Spiritual Bypassing is the cancer of the spiritual world.
It's a disease that has run rampant
in both religious and non-religious circles.
Spiritual Bypassing is the act of using spiritual beliefs
to avoid your un-met needs, deep pain and unresolved wounds.
Spiritual Bypassing is a form of avoidance.
Because it's a form of avoidance, it's a form of resistance.
Spiritual Bypassing is in fact, the shadow side of Spirituality.
The spiritual beliefs of any spiritual tradition,
be it Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, New Age,
Islamic or even Self-Help,
can provide ample justification
for living in a state of Inauthenticity.
They can all provide justification
for avoiding the unwanted aspects
of one's own feelings and state of being
in favor of what one considers to be,
a more enlightened state.
Even the non-affiliated unanimously beloved saying
"Keep Calm and Carry On"
is a glorification of Spiritual Bypassing.
Some examples of Spiritual Bypassing include:
Anger phobia,
exaggerated detachment,
emotional numbing and repression,
blind or overly-tolerant compassion,
weak or too porous boundaries,
using cognitive reasoning to escape emotional feelings,
debilitating judgment about one's negativity or shadow-side,
devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual,
avoidance of physical day-to-day life,
delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being,
and, my personal least-favorite:
over-emphasis of, and attachment to, the positive,
to the degree there is a high level of resistance
to anything negative.
Every Religious Practice and spiritual tradition
propagates its fair share of spiritual bypassing.
For example:
Catholic confession, which is expected to just wash away sin
and effortlessly alter someone's negative behavior.
Buddhist premature transcendence, which is to act as if
one is above and beyond the messiness of life's drama,
when the truth is, one is not.
Christian unconditional love, which is to espouse love
that is false.
To say 'I love them' when, in truth,
one harbors prejudice and resistance to them
and only wishes they could learn to love them.
Meditation is also frequently used to avoid
uncomfortable feelings and unresolved life-situations.
For those in denial about their personal feelings or wounds,
meditation practice reinforces the tendency
towards detachment, disengagement and inter-personal distance.
The use of spiritual drugs can be a tool to avoid
getting one's hands dirty in the work of resolving emotional issues.
It is easier to spend time in an altered state of consciousness
than to spend time facing one's pain.
And in the Spiritual community,
no form of spiritual bypassing has become
such a widespread disease as: 'Positive Focus'.
Here's a prime example of spiritual bypassing:
Person A feels an extreme amount of guilt and grief
because their romantic relationship just ended.
Person B feels uncomfortable because of those intense emotions,
and so, they want to help Person A try to avoid
those painful feelings.
Person B tells Person A that she creates her own reality
and that she should therefore just quit thinking about
what they're thinking about and "Be positive instead".
Not only does this condemn the thoughts
which are being thought by Person A
and therefore 'shame' them,
it also requires them to do something
that they are not actually capable of doing.
Jumping from a purely negative thought
to a purely positive thought
is not possible in the universe that we live in,
it's too far of a vibrational gap.
The positive thoughts are not a match
to the negative thoughts you're currently thinking,
they're outside of your vibrational range.
So, expecting someone to jump
from a purely negative spot to a purely positive spot,
asks them to do something that they are not actually capable of doing.
The result is: Person A feels shamed and powerless
to their own thoughts.
They feel as if where they are is not OK.
There's a big difference between being Authentically positive
and forcing positivity, in order to try to avoid negativity.
In today's world we have very little tolerance
for working through our own pain.
We'd prefer to take a pill for it.
Lo and behold, spirituality has become its own avoidance strategy.
When we turn away from our pain or from wherever we are,
we are ultimately avoiding ourselves and resisting ourselves.
That guarantees that we and that particular issue,
can only continue to pop-up in our realities.
It means that issue will continue to mirror itself
by becoming obvious, and then more obvious,
and then more obvious,
until you have no option to avoid it.
Authenticity is the highest state for the spiritual practitioner.
In fact, in the years to come,
Authenticity will become the replacement for Enlightenment
as the true goal of spiritual practice.
When we use Spirituality to whitewash over our issues
and try to avoid them,
we use the goal of spiritual transcendence
to try to rise above the raw and messy,
and real side of human life,
before we have fully faced and made peace with it.
This can be seen as premature and false spiritual transcendence.
It is one of the major pitfalls or occupational hazards
of walking the path of Spirituality.
Spiritual Bypassing isn't just an annoying facet of Spirituality,
it's extremely dangerous.
Why is it so dangerous?
First of all, it's dangerous because it sets up a split
within a person.
The path of Spirituality is meant to be a path of reintegration.
It's meant to bring you into an aspect of wholeness
in and of yourself.
But, when you use spiritual bypassing,
it creates a division between where you are
and where you think you should be.
It enables us to lie to ourselves and delude ourselves
and live our lives through a projection of a false self.
We cannot heal unless we are willing to admit to where we are.
Spiritual Bypassing is like breaking your leg,
but being unwilling to admit that that just happened.
It's like putting a band-aid over a compound fracture
and then trying to continue walking all the same.
You can imagine what kind of harm would come to somebody
who did that.
Now I'm about to tell you that spiritual bypassing
does the same thing on an emotional level,
that a compound fracture gone ignored, does on a physical level.
We need to take time to face, to move through,
to heal and to transcend our emotional pain
and our unresolved wounds, in order to move forward emotionally.
In the same way that we need to face
the fact that our leg is broken,
reset the bone, and allow our leg to heal,
in order to move forward physically.
Spiritual Bypassing also leads
to a conceptual one-sided form of Spirituality,
where one aspect of life is elevated at the expense of the other.
For example:
Objective truth is valued more,
it is used to invalidate subjective truth.
Non-physical is valued over form ...
5D is valued over 3D ...
Transcendence is valued over physical embodiment.
And detachment is valued over feeling.
This behavior of valuing one side of polarity over the other,
gives rise to extremely damaging experiences.
For example:
One might try to practice emotional detachment from others
by suppressing the one's need for love,
but this only drives the need underground
so that it becomes unconsciously acted-out
in covert and manipulative ways instead.
Also, being a good spiritual person
can be an identity which compensates
for a deficient identity,
that is, a sense of self that is less-than,
that is not-as-good-as ...
A lot of times, our spiritual identity
will cover over the fact that deep-down we have
immense insecurities.
And because we know how we should feel,
because we know how a spiritual Being should be,
we're not taking the time to heal and address the fact
that we have such a deficient sense of identity.
We feel bad about ourselves.
Although we may be practicing diligently,
our spiritual practice can be used in the service of denial and defense.
And when spiritual practice is used to bypass our real life human issues,
it becomes compartmentalized.
Our spiritual life and practice remains separate and unintegrated
with our day-to-day life and our overall functioning.
We feel like we have Split-Personality Disorder.
We can never truly become the embodiment of the higher self
because we are still thinking of our lower self
as our 'lower self' , as the unwanted self.
Our spiritual practice cannot ever
fully penetrate our life and make us feel good
if we're using spiritual principles
to avoid ourselves or to avoid pain.
Are you avoiding the fact that you feel like you are deficient
and not good enough or bad,
by creating a persona of a spiritually-transcendent person?
Do you use spiritual beliefs to avoid your pain or problems?
Do you feel like the spiritual you is different
than the embodied you?
Do you use spirituality to justify an insecurity within yourself?
Do you use spirituality to avoid looking at things
in your Reality that you would rather think didn't exist?
You cannot avoid your pain and your unresolved wounds.
All that will happen is
it will keep coming up again, keep coming up again
until it's so big that you must face it.
Most of us turn to spirituality because we want to feel better.
But then, all too often, spirituality becomes
the very thing we use to avoid ourselves
and to avoid looking at our issues.
We use spirituality to avoid getting better.
We use spiritual practice
to avoid looking at our psychological issues.
That's why so much about our spiritual progression
has to do with us facing our psychological issues.
We cannot move forward on our path of spirituality
any more than we can move forward on a map
when we are unwilling to admit to where we are.
Think about that for a minute.
Imagine taking out one of your maps,
pretend you're going on a hike somewhere
and you know what destination you wanna get to
but you're unwilling to admit to where you are.
You're never gonna be able to chart that distance
between where you are and where you want to be,
if you are unwilling to admit to where you are,
if you're trying to avoid where you are.
Now, I'm about to make a bold statement:
Most of us alive today struggle with spiritual bypassing.
So how do you know if you struggle with spiritual bypassing?
If you espouse 'I create my own reality'
and then, you worry ...
If you espouse 'Unconditional Love'
and then feel emotional resistance to someone.
If you espouse the idea that the Universe is 'Benevolent & Good'
but then distrust others at the world at large.
If you espouse 'Love & Kindness'
and then berate yourself.
If there is any kind of split within you
between the spiritual principle and the actuality
of how you feel or act,
then the order of the day is authenticity.
We are not physical beings
simply waking up to a spiritual experience.
We are also spiritual beings
waking up to our physical experience.
The physical experience is no more 'degraded'
than the spiritual experience.
In fact, the spiritual experience and the physical experience
are both spiritual experiences!
Life is not clean, life is messy.
Life contains both what is wanted and what is un-wanted.
You came here to sort through the contrast of your experience,
and to go in the direction of what is wanted.
You came here to transform your unresolved wounds.
Spirituality is not an excuse to run away from physical life.
The soul is not a justification
to deny the human side of ourselves.
Spiritual principles are not an excuse to avoid
the unhealed aspects of your psyche and your pain.
Spiritual principles are not meant to serve
as a justification to support your defenses.
In order to not spiritually bypass,
we have to be brave.
We have to be brave enough to admit to how we feel.
We need to be brave enough to admit to what we want
and don't want, what we like and don't like.
We have to be willing to admit to who we really are
and how we really feel,
even if we feel like who we are and how we feel
is not OK.
If we want to avoid the pitfall of spiritual bypassing,
here are some tips:
We need to express and allow our emotions,
wounds, traumas and pain
to surface healthfully and with love.
Let go of the fear of judgment and suppression of emotions.
We often turn to bypassing to cope with our internal pain and suffering.
Examples include addictions to food, drugs,
drinking, shopping, sex, work,
focusing on others, distracting ourselves,
and diverting our attention away from ourselves.
Make peace with being uncomfortable.
If you are numbing yourself inside out,
this energy lingers and creates a breeding ground
for other issues to arise and manifest.
So get down to the root of your problems.
The journey through life is not always a journey of bliss.
Sometimes, the journey through life
leaves you curled-up on the floor, in tears,
having a breakdown ...
This is really the 'meat' of transformation.
I want you to think of a butterfly
because our spiritual transformation is a lot like that.
When a butterfly crawls itself into a space where it can cocoon,
what will happen is that that butterfly
will dissolve within that cocoon, into a type of 'soup'.
That 'soup' is nothing but pure genetic material.
The butterfly had to break down completely
in order to become a butterfly instead of the caterpillar.
It's not like the caterpillar simply grew wings.
In order to not spiritually bypass
we need to apply what we learn to our life.
Going to yoga classes or going to seminars or workshops
is a really great tool
but a tool is useless unless it's used.
So we're the ones who really get to
take responsibility in our lives
and apply the tools that we use, on a day-to-day basis.
That's the only point at which the abstract spiritual principles
become actual, tangible, day-to-day practice.
If we are to avoid the trap of spiritual bypassing
then we have to let go of the idea that something is wrong about us,
if we are thinking negative thoughts, feeling negative emotions,
or being negative.
If we think that being negative,
or negative in general, is wrong,
now we have a motive for spiritual bypassing.
And if you have a motive for spiritual bypassing,
you will fall in the pit of spiritual bypassing quite quickly.
We can never resolve our issues
and we can never avoid the trap of spiritual bypassing
if we continue to avoid the way we actually feel.
Healing cannot come from a space of Inauthenticity.
Have a good week.
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