Spiritual Bypassing

What is Spiritual Bypassing? 

Spiritual Bypassing or Spiritual Materialism, has become rampant lately in both religious and non-religious circles. But what is Spiritual Bypassing?

According to author Teal Swan, it is the practice of using spiritual beliefs to avoid facing or healing one’s painful feelings, unresolved wounds and unmet needs. It is a state of avoidance and therefore it is a state of RESISTANCE.

I personally, consider Spiritual bypassing to be the shadow side of spirituality. It is the belief that we can be instantly healed through a religious or spiritual experience ALONE.

Spiritual Bypassing Ignores True Self Awareness 

When we do that we are trying to bypass and ignore the lower levels of consciousness to get to the higher levels. Eventually, however, our false self will usually pull us back until we work through our particular unfinished business.

Can Meditation become a form of Spiritual Bypassing? 

Meditation is also frequently used as a form of spiritual bypassing. It is used to avoid uncomfortable feelings and unresolved life situations. For those in denial about their personal feelings or wounds, meditation practice can reinforce a tendency toward detachment, disengagement, or interpersonal distance. Spiritual drugs can be a form of spiritual bypassing.

Are Spiritual Drugs a Forms of Spiritual Bypassing?

The use of spiritual drugs can be a tool to avoid getting ones’ hands dirty in the work of resolving emotional issues. It is easier to spend time in an altered state of consciousness than to spent time facing the pain of one’s current state of consciousness.

Is Positive Thinking a form of Spiritual Bypassing?

And in the spiritual community, no form of spiritual bypassing has become such a widespread disease as “positive focus”.

In our desire to support someone who is suffering, we sometimes encourage that person to avoid those painful feelings by telling them “we create our own reality” and that she should therefore stop thinking about what she is thinking about and “be positive” instead.

The truth is, we may feel very uncomfortable in the presence of her own suffering, and we are trying to avoid it, by rushing her into a state she is not ready to inhabit yet, when in fact all she needs is to be listened to with love and respect.

She feels as if she is not OK. There is a big difference between being authentically positive and forcing positivity in order to try to avoid negativity.

In today’s world, we have little tolerance for working through our pain. We much prefer instantaneous solutions that involve numbing out pain. Unfortunately, Spirituality itself has become it’s own avoidance strategy.

When we turn away from our pain or away from “wherever we are,” we abandon ourselves. We resist the very thing we need to face in order to grow. When we do that, we guarantee that that experience will come up again and again, until we learn the lesson.

The truth is we cannot heal unless we are willing to admit to where we are and who we are.

Some examples of spiritual bypassing include:

• Overemphasis of and attachment to the positive to the degree that there is a high level of resistance to anything negative.
• Emotional numbing and repression, trying to avoid feelings that naturally arise in challenging situations instead of becoming self-aware, facing those feeling  and working through them.
• Using cognitive reasoning to escape emotional feelings. Becoming too logical in the face of challenging emotions.
• Exaggerated detachment.
• Blind or overly tolerant compassion, to the point of ignoring facts that could lead to the suffering of other individuals by the actions of those we are inclined to feel compassion towards.
• Weak or too porous boundaries
• 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

Authenticity is the highest state of being for the spiritual practitioner

We need to take time to face, move through and heal our emotional pain before we are truly able to move forward.

How to know whether you are struggling with Spiritual Bypassing

You struggle with spiritual bypassing if you espouse loving kindness and then berate yourself.

If there is any kind of split within you between spiritual principles and the reality of how you feel or act, then you struggle with spiritual bypassing.

How can you deal with it? Becoming authentic. Authenticity is the highest state of being for the spiritual practitioner.

We are not just physical beings waking up to our spiritual essence; we are also spiritual beings waking up to our physicality. Physical life is not clean. It is messy. Physical life is a life of contrast. It is an experience that involves both what is wanted and what is unwanted. 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.

How to Avoid Spiritual Bypassing

In order to avoid the trap of spiritual bypassing, we need to be brave enough accept our feelings, all of them, without judging them.  To accept what we want and don’t want, what we like and don’t like.

We need to be willing to risk admitting to where we are and who we are, even if we think that where we are and who we are isn’t good enough.

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. Get down to the root of your problems.

The journey through life is not always one of bliss. And you haven’t gotten life wrong if you are not always happy. Sometimes the path through life leads you to breakdowns where you are curled up on the floor in tears.

Final Words on Spiritual Bypassing

Attending workshops, talks, reading books, going to yoga and meditation classes, etc. are good tools. However, tools are of no use if they aren’t used. Take action by applying what you are learning from these modalities consistently.

Integrate them into your life daily. If these ideas remain abstract and merely intellectualized, they aren’t going to help you to create long lasting and permanent change.

Everyone has personal, “struggles,” to work through. When we judge our problems or feelings or negative-ness as wrong, we suddenly have a motive for spiritual bypassing. We make where we are “not ok” which may lead to an inauthentic way of being in order to look OK.

You cannot avoid your pain because you cannot avoid yourself. Anything you try to avoid will haunt you for ever. We cannot move forward on our path of spirituality by lying to ourselves. We must face our psychological wounds.

If you want to feel better and enjoy your life, I encourage you to face your pain, and discover how to bring healing to those part of yourself that were wounded in the past. You can heal. Accept your past but do not linger on it.

Seek the guidance of a mentor if you are not sure where to begin. But the first step is being authentic.