Having Healthy Boundaries on Your Spiritual Journey
Forming and maintaining healthy boundaries in your spiritual journey is essential to managing your energy flow. It’s healthy to say “no” to some experiences and relationships in your expansion toward higher consciousness.
Your Internal and External Boundaries
There are two types of boundaries highlighted in some of the literature on forming and maintaining healthy relationship boundaries with yourself and others. These two types are referenced as internal boundaries and external boundaries. Internal boundaries help you set limits on your own thoughts and behaviors, while external boundaries help you set limits on what you express to others as well as what you receive from others.
There is a purpose to you having internal and external boundaries that filter what you circulate within yourself, what you send outward, and what you receive. When intact and healthy, these boundaries ensure you are directing the currents of your life force toward your growth and fulfilment. With healthy boundaries, your thoughts, emotions, and focus align with your intent, and your dreams and visions are identifiable as yours.
Spiritual Growth with Healthy Boundaries
Within the spiritual discourse, the concepts of unity and oneness may give you the impression that you don’t need to set internal and external limits. You may have come across teachings that promote an aversion to separation and separateness. There are different conceptions of unity and oneness that you can reference, that allow you to maintain your uniqueness and energetic integrity.
There is a difference between differentiation, being unique, and believing yourself to be an isolated and separate self. On one level, having a sense of self that feels separate and isolated, a sense of self that doesn’t know the wholeness, un-fragmentable core your individuality arises out of, does create a lot of unnecessary suffering. Unchecked, though, this discourse may create the impression that you’re supposed to drop your individuality, your differentiated identity, and leave yourself open to the ever-changing flow of energy all around you.
Clarification around these concepts is important here. There is a difference between boundaries and defenses. Boundaries are the clear resonant distinctions between what’s the individuated and differentiated you and what’s not.
Healthy boundaries are both firm and flexible. They allow you to inhabit your uniqueness and leverage your autonomy as the co-creator of your experiences while allowing you to set limits to protect the integrity of your authentic self when necessary. These agile boundaries allow you to know your individuated expression and your unified source while protecting your uniqueness.
How Healthy Boundaries Support Your Consciousness Evolution
Healthy boundaries allow you to identify your unique desires and preferences easily, and let you pinpoint what’s important and of value to you. Just as every cell in the body is both independent and interdependent with other cells, having its own membrane and unique function, you are a unique cell with your own unique structure and membrane in the Universal Body.
It’s important to honor that.
Part of healthy psychological development is this recognition of yourself as an individual. Standing in your power, being in your authority, self-authoring your psychology all extend from this natural ability to stand in your true individuated self. It is this same individuated self that evolves to become empowered enough to drop defensiveness and stand in the reality of an interdependent and unified existence with other individuals. On the other hand, defenses are learned strategies you make use of to avoid relating to and facing yourself, others, or your world. Defenses aren't empowering, and they typically don't support growth and expansion but rather promote conservation and staying with the familiar. Recognize that your spiritual journey is inclusive of protecting, nourishing, and honoring yourself. Healthy boundaries are a must for empowerment and self-evolution. By setting and reinforcing internal and external limits, you keep your energy going only toward the experiences and relationships that support and honor your sacred divine nature.
For more on how to protect your energetic integrity, check out Asserting Your Psychological and Intellectual Boundaries.
Kidest OM is a manifestation and consciousness evolution author and teacher with indispensable books and online courses designed to help you attract and manifest what you want. Her books include "Anything You Want" and "Nothing in the Way: Clearing the Paths to Success & Fulfilment" which are available globally in eBook and print through online book retailers.