Imagine you have a piece of plain white paper and on it, you draw a small circle. Suddenly, you have a boundary – you have inside the circle and outside the circle.
And with every boundary, there is the potential for conflict.
In life, we have all created a great many boundaries. Universally recognised ones, like time for example, and personal ones like our ego, which is the sum of all our self-created boundaries (I am this, I am that, etc.).
Boundaries can be a good idea and the concept of time is clearly useful! It allows us to show up when we are supposed to. Or remember our loved one’s birthdays. Or as a guide to accomplishing something.
But there is still that latent potential for conflict in every boundary.
A client recently shared with me that he felt under pressure because his business had a ‘poor’ month. Revenue was not quite what he wanted.
So, in crossing the boundary from the end of one month to the beginning of next he began to experience a lot of insecure thinking that was not there before.
Instead of being present, calm and open – the very place where we keep perspective and have the most access to intelligent, creative thinking – he got negatively preoccupied and felt bad.
I know that many people will say goals (like monthly targets) are important.
But this is just a made-up idea too. I have seen many people under-perform because they feel under pressure in trying to meet their target. I used to fall into that trap too.
This is not to say targets are a bad thing. They are neutral. But when people get attached to them it does the opposite of what the initial intention was.
It is understanding where our experience is really coming from that sets us free.
Beyond the limitation of the boundaries we make up is the infinite potential of pure consciousness.
Nothing is smarter than this.
I remember Dr. Dicken Bettinger saying (and I am paraphrasing) – ‘We all have the intelligence of the entire universe at our disposal’.
When we appreciate this fact then it stops making sense to put up so many boundaries and it becomes easy to let them go.