The Care & Feeding of Boundaries
This morning, I’m honoring a profound desire to tend to my boundaries, which have become somewhat diffuse and hazy over the past few days.
Boundaries are not walls, but rather, those forms that create and hold the evolving shape of your life. When I tuned into mine this morning, they felt studded with — and in places, shredded by — bits and pieces of the world’s stuff, embedded into my energy field like shrapnel.
As incarnate beings, we are both boundaried and boundless. We inhabit an ecology of being that includes everything from the unconditioned realms of unity and essence — in which we are one with all that is — to the pattern and form of our lives, which unfold in the conditioned realms of the 3-D world, as well as the subtle energy realms in-between.
Incarnation is a boundaried state in which the boundless soul enters into a conditioned field, and takes on a particular shape and form — a pattern that makes each of us uniquely ourselves, a very specific and individual expression of the Sacred.
Without boundaries, we would remain in the realms of formlessness. We choose to incarnate in the physical world because we love this earth, because we love the human family. Being here as incarnate beings offers us a richly creative environment in which to grow, serve the earth, serve humanity, experience and express our soul’s qualities within the form and pattern of our lives, and act as generative, co-creative partners to shape a world of love and blessing.
On a practical, everyday level, it’s simple. Boundaries help us to be more fully ourselves. When you are yourself, you can share yourself — your soul’s gifts, the gift of your personhood — with your world. You can be loving, kind, funny, playful, generous. Your presence blesses our world.
When you lose yourself — either by merging with someone or something else, or losing your sovereignty in some other way, by allowing that which is not-you to become stronger in your energetic space than your own soul — you become a blobby mess, unable to connect with your soul, and unavailable for true communion with anyone else.
For me, there’s a rhythm of engagement and solitude that helps me stay whole and present. Too much engagement and I fray around the edges. Too much solitude and I lose connection with my heart. So it’s a dance rather than a fixed state of being.
For the past 50+ years, I’ve had a daily practice of cleansing and restoring my body, energy body, and energy field. And, during that time, the world around me has changed, as have I.
As I age, what I need to sustain the vibrancy and health of my body and energy body changes as well. As the world around us changes, those personal practices of cleansing, nourishment and restoration that were effective and powerful in the past, become less so.
So, with my soul’s guidance, and in partnership with the Devas and my own embodied creativity and discernment, I devise new ways of harmonizing the elements of my energy body that are more skillful and responsive to the times in which we live.
Today, I’m filling the boundary of my energy field with flexibility and strength; release; receptivity and discernment; love and power; radiance, truth, and completion. Each of these qualities helps differentiate my incarnate being from the world around me. And, through that differentiation, I become more available for true relationship with my world today.
How about you? What is your relationship with your own boundaries today? How do you honor and care for them? How do challenges with your boundaries affect your life and business?
