How Can You Practice Oneness and Boundaries

If you are surrounded by validating, sensitive, respectful, loving people who go out of their way to help you, make you feel great, you will not think about boundaries, and it will be a walk in the park for you to live in Oneness.

If you are surrounded by people who are lacking in empathy, appreciation, common sense, or even just basic warmth, the idea of Oneness might appeal to you, but not to your neighbours. If you choose to live in Oneness, you will separate yourself through your choice, and you can – because it is possible to cultivate traits in you that few around you have or deem important. (Who knows, in a decade or two, you may be seen as a trailblazer in your ‘hood, the first in your clan who dared to go in an unknown direction, or the one who healed the communication…) What you separate from is the plane of ego, and the influence people who live by other, not-unity, beliefs could exert on you. You can stay connected on the heart plane, trusting that all beings are part of one universe, and one earth.

If you are surrounded by people who are unaware or proud of their cruelty and ignorance and have not even begun to challenge and transmute the toxic messages they have eaten up, you draw boundaries and remove yourself from those energies as well as you can. Being true to your values in a social environment that tramples on them can be challenging, and, over time, a chronic health hazard; that is why you take yourself out of it. It is not your job to open closed hearts or closed minds, to appease hostile hearts and hostile minds, to change people who want to be who they are, or to forcefully wish that they wake up as someone else. All you can be to them is an example of a different – and amazing (!) – set of values.

In these contexts, Oneness and boundaries support each other.

It helps to remember that being on a journey means that no one is stagnant and no one is finished, that there is always more to refine, that you and I and everyone else are advancing. Where we will be tomorrow is not where we are now – as individuals, or as individuals in our groups, in our culture, and in the human family.

Who we shape is ourselves and our destiny. We put ourselves into better environments. We feed ourselves with better food. We feed ourselves with better food for the mind. We become the love, the respect, the inspiration that we have been trying to find. We beautify the place we are in. We make our sacred spaces. We make our sacred hours. We commit to our thriving. We bring love to ourselves.

Of course, a loving consciousness and a consciousness that likes other things (than love) are different energies that end up with different results. Be realistic about who you are dealing with.

Medicine, psychology and wisdom traditions suggest that peer groups with a common goal, support networks with a shared practice and “sanghas” – spiritual fellowships, mindfulness circles, prayer groups – are foundational to well-being, confidence, the felt sense of “my life has meaning, I am okay, and I am going somewhere”. These chosen communities are a success because, in them, we get to be both, the nurturer and the nurtured. Our bodies feel these experiences as being safe and loved, needed and recognized. The verbal mind may struggle with naming and justifying these experiences, but we know them when we feel them and what power they have.

Further, who we socialize with has a strong, and often lasting, influence on how we think and feel.

Honour your desire to evolve, honour your social nature, and honour your discernment. ⭕

NJ,

6 June 2020

#selfcare #selfdevelopment #blossoming #connectedness #rapport #resonance #oneintheone

#containment #boundaries #composting #lettingbe

#Gaiaisbigenough #nurturingversusconsumerism

#willtopeace #love