Boundaries Are The Boldest Act of Love

You can be angry with someone and still love them unconditionally.

You can love someone unconditionally and still draw boundaries with them.

You can love someone unconditionally and decide the most loving boundary you can draw is to cut them out of your life and stop enabling a toxic pattern.

As Prentis Hemphill so beautifully put it, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

Unconditionally loving someone doesn’t mean you relentlessly put up with their shit at the expense of yourself, contrary to a lot of new age spiritual belief systems.

Unconditional love isn’t a self-sacrificing badge of honor but rather a gift you offer yourself first and allow to guide the boundaries and relationship dynamics you create.

Anger is a tool of self-preservation, an indicator that our boundaries are being crossed, and when channeled effectively, offers fuel to forge new pathways of relationship.

If our love for another comes at the expense of the love for ourselves, it’s not love but rather fear. Fear of losing “love,” fear of hurting someone, fear of confrontation, fear of being alone.

The most honest act of unconditional love flows from a devotion to self-love that trusts in the great mystery to guide everyone home to love, surrendering the need to control the path that the ones we love take to get there.