Developing healthy boundaries plays an essential and sometimes critical role in developing compassion. Boundaries are similar to the stake and wires used to help keep young trees rooted and growing straight. Having health boundaries early on in our compassion practice is adamant because if not when we might be faced with complex and new challenges, blocks to the cultivation of compassion might easily arise. Because of this, a lack of healthy boundaries can lead to our compassion being thrown off track before it has any chance of taking hold and spread its roots. On the other hand, if we are trying to develop compassion and we are plagued by boundaries that are held too tightly. This can easily stifle our efforts to cultivate compassion and keep it from reaching maturity. So it is crucial that in the process of developing compassion , we need to become skilful at knowing when to apply boundaries and when to relax or release them.