Boundaries: Body, Space and Awareness

Have you noticed how some people walk into a room and immediately own it? It’s like they come in and occupy all the space in it. Other people sit and the room feels empty still. Chances are, you’ve felt both of these. That’s how our body construes other people’s boundaries in relation to us and other people. Some we feel as invasive and aggressive even when they don’t do or say anything inappropriate, and others feel almost invisible or respectful of our space.

What all these feelings have in common is the idea of a subjective space that is encompassed by our body and surrounding it. Ideally, when people stay out of that space, you feel safe around them and your boundaries are intact. The edges of that space are areas where contact with others is established even before touch or speak. Touching someone’s body space is already initiating contact, albeit on a nonverbal level. Therefore, on occasion, we may feel uneasy or even disturbed by someone’s presence even if they don’t touch us or speak to us in an inappropriate way.

There’s not a lot that we can say about our body space. There is a lot to investigate and grasp, but all of that work is typically done without words because the subject matter itself is beyond words. Our bodies don’t speak, they produce sensations that we can pick up on if we develop awareness of them. Human language fails miserably when it needs to speak about feelings with precision because a priori they are not meant to be precisely translated: bodies don’t speak, so whatever the message is, it wasn’t sent in the English language. Just because something is difficult to put into words, it doesn’t mean that we are not able to explore or understand that space, only that we have to approach it differently. Less intellectualization and more awareness.  Less thinking and more experiencing. Eventually, words might spontaneously come, but you won’t accelerate the process by forcing yourself to verbalize things.

This type of a boundary is quite important. It often sends messages to others, but messages that we may not be aware of at all. They color the way we see others, depending on how we understand their nonverbal behavior – if we feel that they’re invading our personal space, we will react differently than if we feel they are respecting it. But what our personal space is, that’s a bit hard to define. It’s not only a matter of distance, but also a matter of who enters our space. With some people we need more space, with others less, and it’s often quite difficult to say why, because the entire process works unconsciously. Eventually, we attribute all our feelings to traits of others or write them off as mere hunches. Instead of doing that, it’s much more productive to engage with our body and observe how it processes information, how much space it needs, who is it protecting itself against, etc.

Somatic space

Our somatic space is an aspect of our boundaries. Having good boundaries is a much talked about subject in psychology although if you press any of us, we will have a hard time telling you exactly what we mean by it in general terms.

This concept is like an onion, it has many layers, especially because it’s used by psychoanalysts and CBT counselors at the same time, theories that have very little vocabulary in common. Sometimes, we talk about setting boundaries as a communication strategy – asking for something or saying “no” to protect our needs and make sure others don’t drain us with excessive demands. On a more profound level, we can talk about boundaries as limits of our personality and that has very important implications for how we understand borderline personality disorder and psychotic disorders. Then, there’s the natural boundary, which is our skin. It’s what separates us from the rest of our environment. Our skin guarantees our bodily integrity. We have other physical boundaries some of which we can work on and improve, others are fixed and there’s nothing we can do about them.

In addition to our skin, there’s the psychological aspect of it. Even though our bodies may perform all their biological functions well, we may still not feel safe being in our bodies. When a person has experienced trauma, for example, trusting the body is not an easy thing. After a traumatic experience, the body remains vigilant, alert, and constantly feels danger everywhere, danger that intellectually may seem strange or even completely absent. This is because our thinking isn’t as affected by a trauma, precisely because trauma affects those parts that of us that are beyond language. In fact, there is some research to suggest that trauma shuts down our brain’s speech center. That means that trauma is beyond language and what’s beyond language is often (to a large degree) in the body.  Our intellect is often distrustful of our body when it doesn’t understand its messages or when it sees that the body acts as if there’s danger everywhere and the intellectual assessment of it seems false. That distrust breeds a whole other level of problems, needless to say.

If we can’t intellectually understand our somatic boundaries, how do we do that? The short answer is experientially. Understanding where our boundaries are involves being aware of how we feel in our own skin and mapping out the space around us that we need in order to feel safe. We pay attention to how we experience other people’s bodies around us and how we interact. The keywords here are feeling and awareness. The whole process takes place beyond words and it’s important to not impose them unnecessarily.

We can explore three separate facets of somatic boundaries:

1.      Our somatic boundary

2.      Our construction of other people’s somatic boundaries

3.      Interactions between

Below, I will suggest a few simple exercises that you can try and get started with your own exploration. See how they feel and then modify them to work even better for you. See what feels natural in the moment and then go on your own path. What feels natural, though, isn’t necessarily what feels good.  

Our somatic boundary

Exercise 1.

Duration: 2 – 5 minutes

Wherever you are now, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths (diaphragmatic breathing). While your eyes are still closed, feel your entire body. Visualize what you feel: is it quiet or full of sensations? Do you feel pain or tension anywhere? How safe do you feel?

Assess your posture. Are you sitting straight up or slouching? Imagine the shape of your spine.

Open your eyes and look around you. Where are you in the room? How do you see yourself having in mind the size of the room? Imagine yourself in the room with the posture you currently have. Are you big or small? How do you see yourself?

Spend a few moments reflecting on how you feel about the exercise and how you experience your own body in space.

Exercise 2.

Duration: 1 – 3 minutes

Start with a few deep breaths and/or do a grounding exercise. Focus on the sounds, smells, what you see. Map out the space around you. Get a feel for the size of the room.

Pay attention to your body. Change your posture and see if that changes how you feel – when you slouch or when you sit with your back straight: what difference does that make?

Stand up. Does your body feel different when you’re standing up vs when you’re sitting down? Spread your arms, move them up, down, in front of you, etc. Draw a sphere around you with your arms. Does that feel like it’s enough space?

Take a few steps left or right. Do you feel more confident when you sit, stand or walk?

Do you take up more or less space depending on the posture you’re in?

Don’t bother to define things with words, this exercise is meant to examine how you feel, not to test your vocabulary. There is no need to verbalize anything, but there is need to feel as much as possible.

Boundaries of other people

Exercise 1.

The previous set of exercises involved setting time aside and finding a space where you can be alone. Exploring how you imagine somatic boundaries of others requires the opposite: you need a space with other people. Sit in a café or take a walk in the park – someplace where you can set yourself aside and be an observer, rather than a participant.

Look at the people passing by, set your sights on someone, and see pay attention to the following:

1.      How are they standing? What is your reaction to their posture?

2.      Pay attention to people’s gestures: are they respectful to what you understand as the other person’s personal space?

3.      What’s the distance between the person you’re observing and people around them?

4.      As far as you can discern, how do people react (nonverbally) to that person’s body language?

5.      What drew you to that person in the first place? How are they different from other people in the crowd?

Exercise 2.

Call a friend, someone who would be interested in exploring their body in this way. Have them do the first group of exercises, maybe even do the one above together. Invite that person for coffee. Sit and drink the coffee and pay attention to the space between you: are you close or far away? Move closer, see if that changes how your body feels? If it changes it, is it for better or worse? Move away. How is that different? Does it change how emotionally close you feel? Do you feel more or less safe? Do you crave their closeness.

Make this encounter an exercise in mindfulness. Prepare for it by relaxing in whatever way works for you. It is important to enter the exercise as relaxed and as mindful as you can be, because it wll be easier for you to recognize if a part of your body tenses up, if it relaxes, etc.

The relational aspect

Once you go through the first two groups of exercises, you can put them together into an integrate practice. As you go about your day, pay attention to the space around you that you’ve identified and see what happens when different people enter it. What are the different ways that your body reacts? Are there people that your body welcomes into its space?

It may be useful to introduce a new term here: porosity. In geology, this refers to how much empty space there is in a rock. When we talk about porous boundaries, we are not talking about the exact same thing. We are talking about a more dynamic process: how porous are your boundaries for specific groups of people? In other words – who can get close to you and who can’t? For some, our boundaries are porous. They can stand very close to us and we won’t feel insecure or we’ll even find that exciting. On the other hand, there are people that we want to keep at arm’s length or farther away. Or preferably in the other room.

Be mindful of how your body communicates this. Don’t think of it as an alarm, like a sign of danger, think of it as your body communicating something. Collect the information and journal about it. Patterns will emerge with time.

This kind of an investigation requires you to approach interactions with mindfulness and with intention, and it’s obviously not easy to approach everything that way, unless you are enlightened in which case you don’t need these exercises. So do as much as you can. Investigate specific relationships in your life. See how your personal space reacts to your boss or to your partner or to your mother, your sister, etc. You might be surprised with what you discover!