Maybe Your Environment is the Problem
What if strong boundaries aren’t about becoming unaffected by difficult environments?
What if they’re also about learning which environments support your health, nervous system, and thriving?
🧱 The Boundary Myth
🐌 Desert Experiment
🗺️ Environment Matters
🌀 It’s Not Just About Raising Your Vibration
🌿 Environmental Discernment
🧱 The Boundary Myth
Maybe your environment is the problem.
That thought might have felt offensive to a past version of me.
I was taught that strong boundaries meant being able to handle difficult or unhealthy environments.
That if I were strong enough, grounded enough, regulated enough, spiritually evolved enough— I could be anywhere and remain unaffected.
So when I struggled in certain environments, I blamed myself.
Weak boundaries.
Too sensitive.
Too open.
The wrong energetic tools.
Not spiritually evolved enough.
Over the last several years, I’ve been reconsidering that framework entirely.
Because humans aren’t isolated energetic islands.
Nervous systems regulate together.
Bodies respond to environments.
And some environments require so much hypervigilance, self-monitoring, and energetic labor that merely surviving them becomes exhausting.
🐌 Desert Experiment
I noticed this viscerally during my time in the Arizona desert.
I moved more there.
Biked.
Swam.
Walked.
Felt clearer.
Lighter.
Back in the Pacific Northwest, my body felt different almost immediately.
The dampness.
The heaviness.
The slower pace.
I reentered Slug Mode. 🐌
That doesn’t mean Arizona is objectively “better.”
It means environments affect us.
🗺️ Environment Matters
Epidemiologists already know this.
They study how environmental factors influence health outcomes, disease, and illness.
During a two-quarter epidemiology course, my research focused on the epidemiology of violence. Specifically, murder.
And despite the deeply personal nature of murder, violence clusters in certain environments.
Even in my doctoral research, I studied the spatial distribution of crime and violence. Human behavior clusters geographically too.
Environment matters.
That’s why I became a sociologist.
🌀 It's Not Just About Raising Your Vibration
I used to wonder why I blamed myself so quickly.
But I was trained to.
Through spiritual frameworks that treated people as isolated individuals, separate from their environments.
Everything is your trigger.
Everything is a reflection.
Everything is a projection.
Think positive.
Your inner reality creates your external reality.
Good vibes only.
Just raise your vibration.
If you behave differently, others will behave differently.
If you just do enough inner work, then other people will somehow gain access to different parts of themselves.
But there is no amount of ayahuasca or psilocybin I can do to make certain environments more inhabitable for me.
Sometimes it’s not about me.
Sometimes it’s about other people.
Sometimes it’s the environment itself.
What I’ve noticed over time is that I’ve become more sensitive to my environments.
Or maybe more accurately—
I’m becoming resensitized to things I learned to ignore or tolerate.
I’ve worked through many things.
But that doesn’t mean every environment—or every person—can meet me there.
And raising my vibration isn’t the answer.
Environmental discernment is.
🌿 Environmental Discernment
Maybe strong boundaries aren’t just about surviving difficult environments.
Maybe they’re also about discerning which environments support thriving.
I’ve been taken off work three different times because of my health.
At the time, I kept trying to “boundary harder.”
Push through it.
Adapt harder.
Regulate harder.
Trying to survive environments my body was struggling inside.
Over time, I started noticing that my body responded differently in different environments.
Not just emotionally.
Physically.
Energetically.
Socially.
Frameworks like Human Design and Creator Types gave me language for some of these patterns.
Not as rigid answers.
More as mirrors.
Ways of noticing:
What kinds of environments do I feel drained in?
What kinds do I feel more alive in?
What pacing feels supportive to my nervous system?
What kinds of people and spaces do I feel clearer around?
I’ve spent years trying to become resilient enough to tolerate certain environments.
To override my body to the detriment of my health.
Now I’m more interested in environmental discernment.
Not just surviving environments—
but learning which ones actually support my health and thriving.
Maybe strong boundaries aren’t always about learning how to stay.
Sometimes they’re about recognizing when your body wants or needs a different one.
And listening.
Love,
Heidi
Maybe thriving has less to do with becoming unaffected—
and more to do with learning where and how we come alive.
More reflections, moon phases, and field notes:
