On Balance: The Warrior/Buddha

Posted by Katie Kovaleski on August 23, 2020 in life coaching

Warrior/Buddha. Part of my human design is to embody both and learning to balance both, at the same time, has been a lesson in patience.

I’ve wanted for some time to learn how to get realllllly good at setting & honoring compassionate boundaries. It wasn’t something I had ever been taught to do; either I loved you and wanted you close or felt something quite opposite and wanted you gone. The idea of letting something or someone go with love was foreign and didn’t make sense to me. Why would you choose to let something go if you really loved it and wanted it around?

So I spent a lot of time living between poles – all in on love and passion for a project or person or living in the opposing pole of resentment and disgust and the desire to release and be released.

I’ve finally gotten to a place where having what I call “compassionate boundaries” feels much easier. This means being able to assess where the boundary needs to be for my optimal health and functioning, regardless of how much I might crave a different reality with the thing, setting the boundary externally (verbalizing where I’m at and what I need), respecting and allowing the situation or someone to have whatever response they have while still remaining firm in the boundary and instead of meeting the external outcome with matching energy, keeping mine calm and compassionate. Everyone deserves to have the respect and autonomy of having their own response and reaction. When we know what our boundaries are, someone else’s response won’t dictate or change the boundary or influence our emotional state to an intense degree.

Going through this process also taught me to be able to hold two opposing emotions at the same time and allow them both to fully exist and it’s really really cool. Holding compassion and allowing it in while also experiencing resentment feels like meeting myself in a whole new way. Balance of warrior & Buddha, the masculine & feminine. Instead of this or this, it’s now becoming a constant state of this AND this. The key for me has been learning to sit with the discomfort. Allowing the outcome to play out and not engage in emotional exchanges that are just wounds arguing with wounds. And I’m not talking about bouncing back and forth between two voices in your head, arguing with each other. I’m talking about dropping deeply into one feeling, compassion, using all your senses to allow it to really flow through you and then doing the same with the opposing feeling that’s present, like resentment in this case. And then allowing them to flow through you at the SAME TIME. It’s an amazing energy practice that allows them to intermingle and really make healing feel amplified, in real time. It’s been a really beautiful experience moving through this and although some points of the process with learning to embody compassionate boundaries felt like swallowing jagged pills at the time, it was well worth it. And that, my friends, is what self-love is all about. (At least for me, this month ☺️)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *