When we think about love, we often do not think about boundaries. In fact, we usually think the opposite. We imagine two lovers almost merging into the ethers, so interconnected and intertwined that separation is unnecessary. The need for boundaries is summed up so beautifully by the famous Lebanese poet in the early 20th century, Kahlil Gibran,

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the
heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of
love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

What are boundaries and why do we need them in love? Boundaries are invisible demarcations between our own energy field and everything and everyone around us. Without boundaries, we would very quickly be unable to cope with even the most simple tasks of daily living. Our sensory apparatus, which is continually bombarded with external and internal sensations, must continually discriminate and selectively bring to our awareness only certain sensations.

Without adequate boundaries with another person, our own internal sensory discrimination can become impaired. We may seem fine, as long as we are together with this other person, but we may soon have difficulty functioning alone. Our ability to think and feel and discriminate may become blurred by the confusion of always responding to our own set of stimuli and what the other person thinks and feels.

Tonight I observed a boundary violation that stirred up rage in the injured person. It happened at my weekly Chaga meeting, a congenial meeting about the healing properties of Chaga, a mushroom grown and extracted from the birch trees of Siberia. One guy, with a serious medical diagnosis, has been taking chaga for a few weeks. He was telling a few of us that he had difficulty regulating the number of drops he pours out of the bottle. A lady sitting next to him grabbed his bottle and showed him how to pour it. She poured about 20 drops of his precious Chaga into her own bottle of water. To him, this one bottle of Chaga felt like his lifeline to healing. So, it was a dramatic altercation that followed and I was happy to be there to support him in his personal anguish.

He became enraged at her for wasting drops of his “lifeline” so flippantly. This lady never acknowledged that she had crossed a personal boundary, thereby further injuring this person who was already in an emotionally compromised state of mind due to his fear of dying. Instead of understanding the depth of his pain, another person proceeded to tell him to “get over” his anger, to let it go. She was also intruding upon his boundary, his right to express his true feelings.

How often have you felt intruded upon, as if your boundary was violated? And how often have you experienced feeling violated but the violator was in denial? Do you recall ever crossing someone else’s boundary, and not understanding the emotional impact on that other person? All of us have done this, often without realizing it, especially in our most intimate and “loving” relationships. However, the more concerned and sensitive we become to boundaries, our own and others, the more miraculously intimate we can become.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!