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 unity. 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.
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 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 reality while allowing you to set limits to protect the integrity of your true authentic self when necessary. These agile boundaries allow you to know your individuated expression and your unified source while protecting your uniqueness.
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 the all-oneness of creation. On the other hand, defenses are learned strategies you make use of to avoid relating to and facing yourself, others, or your world. They are strategies of fear, aversion, and avoidance. They are a means of keeping pain out and hidden and avoiding integrating qualities of self that may not necessarily be all sparkly and shiny. Defenses are forceful in the way they keep out information and energy flow. They are sharp, jagged, spikey, and are more about control and manipulation than they are about empowerment and connection. 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.