Living with limits
A key dynamic of prisons is limit-setting. We feel safer when we live within limits. A person who lives without limits may not be aware that they feel unsafe. They may look outside themselves and understand the threat as always on the outside.
On the international stage, we see how an inability to respect limits is making the world more dangerous for everyone. Limits are essential if we are to feel safe in the world.
Anyone who feels troubled by all that gets reported in the news might not readily connect that an incredibly healthy and meaningful response is to make room for personal therapy. Therapy works by attending to unsafe feelings and the steady creation of healthy limits.
In a real sense, therapy is defined by boundaries and the limit of time of each regular session. Within the safe limit of that time, it becomes increasingly possible to look inside and to attend to feelings more sensitively.
When we listen to the news, we might imagine that change needs to happen on a big scale. Personal therapy on the other hand supports belief in changes that start small and grow gradually over time. We can naturally see similarities between such growth and the stages of life in a plant.
As such, the growing of plants can become a vital resource for attending more fully to our own inner-lives. Each year, I am reminded of this vital pattern through growing chilli plants.
In practice, when growing chilli plants careful attention needs to be given to the size of the pot – plant the seed in a tiny pot, then gradually re-pot several times as the plant grows. Keeping a plant in too small a pot restricts growth whereas a move to a pot that is too large, too soon does not support overall healthy growth. It is as though chilli plants need the container of a suitable-sized pot in order to flourish!
Might there be a sense in which something similar can happen for us, as well? Might you be in need of a containing space where all that is most vital to you can be supported to grow and eventually to flourish? In personal therapy, change can start small and yet gradually over time can find expression in ways that are a real outworking of all that engages and matters most to you.