Internal Boundaries The Key to Spiritual Integration and Emotional Balance

Loving internal boundaries can allow us to achieve some integration and balance in our relationships and our life experience.

"I needed to learn how to set boundaries within, both emotionally and mentally by integrating Spiritual Truth into my process. Because "I feel like a failure" does not mean that is the Truth. The Spiritual Truth is that "failure" is an opportunity for growth. I can set a boundary with my emotions by not buying into the illusion that what I am feeling is who I am. I can set a boundary intellectually by telling that part of my mind that is judging and shaming me to shut up, because that is my disease lying to me. I can feel and release the emotional pain energy at the same time I am telling myself the Truth by not buying into the shame and judgment."

We need to own that we have the power to choose where to focus our mind.

We can consciously start viewing ourselves from the "witness" perspective.

We all do this anyway but we learned to watch our selves from a place of judgment and shame. It is time to fire the judge - our critical parent - and choose to replace that judge with our Higher Self - who is a Loving parent.

We can then intervene in our own process to help us be more Loving to self.

"We need to take the shame and judgment out of the process on a personal level. It is vitally important to stop listening and giving power to that critical place within us that tells us that we are bad and wrong and shameful.

That "critical parent" voice in our head is the disease lying to us. Any shaming, judgmental voice inside of us is the disease talking to us - and it is always lying. This disease of Codependence is very adaptable, and it attacks us from all sides. The voices of the disease that are totally resistant to becoming involved in healing and Recovery are the same voices that turn right around and tell us, using Spiritual language, that we are not doing Recovery good enough, that we are not doing it right.

We need to become clear internally on what messages are coming from the disease, from the old tapes, and which ones are coming from the True Self - what some people call "the small quiet voice."

We need to turn down the volume on those loud, yammering voices that shame and judge us and turn up the volume on the quiet Loving voice. As long as we are judging and shaming ourselves we are feeding back into the disease, we are feeding the dragon within that is eating the life out of us. Codependence is a disease that feeds on itself - it is self-perpetuating.

This healing is a long gradual process - the goal is progress, not perfection. What we are learning about is unconditional Love. Unconditional Love means no judgment, no shame."

This is what enlightenment and consciousness raising are all about!

Owning our power to be a co-creator of our lives by changing our relationship with ourselves.

We can change the way we think.

We need to detach from our wounded self in order to allow our Spiritual Self to guide us.

We are Unconditionally Loved.

The Spirit does not speak to us from judgment and shame.

We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.

We need to work on integrating Spiritual Truth into our relationship with the mental and emotional levels of our being so that we can achieve some balance with, and between, all the levels of our being.

The Twelve Steps are a formula for integrating the Spiritual into the Physical. The Ancient Spiritual Principles (and the tools they provide) which underline the Twelve Step Process work because they are aligned with the Universal Laws of Energy Interaction.

Through admitting powerlessness out of ego-self we gain access to the unlimited power that is available to us out of our Spiritual Self.

"We must start recognizing our powerlessness over this disease of Codependence. As long as we did not know we had a choice we did not have one. If we never knew how to say "no," then we never really said "yes."

We were powerless to do anything any different than we did it. We were doing the best we knew how with the tools that we had. None of us had the power to write a different script for our lives.

We need to grieve for the past. For the ways in which we abandoned and abused ourselves. For the ways we deprived ourselves. We need to own that sadness. But we also need to stop blaming ourselves for it. It was not our fault!

We did not have the power to do it any differently.

As long as we are holding onto the guilt and feeling ashamed, it means that on some level we think we had the power. We think that if we would have just done it a little differently, if we had just done it "right," if we could have just said the "right" thing, then we could have controlled it and had it come out the way we wanted.

The part of you that is telling you that is your disease. The part of you that tells you that you are not lovable, that you are not worthy, that you are not deserving, is the disease. It is trying to maintain control because that is all that it knows how to do.

We are not "better than." We are also not "less than." The messages that we are "better than" come from the same place that the messages of "less than" come from: the disease.

We are all children of God who deserve to be happy.

And if you are right now judging yourself for not being happy enough or healed enough - that is your disease talking. Tell it to fuck off!!

It is not who you are - it is only a part of you. We can stop giving power to that part of us. We can stop being the victims of ourselves."

The disease has power when we believe the critical parent voice.

When we are feeling something "negative" and buying into the negative messages is when we go into the downward spiral - when we crash and burn.

(Emotions are not negative or positive, it is our reaction to them that gives them value - i.e., sadness is very positive when we are grieving, if our perspective is aligned with Truth.)

"If I am feeling like a "failure" and giving power to the "critical parent" voice within that is telling me that I am a failure - then I can get stuck in a very painful place where I am shaming myself for being me. In this dynamic I am being the victim of myself and also being my own perpetrator - and the next step is to rescue myself by using one of the old tools to go unconscious (food, alcohol, sex, etc.) Thus the disease has me running around in a squirrel cage of suffering and shame, a dance of pain, blame, and self-abuse.

By learning to set a boundary with and between our emotional truth, what we feel, and our mental perspective, what we believe - in alignment with the Spiritual Truth we have integrated into the process - we can honor and release the feelings without buying into the false beliefs."

The child in us has a reason to feel like a "failure."

Because our parents weren't capable of Loving themselves or of emotional honesty - we felt like there was something wrong with us.

We felt responsible for the deprivation or abuse or abandonment that we experienced.

"The hardest thing for any of us to do is to have compassion for ourselves. As children we felt responsible for the things that happened to us. We blamed ourselves for the things that were done to us and for the deprivations we suffered. There is nothing more powerful in this transformational process than being able to go back to that child who still exists within us and say, "It wasn't your fault. You didn't do anything wrong, you were just a little kid.""

We need to have internal Boundaries with and between the emotional and mental components of our being so that we can:

• feel our feelings without being the victim of them or victimizing others with them;
• achieve some balance between feeling and thinking, intuitive and rational;
• know which feelings are telling us the Truth and which are reactions to old wounds so that we can discern between emotional honesty and indulgence.

Boundaries:

• with the disease/critical parent voice so that we can stop giving power to the judgment and shame on a personal level & stop letting our own mind be our worst enemy;
• between being and behavior so that we can take responsibility without blaming ourselves;
• with our inner children to allow us to Lovingly parent and set boundaries for the wounded children within which allows us to own the magical, spontaneous, creative, Spiritual child inside;

Boundaries which:

• allow us call on the Power Within any time, any place, that we need it;
• allow us Integrate the Truth of an Unconditionally Loving God-Force/Goddess Energy/Great Spirit into our experience of the process so that instead of just knowing Spiritual Truth intellectually we can start feeling it emotionally;
• allow us to relax and enjoy life more.

"It was vitally important for me to learn how to have internal boundaries so that I could lovingly parent (which, of course, includes setting boundaries for) my inner children, tell the critical parent/disease voice to shut up, and start accessing the emotional energy of Truth, Beauty, Joy, Light, and Love. It was by learning internal boundaries that I could begin to achieve some integration and balance in my life, and transform my experience of life into an adventure that is enjoyable and exciting most of the time."

next: Learning to Love Our Self