Who Are We Without Our Borders?

Who are we without our borders? I asked myself again after reading a provocative article by Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley. What a probing and interesting question. He explored why countries don’t need borders, but this article will explore a personal border I struggled with.

When I heard this question, somehow, the question became, where do I stop and the world outside begin? For my young empath self, it was the most important question to figure out. I didn’t know I had no boundaries. Other people’s feelings filtered through me all the time like they were my feelings. You can imagine how confusing that was. Emotional undercurrents were the worst. They were as palpable to me as my heartbeat. Only as I matured did I comprehend I was reacting to external emotions as if they were my own. I had no filter.

This story illustrates what I’m talking about. A sudden question blindsided me, and I felt duty bound to tell the truth. Here’s what happened:

My mom, a sibling, and I were having lunch at a friend’s house. At thirteen, I was oblivious to why we were there, but I picked up an intuitive alert to be careful. I was stepping into a situation that felt tricky and uncomfortable. Then I forgot about it. At one point, the friend turned to me and asked what I thought of a specific teacher. Out of my mouth came the whole unfiltered truth with stories attached. “This teacher is losing it,” I explained. “She yells a lot and then slaps her ruler hard on a desk if we don’t listen to her.” I related how one young boy thought it might be funny to crawl on all fours to the teacher’s desk and pretend to be a dog lifting its leg to mark its territory. “The class laughed as the boy raced back to his desk. The teacher’s face got red, and she began yelling and ruler slapping again. Her ruler broke.”

The words came blurting out before I could stop. I didn’t understand why my sister kicked my shins underneath the table and my mother gave me “the look”, because telling the truth was always the right thing to do, wasn’t it? The rest of the afternoon was hazy in my memory. On the way home, my mom explained her friend was friends with the teacher, and I shouldn’t have said anything. The double standard was blatant. The fact that it was a story nobody wanted to hear wasn’t so clear at the time. (From my Journal, 1967)

On many levels, I should have paid attention to my discomfort. The undercurrent was a hidden agenda, an “elephant in the room”. The host of our lunch wanted information about my experience in her friend’s classroom and knew I was in her class. I realized as a young teen that, while I could pick up feelings from people, I couldn’t pick up what social norm I’d violated.

Where did my feelings end and others’ feelings begin? To explore this question further, I pondered one of the first skills empaths learn. Receiving energies from others is tiring and can mess with my emotional and physical health. It’s important to know how to maintain boundaries. One way is to leave situations I find overbearing, as in this case:

I have much respect and gratitude for our military, so it was a mystery why I avoided Remembrance Day activities. We were running late for our outing, and unexpectedly found ourselves on the street where the veterans’ parade was forming. I couldn’t control my emotions as tears filled my eyes and a lump in my throat prevented me from swallowing. My chest heaved with a sorrow I’d not felt before. Concerned, my partner drove quickly past as I gestured wildly to hurry. He did, and my symptoms went away. I can’t even watch the parade or ceremonies on screens because those symptoms reappear. (From my Journal, 2002.)

According to author J. Vandeweghe in her book, Highly Sensitive Empaths, “The best shield to consider using when you are going out in public, or anywhere that your gift may be overly activated, is called a bubble shield.”1 But what happens when putting up borders hinders healing or growth? The question becomes, who am I when I remove those boundaries?

This answer is a recent discovery, and difficult to put into words. Occasionally, I use my empathic abilities to understand another person’s difficulty or emotional pain integrally. This means I tap into another’s feelings and then allow myself to feel them deeply, but I don’t use my mind to understand. It’s a receptive, no-thinking state. From that state, I will often sense questions to ask or words to say that speak to the person’s pain.

The act of being part of another’s pain–listening, acknowledging, and feeling it–is a powerful act. I’m not solving anything for that person; I stand in that painful space with them. Somehow, it changes how that person feels. Their pain isn’t gone, but it seems to allow them to feel their pain from a new perspective that’s easier to handle. I’ve experienced this state only twice. We were strangers, and our meeting was unplanned. Based on positive feedback, I’ll be exploring this further.

Casting my mind back to Vishen’s article, “fear of the other” is one reason we put up borders, whether they wrap around countries or individuals. It was my fear of getting too involved or not feeling confident enough to use the healing modalities I studied that kept my borders up. It was only when two people allowed their borders to fade away that positive progress continued toward healing.

Thank you, Vishen, for the inspiration for this post. His conclusion in “A Case For a Borderless World” was profound, and he said it best:

That every culture, every perspective, and every being—no matter how strange

or different—adds richness to the whole.

That diversity isn’t something to tolerate. It’s something to celebrate.

That’s not just fantasy—it’s the future we’re capable of creating.

1 Vandeweghe, J., Highly Sensitive Empaths: The Complete Survival Guide to Self-Discovery, Protection from Narcissists and Energy Vampires, and Developing the Empath Gift. (Power Pub, 2019), 74.