SPIRITUALITY
How ‘Spiritual Bypassing’ is Not A Lifelong Commitment to Well-Being
Every emotion must be owned and not sidelined.
“Spiritual tools are magnanimous guides to understand the psychological behaviors or patterns orbiting in the realm of our consciousness,” a self-help guru advised. The statement is an excerpt from my recent visit to a personal growth seminar addressed by one of our community gurus.
Attending the seminar spiritually inspired other members, including me, who were present to receive guidance towards counterbalancing our destructive thoughts. More than often, these disempowering or negative thoughts barricades life course. If problems remain unaddressed, such a deceptive cycle of emotions warps reality.
During the seminar, the practice of “Spiritual Bypassing” got introduced. The term was originally coined in 1984 by the Buddhist teacher and transpersonal Psychotherapist John Welwood.
In his classic book, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, he defined spiritual bypassing as using spiritual practices and ideas to sidestep or avoid facing deep pain and unresolved wounds. The intention behind these spiritual practices, he claimed, was to achieve enlightenment.
Almost all spiritual ideas related to any spiritual tradition, be it Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islamic, New-Age, and even self-help, promise us or makes us believe that living in the state of authenticity is achievable. These practices often serve as a lamp in darkness and voices to enhance the positive emotions rather than focusing on the negative ones.
However, certain questions regarding spirituality spring up in our existential domain:
- Does drawing positive emotion under conscious attention serve?
- Is neglecting our shadow sides healthy?
- Can Spiritual Bypassing truly resolve the unmet needs?
We have ample spiritual justifications for mending our traumas, but spiritual bypassing as a practice to suppress the negative feelings and disconnect from the uncomfortable problems in life somewhere detaches us from reality.
Spiritual bypassing got designed to avoid complex psychological issues, but people in a true sense dismissed their shadowed sides or weaknesses with spiritual explanations. Instead of harnessing our painful sides, most of us corner our psychological wounds as untouchable personality traits.
Glorification of positives inflicts emotional numbing
Marrying our positive sides remains welcomed by many. We lovingly enjoy implanting the traits that act as a window to abundance and contribute towards our spiritual nourishment.
Inhabiting this polarised behavior is relatively correct from an individual’s perspective; however, embracing too much positivism commands us to turn a blind eye towards another emotional experience — that is, understanding the nature of our depressive feelings or unsettled wounds.
The inbuilt attitude of seeking only light in favor of achieving a more latent state and side-stepping on the dark causes emotional paralysis. Returning from the spiritual seminar had this thought stir me to the core.
When I applied the spiritual bypassing ideas initially, it did tap harmony and optimistic faith in my personal and social realm. Contrarily, not sitting with shadowed sides, with running times, made them appear again and again.
In the words of a prominent Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, “Whatever you resist, persists.” Meaning to say, the more we avoid or resist anything in life, the more we bring that situation to us.
The spiritual bypassing examples like exaggerated detachment, debilitating judgments towards one’s own negative or shadowed sides, anger avoidance drives to enhance pain rather than annihilating the melancholy of life.
Defense mechanisms like emotional numbing or repression, escaping our emotions through cognitive dissonance, idolizing a belief that each negative experience guarantees happy phases in later life stages; wrongly alters our thought process rather than coining contributions.
Similarly, seeking extremely high and often unattainable idealism and our personal favorites — an overly fascination towards optimism-resists us from realizing the psychological injuries or unmet needs.
Simply put, over-attachment towards the positives benumbs our actions towards anything that falls under the negative peripheries.
Spiritual bypassing asks us to avoid facing unresolved issues. As a result, those unhealed psychological wounds leave us with short-term healing and sequences the false feeling of security and happiness. With that, true transformation gets undermined and still waits around.
Intolerance withholds real spiritual transcendence
If the idea behind harnessing positive thinking is creating a mind-expanding and toe-curling experience, then our connection with the complex thoughts also lanterns undermined aspects of our personality.
Negative emotions are often crucial for survival, for they make us aware of our disputed and unsettled feelings. To shine through them, all we need to do is establish a meaningful friendship with unhelpful emotions that later can purposefully guide us. We must avoid being intolerant to critical emotions.
Incorporating spiritual practices to resolve emotional issues through the transcendental and heightened state of being, at times, prevents us from working through our pains. These pain-numbing solutions split us from connecting with psychological wounds, leaving them raw and messy.
During most meditation practices, concentrating on positive energy and side-stepping the pain remained my prime focus. If the opposing force knocked, being intolerant was my immediate next step. Over time, the negligence towards the destructive emotions agonized the pain. It dawned upon me a realization that something intuitively is wrong.
The collective habit of turning away from what is painful and avoidance in addressing the complex thoughts ringed aloud and made us wary about the aching sides of life. They pop each time, with higher intensities, until not addressing them is hardly an option left.
When we deny our personal feelings or wounds and neglect the pain, this grim situation can make us ultimately avoid ourselves or resist healing our wounds that hides under the umbrella of emotions.
Under the guise of spiritual bypassing, the avoidance tendencies we develop forge an interpersonal distance, make us feel disconnected, and reality gets distanced. As such, the true nature of spiritual transcendence gets lost.
In his book Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us From What Really Matters, Robert Augustus Masters mentioned:
Spiritual bypassing is a highly persistent shadow of spirituality that manifests in many forms, often without being acknowledged as such. It means applying spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing in any significant depth with our pain and developmental needs.
The spiritual bypassing path to merge or integrate with our higher self, in its real essence, creates a split between our present and future selves, between who we are and what we aspire to be, which potentially can be dangerous. Rather than distinguishing, we must understand and live in the moments.
Cherry-picking emotions are unfavorable if we want to grow on an emotional level. For real development to happen, we must take time to rise through our pains, heal, balance harmonious and dissipated energies, and transcend through the duality of emotions where vibrations beat with equal intensity.
Devaluing personal selves relative to spiritual
We have a higher self and lower self associated with our personalities. Higher self surrounds itself with denser layers of intelligence. It generates an eternal spark and is more of a spiritual union with the divine source. The lower self, in contrast, consists of individual weakness, common faults, is egoistic, and resistant towards change.
The purpose of spiritual development is to eliminate the lower self so that the higher self can be free. We all seemingly strive towards spiritual experience to feel better and avoid looking at our psychological issues.
On one side, our purpose is to connect with the deepest layers of our personality extending beyond the physical eye’s reach, whereas aiming it at the cost of avoiding our wounds is not soul justifying. It degrades the purpose of spiritual experience.
Situations as above throw light on certain underlying questions:
- Do spiritual practices distance us from our embodied self?
- Does bypassing emotions an infringement on enlightenment?
- Is pain-numbing an authentic answer to spiritual transformation?
To retreat towards spiritualism, we often back-peddle from physical lives. We look through our insecurities, distressful feelings, and developmental needs with an eye of suspicion relative to spiritual selves. And degrade our physical experience compared to spiritual, deny the darker elements of our lives and unhealed aspects of our psyche.
To use the spiritual bypassing strategy as a measure of avoiding wounds constructs a spiritual bubble that wards off the demons of our existence without even acknowledging the internal pain and sufferings.
The purpose, therefore, of true transformation remains unmet.
When we weigh our spiritual self comparatively more than the physical and are highly defensive towards the shadowed aspects of physical being, this pain-numbing behavior prevents us from developing authenticity, wisdom, true courage, wholeness — the qualities that nourish our soul.
“That which is to give light must endure burning” — Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning.
Every religious and non-religious aspect comes with its own sets of beliefs and practices whose end goals rests in seeking happiness. Although happiness is our favorite companion likewise problems are part and parcels of life and have varied forms. We can avoid the pain for a time-being but we can’t suppress it totally until we learn to deal with it.
If we leave the problems unhealed, then our ability to deal with them dies. Avoiding the pain will cut short our ability to cope with the human tangles.
When we suppress our emotions, fear judgment, avoid uncomfortable pains, side-step from making peace with the unsettled feelings, at the wholesome level, the energy transpired creates breeding grounds for issues to develop further. If good happens, the negative phases should also be treated gently and not distinguished or belittled.
We need to sit with the problems that troubles us. Authentic spiritualism is not about rushing things or avoiding pains. It is something that associates itself with fires of liberation and not sticks around jails of illusions. Real spiritual progress fragrances in humble self-knowledge and is not an enticing escape from breakdown moments. Instead, treat wistful feelings with a reading light!
