, to really get to know them. She compares this to getting to know a person - so like if you’re dating one person for a year, for example, you get to know them a lot more deeply than if you dated like 15 different people over the same time period. 

In 2021, the plant that I really felt intuitively connected to and decided to work with one-on-one and really get to know was rose. This was kind of surprising to me, because it wasn’t one of the first plants that I would have thought of in terms of herbs and healing plants. And I actually used to not really like roses because I thought they were cliche and overrated, now I’m sort of obsessed with them…which is maybe a story for another day. But anyway, it felt like rose wanted to be my friend and ally this year, so we spent a lot of time together. I invited rose into my meditations regularly, I drew roses, if you are following me on IG at @thephilosophersstem you may have seen some flower illustrations including some rose illustrations - maybe I haven’t posted any there yet? I definitely will I haven’t. You’ll see them if you find me there. I noticed roses when I was out for walks, I stopped to smell the roses, and I even enjoyed making rose lattes and wearing natural rose perfume. It was a pretty rosy year. And it was really fun to engage with rose through my different senses in all these different ways and really get to know this plant on a deeper level.

During this time when I was working with rose, I had some really powerful experiences with this particular plant, and many of them were around the topic of boundaries. So this may be like a little mystical and out there for you depending on where you’re coming from but if this sounds interesting to you, just go ahead and go along with me for a minute, these have been really powerful experiences for me so I want to share them with you. If they resonate, great. If they don’t, that’s ok. Anyway, when I was working with rose, I was in this one meditation where I had invited rose energetically into the space with me, and I really felt like rose the plant was giving me this message to let more joy and love into my life, while also encouraging me to be discerning of who and what I was letting in. Boundaries, essentially. She reminded me that I get to be in charge of who I spend my time and my energy with, and that this discernment is what allows me to express more joy and exuberance. So essentially, she was telling me that boundaries create safety which allows for fuller expression. Obviously, that’s my interpretation of what I experienced working with this plant, but that’s the lesson that I gained from this experience that has really stuck with me. 

There was another time when I was going through something really challenging, where someone in my life had disrespected a boundary I had set for myself, in a pretty rude and hurtful way. And so to calm myself down, I closed my eyes and meditated, just focusing on my breath, I wasn’t doing a guided meditation or anything. Almost immediately once I started focusing on my breath, once I closed my eyes, I saw this image in my mind of a wild rose wrapping around me, and it felt like this plant was both enveloping me in softness and love, and also fierce protection at the same time. 

A couple of months ago, I was chatting with a fellow student in my herbalism apprenticeship, and sharing some of the shifts that I’d experienced over the past year since I started working with rose, just different things I had noticed in my life. As I was talking, I realized that a lot of the growth I’ve gone through this year has been around boundaries. And this was really interesting because it wasn’t necessarily my intention in working with rose, but I believe that rose came in to help me with what I needed to work on, and I think what I needed to work on is boundaries. 

One of the most important things I’ve created a boundary around in my life is my creative practice. This used to be something that I would push to the side, because it seemed like there were always other priorities (generally not my own priorities) that were more urgent at any given time. While this didn’t feel like a big deal in the moment a lot of times - it was just one day where I was skipping my art practice - after many days it added up, and I realized I really had not been making very much art at all over quite a long period of time. And I changed this by carving out time for a daily creative practice, and then honoring that boundary that I had created. Personally what I did is I committed to spending 30 minutes, Monday through Friday, on my art. During that time, I don’t look at my phone, I don’t check my email, I don’t respond to people asking me for things, I just make art. Or I write something. 

So If you feel like you’re not making progress on your artistic projects the way you’d like, I invite you to try your own version of this because I have really found it to be so powerful and so impactful. Set a boundary around your creative practice that works for you. It might be different for you depending on your circumstances and what kind of art you work on, and then stick to what you set as your boundary. If you need outside support to make this happen, set that up. You might want to find an accountability buddy or put it in your calendar and mark it as “busy” or you might want to hire a coach. Whatever you need to do that is going to help you, support you in honoring that boundary. 

So my questions for you today, for you to ask yourself and reflect on, are:

• What supportive boundaries can you create around your creative practice? So again, you might want to think about your lifestyle, your circumstances, your form of art, and then what boundaries can you create given all of those things? 

• How will you enforce and honor those boundaries? What kind of support can you put in place to help you do this? So this I think also requires a little bit of self-knowledge. Do you do best with another person holding you accountable? Do you do best with writing things down, checking things off? Spend some time reflecting on this and then set up whatever support you need to make that happen. 

If you do feel like you want some extra support in your creativity journey, and you know you’d resonate with a guide who is both grounded and practical when it comes to setting up routines and structures and boundaries, and also open to the magical and mystical side of creativity and inspiration, I’d love to hear from you. You can send me a message at hello@thephilosophersstem.com if you want to chat with me, or go to thephilosophersstem.com, to learn about working together. I’ll also put the link in the show notes to my website and to my coaching page if you want to learn about that. I would love to support you because I really just want everybody who wants to make art to make their art so I would be happy and honored to support you in that process. 

I am so grateful to you for joining me in this episode, and I look forward to talking to you again soon. Until then, please remember, as always, to never wear boring socks.