What are boundaries?

Because the people I work with are sensitive people with big hearts, here to heal the world, boundaries are a topic I work with almost daily. So let me say the most important thing first: having good boundaries does not mean you need to close your heart to the world. Quite the contrary.

The edge of your energy field

In the energetic sense, boundaries are a structure at the edge of your energy field. Your energy field is your personal energy — all the vibrating information that is you — and it does not finish at your body. You take up more space than you think: in a very typical scenario, about an arm's length in every direction is where your personal space wants to sit. Your boundaries are the interface — the place where your personal energy meets the world, meets the universal, collective energy.

Too walled off, too wide open

If your boundaries are really rigid and solid, you'll have the experience of feeling separate and disconnected from the world around you. If they're flung far out and wide open, you might feel overwhelmed and oversensitive — feeling everything in the collective, and struggling to come back to your own autonomy. Good boundaries let you negotiate both: being in your own space, your own energy, your own autonomy — and being intimate with the world. Your life straddles both desires. So does every relationship.

And good boundaries are not the same all the time. They respond to what you need in each moment. Out in nature with only people you adore — that might be the time to let your boundaries dissolve and become one with all that you love. Walking through a sketchy mall with all sorts of icky energy in the air — that's the time to contain your energy, wall it off enough that you can simply be in your own space.

You can configure them — like a program

Imagine your boundaries as something you get to program. Some things can be always allowed in: pure, clean expressions of love. Anything that makes you giggle and lightens your heart. (You tell me what else belongs on that list.)

Some things you never allow in — and not by fighting them off. Better: you become invisible to them. What would you like to be invisible to? What are you so thoroughly not a match to that that kind of energy can't even find you? Maybe violence of any kind. Maybe disrespect. You get to choose.

What are you just not available for?

And then there's the third setting: energies that knock on your door, so you can use your discernment about whether to let them in right now. Picture a package on your doorstep. You can open the door and take it in; you can open the door, see what it is, and close the door; or you can leave it there and ask whoever sent it to take it back. For me, that's helpful criticism. I'm really sensitive to it — not my favorite quality about myself — and I've learned that in the wrong mindset it does more harm than good, while in the right mindset it does so much good. So it doesn't get an always-in pass or a never-in ban. It knocks, and I choose.

Boundaries also hold you

Here's the part I love most: boundaries aren't only for modulating what comes at you from the outside world. They also contain your energy. If your boundaries sit right up against you — you've got big emotions, big thoughts, big experiences to process, and you give yourself no space because you're trying to stay so contained — it's going to feel tight, icky, painful, and potentially like you're all alone with it. And if you have no boundaries at all, everything slips out of you whether it's the moment for it or not: you're at work, you're having a bad day, somebody says one thing, and suddenly you're weeping. That energy isn't contained.

The middle ground is a boundary that holds you — enough space inside it to process your emotions, your energy, your thoughts, your experiences, without all of it going out into the world all the time. In relationship, where you're forever straddling autonomy and intimacy, this is the skill underneath the skill.

So no — boundaries aren't the wall around your heart. They're the structure that makes it possible to keep it open.