Creating & Maintaining Healthy Boundaries with Others

Personal power is not about political, economic, or social clout. It isn’t about having authority over other people. It’s not the power of self-importance used to intimidate or manipulate others to increase your superiority. It isn’t even about getting everything you want in life.

Personal power is the ability to live authentically in each moment. It’s the ability to remain calm, loving, compassionate, and resolute, regardless of opposition; it’s standing in the integrity of your essence before any circumstance and holding your intention with clarity. Personal power is the key element needed to expand your consciousness and create a life of meaning and joy. It is a pre-requisite for mastering energy skills.

As you become more empowered, you become more successful at using energy skills, and as you become more successful, your personal power continues to grow. It is a self-perpetuating cycle.

Creating Boundaries Requires Discernment and Flexibility

Your boundary is the place where you end and another begins. There is a profound dichotomy in working with energy. On the one hand, we are all interlinked with each other and energy flows into, through, and among us. We feel each others’ energy and influence each others’ energy flow. On the other hand, we are each separate individuals with our own distinct energy that is patterned according to our vision, intent, and emotion. The quandary is how to stay connected and flowing with each other, yet maintain a boundary around the energy experiences we want to have versus the ones we don’t.

Being able to create and maintain healthy boundaries requires discernment and flexibility. You still are in exchange with others, but there is no confusion about where your space begins and ends. Think of the energy boundary as a semi-permeable membrane, open to other energy that you resonate with and chose to engage and closed to energy that doesn’t represent you.

What is a Healthy Boundary? What Does It Do?

A boundary marks your emotional, physical, and energetic space. Having it ensures your ability to act from your own center and connect to your spiritual Source. For many, this space encompasses their entire aura. For others, it’s the space out to the third layer of the aura — the layer that links to the chakra of personal individuation. Healthy boundaries allow independence of thought and action, allowing you to be in exchange with others without losing your personal identity, uniqueness, or autonomy.

When doing energy work, your boundaries ensure that you don’t take on another person’s energetic condition or fall under someone else’s influence. At the same time, it restrains your projections, ensuring that you don’t force your own persona on another person or have undue influence. Healthy boundaries demonstrate that you know who you are, have confidence in yourself, are connected to your spiritual Source, and trust and respect other people’s path, purpose, and ability.

Weak Boundaries: Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave

When you have poor boundaries, the demarcation of your aura may appear either very weak or very rigid, and give rise to several energetic conditions. Your energy fibers can become entangled with other people, impacting your ability to be independent. When you’re entangled with another person or group of people, you lose your connection with your center and have trouble walking your path. You have less free attention to explore the world and become less open to new ideas.

Entanglement fosters dependency and control. Power issues are forefront; you may be trying to exert undo control over another person, or a group may be expecting you to conform to a set of ideals and beliefs. Either way, independent thought or action is curtailed.

Consequences of Poor Boundaries

Poor boundaries can result in losing connection with your body. When you abandon your boundaries, or when your space is invaded, the discomfort can be such that it is easier to disconnect from your body than to feel it, especially if you feel powerless to change the circumstance. Once disconnected, you no longer receive the energy information your body provides. This impacts your decision-making abilities, your centeredness, and your grounding. In short, you lose personal power. Effective energy work becomes difficult, if not impossible.

With overly rigid boundaries, you may feel like a victim and become overly protective, or become detached and unwilling to connect with people. Your aura becomes hard and impenetrable, and many of your energy fibers stay coiled up in your chakras. You lose people’s input, support, and exchange of energy.

Flow is essential to health and function. Without flow you become isolated. Isolation causes physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental health problems. Overly rigid boundaries give the illusion of personal power, yet are as energetically disabling as not having any boundaries at all.

The best activation for defining your boundary is the Spiral Pillar of Light. Here's a simple version.

Exercise: Creating Your Healthy Boundaries

1. Ground and center.

2. Spread your arms straight out from your body and swing from side to side, demarking your personal space. Twist from side to side, bend sideways, and explore your space.

3. Activate the Spiral Pillar of Light pattern by inhaling and imagining a pillar of light coming down into, through, and around you to the Earth, encompassing you in safety and peace.

4. Breathe into your core and expand your brilliance, filling your personal space with light.

5. Intend that only input for the highest and best good of all penetrate this boundary.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher, The Career Press Inc.
www.careerpress.com www.newpagebooks.com
©2011 by Synthia Andrews. All rights reserved.

Article Source

The Path of Energy: Awaken Your Personal Power and Expand Your Consciousness
by Dr. Synthia Andrews, ND

A guide to living with expanded consciousness. Included are techniques that build energy awareness and use this skill to deepen your spiritual path, intimacy in relationships, align with earth energy, clear space, create protection, manifest goals, facilitate healing, and more.

Click here for more info and/or to order this book.

About the Author

Dr. Synthia Andrews is a naturopathic physician with thirty years experience as a massage and energy practitioner. She uses the techniques in her book "The Path of Energy" in client sessions and in meditation groups. She is co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to 2012 and The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Akashic Record. She teaches energy awareness workshops and lectures around the world. She offers web-based support for techniques in this book and guided audio meditations at www.thepathofenergy.com.