Navigate Boundaries with an Open Heart

Openheartedness isn't a lack of boundaries. It's a way of lovingly navigating boundaries.

Jul 31, 2024

Do you break a little boy's heart, or skip your workout?

That’s the question I’m facing just after sunrise in my home gym, during my treasured introvert, er, exercise time. My wife’s family is in town, and my seven-year-old nephew materializes in the morning quiet, eager to resume our pretend play from the night before, which had featured smoothies made from various kinds of animal poo.

“Poothies,” we’d called them.

I’m in the middle of some sumo squats and tell him I can’t play.

Did you know you can actually see a boy’s heart break in his big, brown eyes?

He slinks off, grabs a ping-pong paddle, and begins the most pathetic solo play I’ve ever beheld, as if to say, “Look what you’ve reduced me to.”

Wouldn’t a good person skip his workout in favor of his nephew? I wonder.

To deepen my dilemma, the audio playing in my headphones is about openheartedness, the topic of last month’s Human Hour on Zoom. The discussion was electric and enlightening, and it begged exactly the question I face in this moment with my nephew:

Can you have boundaries and be openhearted?

The word openhearted speaks to the soul—we yearn for the freedom of it, and we intuitively know it is the direction in which love is leading us. And yet. We worry not about the direction but the destination. We wonder what it will do to our boundaries.

Does openheartedness mean total transparency?
Will people be able to walk all over me?
Will I have to forgive everything?
Will I need to keep everyone around?

Openheartedness is always lived out at two levels—the spiritual and the relational—and the spiritual level usually sounds lovely. However, openheartedness at a relational level often feels foolhardy—naive at best, toxic at worst. But this spiritual-relational tension is not a failure of openheartedness; it’s a feature of openheartedness.

The edge where your openhearted spirituality meets your relational realities is the edge where most of your spiritual and relational growth will happen.

“Trust in Allah,” Muhammad said, “but tie your camel.”

The tension of the spiritual and the relational is our training ground.

Do Whatever You Must

I’m in the middle of lunges when my nephew beseeches me to play ping-pong with him. I say no again, but this time I feel a tightness in my chest, and I wish someone would whisk him away. My heart is closing.

Years ago—before openheartedness became my life practice—I would have judged myself as selfish, ended my workout, and let my resentment fester until eventually it came out sideways. Now, though, I can see what I’m doing. It’s what we all do in order to hold the lines we’ve drawn:

We sacrifice our spiritual openness to maintain our relational separateness.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though…

Openheartedness is a spiritual condition, not a relational position.
Openheartedness doesn’t dictate what you must do, it frees you to do whatever you do more lovingly.
Openheartedness is a spiritual journey that reveals new possibilities for our relational realities.

The poet Kabir said, “Do what you do with another human being, but never put them out of your heart.”

Do what you do with another human being. Set your boundaries…or don’t. Speak your truth…or don’t. See the frustrating flaws in people and forgive them…or don’t. Detach when you need to and stay attached when you want to. Do whatever you must in your relationships.

But never put them out of your heart. Try to never close your heart, to never sever them spiritually. Let them into your soul, even if you won’t let them into your living room. Don’t armor up your heart against anyone, because you’ll only trap yourself inside.

Ram Dass observed:

We’re so afraid that if we open our hearts we won’t be able to set limits, that if we open our hearts we’re going to end up hurting ourself. I’ll tell you, we’re hurting ourselves a lot more by not opening our hearts. We are starving to death in our protective security. And how secure do you feel?

Not very secure, if you’re threatened by a seven-year-old kid who just wants to play.

Be a Loving Teacher

I open my heart to my nephew, and I let him in without letting go of my plans.

I become aware that I’m now a part of his wound. The wound, actually. The great pain we all encounter in childhood: the pain of separateness, of longing for a closeness we can’t have.

As I open to him, I don’t feel guilty about this. I can’t save him from the human condition. He will learn the pain of separateness one way or another. I did. You did. We all do. On this morning, it just so happens I’m his teacher.

With an open heart, though, I long to be a loving teacher.

So I walk over to where he’s rearranging poothie ingredients, squat down, and say, “Hey dude, I bet it hurts that I won’t play with you right now. But I want you to know, I love you, and I think you’re awesome, and I can’t wait to play again later.”

His eyes swim and he throws his arms around me in a big hug and he doesn’t ask me to play again. Probably because he senses something.

He’s separate but not severed.

Intersections Transformations

Admittedly, when it comes to degrees of difficulty, the openhearted boundary here is about a two out of ten. It isn’t a particularly heavy lift, pun intended. There are much more challenging spiritual-relational intersections:

Our parents will say they did the best they could, and then keep on doing the same old hurtful things. Our kids will marry people who turn them against us. Our spouses will refuse to change, and we’ll refuse to change by letting go of changing them. Our friends will want to pontificate about how much they love their political party; we’ll want to pontificate about how much we deplore said party. Gay people will choose our churches; church people will picket our parades.

The intersections are countless, the relational realities relentless, the spiritual work endless.

But my oh my, that moment in which you open your heart and realize the relational realities weren’t your prison—the closing of your heart to them was.

That can turn any intersection into a transformation,

as you do what you do with another human being,

but never put them out of your heart.