These beautiful words about empathy, about taking on the emotions of others and setting gentle boundaries were written by my friend Justin Luria to a friend who had lost their way. This was just too special not to share.
Your consciousness is like a river, your individual thoughts and ideas like droplets, the course of the current the flow of thinking and imagination. Because you have difficulty saying no, and are so generous with your support of and so unguarded in your connection with people, it’s like the bank of your river has eroded, and your mind has broken beyond its banks and spilled outward, leaving murky pools of other people’s opinions that have grown stagnant. You have “yes, and” your way into agreeing with everything – except, of course, that which challenges or shuts down, or says “no, this is not so.”.
Justin Luria, May 2023
You don’t know how important your “no” is, how vital to healthy life and to ecosystems both literal and internal, that boundaries of all kinds are. Most boundaries aren’t rigid; many are like gradients, liminal spaces that transition from one thing to another; many are permeable, more membrane than wall. Many are literally alive, and the ones in your body are all made of your own body’s cells. They allow you to be in and connect with and experience the world, without you being lost or overwhelmed, or poisoned.
You need to learn how to do that with other people’s thoughts and ideas. It isn’t actually loving to take everything too seriously, or too truthily (to coin a word). In many ways it’s a terrible thing to do to another person: to agree with and confirm them in their prejudices, fears and perceptual filters. Agreeing by reflex can be more like a curse than a blessing; the friction of disagreement is needed to advance ideas, and to clarify, and to test against ever wider circles of experience and reality. That’s needed amongst allies just as much (if not more) than between adversaries or opposites. And agreement just keeps things the same, which at its best and most benign and optimistic, just means “no change, no growth” (and growth for its own sake isn’t good either, see capitalism and cancer for examples, but everything living goes through cycles and seasons, which is more what I mean, rather than to get bigger). At its worse, it means spreading objectively bad or wrong or harmful ideas.
Rebuild the banks of your river. Easier said than done, especially if you learned to get by and survive by being amiable and overly attuned to others; being emotionally and psychologically porous (when empathy goes too far). In my past life I’d have recommended attending to the edges of the aura and to the chakra screens, but to my eyes and ears now that seems like hollow, ineffectually avoidant advice. I’m more inclined to say this: if you are interested in what someone has to say, hold what they’re saying at arms length. Purposefully create distance between yourself and the other (or what they’re saying). Don’t agree too soon. Even if you do end up agreeing, the delay is a time of discernment and metabolism, digesting and pondering what’s been said. Practice respecting people and what they’re saying by not immediately agreeing. It is an immense gift to do that, a way of honouring and engaging honourably with and taking seriously what they’re saying. It says: I respect you enough to take this seriously. If anyone were to be offended by you taking time to wonder about what they’ve said, then they were never relating to you as an equal, and wanted obedience and obsequience, not discussion or the sharing of ideas.
And if you practice this, I suspect what will happen is that fewer of other people’s thoughts, opinions and feelings will stay with you. Rumi’s guesthouse didn’t mean that every idea ought to be an indefinite tenant in your mind. If your inner being of thoughts, feelings and opinions is a guesthouse, let it take on the characteristic of an underground lake, where the “guests” (water) reaching it has passed through soil and silt, through limestone and chalk, filtered and screened (sorry to mix the metaphors; going back to the starting one, it seems). To add one more to the mix: your mind has gates, and I believe it wise and healthy for them to not be fully open all of the time, but instead to have discerning keepers, guardians of the forum. It is good for the hinges to be oiled and for you to be able to take in new things; and it is bad for them to be rusted or chained shut (and I think we all know people like that). But the other extreme isn’t good or healthy either, even though radical hospitality and openness is lauded as a trait. That applies to people, not ideas and ideologies. Though even that in moderation and not as an absolute, perhaps.