Personal Boundaries vs Spiritual Oneness

[TonySG]

Hi
So I am experiencing a conflict between setting healthy boundaries and spiritual oneness.

I wasn't modeled healthy boundaries growing up. I understand my family was 'enmeshed'. I basically have two levels of boundaries - letting people too close or keeping them too far away. I am quite sensitive and feel like I get energetically drained when letting people get too close. It's not a pleasant feeling and makes me shut myself off and run away. So it's important for me to keep people at a healthy distance but close enough for healthy communication and relationship.

I have also been on the spiritual path for a number of years now and have been making some great progress especially over the last month. I can find myself in a state of oneness during meditation and reside in awareness. Sometimes for hours at a time. Needless to say, these states feel life-changing.

But I still have this problem setting personal boundaries. The two things seem to conflict with one another. Be one with everyone and everything but then be separate enough by holding personal boundaries?!

I wonder if anyone can help me navigate this and help me make sense of the two opposing ideas.

Thanks

[John32241]

Hello,

Spirital oneness is about love for all that you are and extending this to all that is.

Healthy boundaries within self and others is about lovingly embracing all and learning to discern and ignore bad advice. It is not really about a physical seperation or insolation from an energy. It is about kindness and respect for those aspects of self within you or others which do not represent your deepest desires.

In my mind these are not two opposing ideas.

John

[Molearner]

Originally Posted by TonySG

Hi
So I am experiencing a conflict between setting healthy boundaries and spiritual oneness.


I wonder if anyone can help me navigate this and help me make sense of the two opposing ideas.

Thanks

TonySG,

Be aware of great expectations. All expectations are accompanied by your personal judgement of someone else. I believe that people have a sense that they are being judged. Once this happens....if they feel you have a negative judgement of them......they are removed from any chance of 'oneness' with you. It is easy to forget the possibility that they might change or that, you yourself might change. Over the course of my life I have witnessed my change in attitudes towards certain people just as they have witnessed my changing attitude in regards to them. Do not let judgement be the cause of separating yourself from others.

[thatothergirl]

At the energetic level, you are one with everything and everyone anyway. That is not changed or threatened by having healthy boundaries in place. Healthy boundaries simply means not allowing others' energies to pollute your awareness, being able to assert yourself and your own needs, and also respecting others' boundaries too (it's a two-way process).

Perhaps, being sensitive and open, you have attracted draining people to you to teach you this lesson about boundaries - since it's obviously something that you struggle with. When you're doing energy work and progressively clearing out your personal issues, you may find those people drift away from you naturally; or your relationships/interactions with those same people will change and become healthier, as you become stronger. That happened to me.

[davidsun]

Originally Posted by TonySG

Hi
So I am experiencing a conflict between setting healthy boundaries and spiritual oneness.

I wasn't modeled healthy boundaries growing up. I understand my family was 'enmeshed'. I basically have two levels of boundaries - letting people too close or keeping them too far away. I am quite sensitive and feel like I get energetically drained when letting people get too close. It's not a pleasant feeling and makes me shut myself off and run away. So it's important for me to keep people at a healthy distance but close enough for healthy communication and relationship.

I have also been on the spiritual path for a number of years now and have been making some great progress especially over the last month. I can find myself in a state of oneness during meditation and reside in awareness. Sometimes for hours at a time. Needless to say, these states feel life-changing.

But I still have this problem setting personal boundaries. The two things seem to conflict with one another. Be one with everyone and everything but then be separate enough by holding personal boundaries?!

I wonder if anyone can help me navigate this and help me make sense of the two opposing ideas.

Thanks

Hello Tony, I hope this sheds light on the issues of concern raised by you:

'We' are all indeed aspects of One Being(ness). But not all Beingnesses are equally evolved, in terms of recognizing and honoring others as valid/valuable/connected aspects of Life. In other words, most souls are still not fully evolved - they are still selfish in terms of their sense of their own identity and, consequently, tend to act in ways which ignore, neglect, exploit and abuse others instead of respecting and treating them as fellow Beings in their own right. Hence it is necessary that one learn to recognize and self- and other-protectively relate to and treat them as such.

An excerpt from my treatise which (I think) places things in 'superordinate' perspective:

Cosmically ‘awakened’ souls continue to live and make choices as personally response-able, choice‑implementing selves who are well worth every ‘bit’ of their ‘salt’, albeit they do so so ‘sacrally’, without putting themselves on any kind of ‘pedestal’, knowing that they are vital components of Life’s Grand Being‑n‑Doing, in other words knowing that they are Love and Joy experiencing and expressing ‘buds’, ‘leaves’, ‘flowers’ and potentially ‘seed’ bearing ‘fruit’ on ‘the Tree’ of Life Itself!*

[Footnote*: The applicability of any and all analogies is limited by the partiality of the significators they contain. If what’s said in the above paragraph is still fairly new news to you, watch that you don’t consequently just go off on a Pollyanna‧ish☺ Love and Joy dispensing ‘ride’ in a naive attempt to unreservedly welcome and be supportive of anything and everything about yourself and/or others just as they are. Unconditional Love is often extolled as being the most ‘perfect’ kind of ‘love’. But the fact is that maximal experience and expression of Love and Joy cannot always be so simply actualized in the context of a multiplistically complex world such as ours. (This, notwithstanding the fact that many of Jesus’ exhortations which focused on promoting brotherly love (see Matthew 5:43-48 for example) may be read to support such ‘unconditional’ proposition. The way in which he addressed establishment Scribes and Pharisees stands in sharp contrast to these, however.)

The relevant bit of information in this case is that, despite the fact that each and every soul and personality aspect thereof really derives from and so may truly be regarded as being an expression of Life Itself, some configurations thereof are more conducive of experience and further expression of Love and Joy while others are not only less so but may even be counterproductive in said regard. As the apostle Paul put it: “In a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honor, and some to dishonor.”(II Timothy 2:20) So embracing and supporting everyone and everything equally, without reservation in any regard, will not serve to operationally maximize the flowering and fructification of Love and Joy in The Flow‑Field of Life.

Among other things (expanding the scope of the above-presented Tree of Life analogy), because of the fact that still incarnating souls are often, in one way or another, still fairly selfishly motivated, they may also (in many cases quite unconsciously!) in effect function (sometimes quite ‘poisonously’ even) as ‘parasites’ and ‘thorns’ in relation to others. Would-be Cosmic, i.e. Tree-hugging☺, souls may therefore be purposed (by Love and Joy, which is the imperative of Life Itself!) to learn to recognize as well as then devise and implement ways of deflecting and educationally redirecting or, such measures possibly failing, counteracting such tendencies in oneself and/or others so as to stop these from being harmfully ‘acted*out’, if, when and in whatever ways and to whatever extent one may have the capacity to so do.

The point being made here is that, to become and synergically function as a self-transcendentally wholesome agent of Life, one must both learn to perceptively discern what sorts of things will and what sorts of things won’t really serve to optimize and augment the experience and expression of Love and Joy in the selfish-temptation filled context of Life’s earthly matrix, as well as then act wisely (i.e. judiciously) on the basis of such knowledge. As the Biblical story of Solomon’s most famous ‘judgment’ clearly illustrates, there is much more to serving the cause of Life than ‘unconditionally’ embracing and/or supporting every aspect of one’s own or others’ being-n-doing processes.]