“People are starving for love, not knowing their heart is a magical kitchen. Open your heart. Open your magical kitchen and refuse to walk around the world begging for love. In your heart is all the love you need. Your heart can create any amount of love, not just for yourself, but for the whole world.”
―don Miguel Ruiz
Good morning! I’m very pleased to be able to share today’s article with you. In this wonderful article, best-selling author don Miguel Ruiz shares his wisdom on love, relationships, and healthy boundaries. don Miguel Ruiz is the author of many bestselling books, including "The Four Agreements" and "The Mastery of Love."
Enjoy ♥
"Boundaries"
by don Miguel Ruiz
There are two kinds of boundaries we use when dealing with people–the boundaries we use when we don't have awareness, and the boundaries we use when we do have awareness. Usually we create boundaries in places where we can be hurt. We have emotional wounds in our minds, and if someone touches our wounds we have emotional pain. To feel safe in our interactions with people, we put boundaries around every emotional wound. These boundaries create a box that restricts us. When we heal the emotional mind, we no longer have those wounds, and the boundaries disappear. When they disappear, we create a new set of boundaries–this time with awareness.
The second set of boundaries we create is because of other people's wounds, so we don't allow other people to give us their emotional poison.
When we are young, we play with other children to have fun, not to insult them or to give them our poison. As adults, we also want to have relationships that we enjoy. We don't want poison like anger, jealousy, or envy. We don't want each other's garbage. When get together, it's because we want to share our love and our joy.
When we are no longer wounded, and we are in a relationship, we can put up boundaries to restrict another's poison. We call that respect.
We don't want to have relationships that are disrespectful to us. For example, if I am in a relationship with someone and that person tries to control me, I can tell them, "Okay this is the limit. Don't cross this limit. You can be with me or not, but if you stay with me don't try to control me. Give me my space, and I will give you your space. I deal with my garbage, you deal with your garbage. If you are cranky, I will give you space. You can be cranky, it's okay, there's nothing personal. I respect you, and I want respect also. If you don't respect me, I will not stay with you and it doesn't mean that I don't love you, no… I love you. But if I'm not being respected, I will leave and you can be with someone who is the way you want them to be.
We can create acceptable boundaries with people whose emotional poison we do not want to eat. When we respect ourselves, we will not allow disrespect from anybody else. This is not selfishness, it's self-love. The controlling aspect is selfishness–wanting a partner to stay with us even if we are in hell. If we go into relationships because, "Oh I need you so much," it's selfishness, not self-love.
We need to understand that self-love is completely different from selfishness. Self-love come from integrity. We recognize our integrity through our feelings. The feelings we have are real. If we don't feel good it's because something is not right. If we feel anger, we know that something is not right. If we feel envy or jealousy, something is not right. Jealousy is not bad, anger is not bad either. These emotions are telling us when something is not right.
Repressing emotions is not the answer…to change the cause of the emotions is the answer. If we feel anger or jealousy, we have to take one step back to see what is causing those emotions. If we change the cause, the affect also will change.
A love relationship should be based in respect. And that's why we put boundaries on our relationships. The boundary is not, "Don't touch me because I can get hurt." The boundary is a way to have someone show respect. We don't want their anger or their judgment…
Copyright don Miguel Ruiz. All Rights Reserved.
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Wishing you a day filled with much love and romance!
Soulfully,
Valerie
