Sunday, December 6, 2020

Spiritual Bypassing: How Spirituality Sabotaged My Growth

Another excellent and illuminating piece on spiritual bypassing. I continue to highlight the need for a deepening recognition and understanding related to how a distorted and disembodied spirituality can be used to sabotage our human capacity for love for empathy and compassion, wisdom and consciousness, and tenderness and generosity towards ourselves and others because these are the exact qualities which are essential to our individual and collective healing, awakening, and the inspiration to bring forth our gifts and take action on behalf of the suffering in our world.

When I was newly sober 36 years ago an early counselor told me, "Molly, you could be addicted to anything. You could be addicted to standing on your head." What he was attempting to communicate with me is that my lifelong patterns up to that time in my life had been to avoid going deep into my heart, experiencing my emotional world, and healing and transforming my woundedness. This counselor reflected to me that I "lived from my head up" and that I "would need to make the long journey from my head to my heart." I had no idea what he meant, but somehow knew that he was speaking the truth which he was.

In the years since then, I've been in a gradual process of coming back into my body, of expanding and strengthening my heart, of healing and integrating my life experiences, and of shedding layer after layer of illusions and obstacles which in some way blocked the wholeness of who I am and my capacity to love. Along the way, I have learned that false spiritual teachers and healers served not to help me heal and feel and come into my own truths but to keep me stuck in self-sabotaging patterns which kept me empathically impaired, fragmented and distracted, and separated from the wisdom we all carry in our sacred human-selves.

And it is true we humans can become addicted to anything even meditation, "observing" and "rising above," and doing everything we can to disidentify with "form" (our human selves), to dissolve our egos, to "not live in our stories," to live in "pure consciousness," and to reject the full depth and expansiveness of our emotional worlds and what it is to be human. Anything that we use habitually to distance ourselves from our own hearts and our felt experiences can be considered an addiction. I say this from experience — I had cultivated a plethora of substance and non-substance addictions to survive childhood trauma and also the trauma of our deeply unhealthy culture.

What I understand today is that the cost of spiritual bypassing is not only enormous for us as individuals and those around us, but also to our planet. As we humans avoid our own pain, we will also avoid the pain of others; we simply will not go any deeper with anyone else than we have first gone within ourselves. And to the degree that our capacity for self-love is impaired, our capacity to love and serve the needs of our hurting species, other beings, and the planet will also be compromised.

Consequently, the impact of spiritual bypassing and anything that we use repeatedly to avoid facing and resolving our own woundedness has global implications. I believe that there is an imperative to embody the wisdom, wholeness, truth, purpose, and deep love which resides in these amazing sacred human bodies that we are gifted with. To do this, I have learned that discernment is of critical importance. We need to cultivate the skills of discernment in order to recognize that which leads us astray and that which assists us in rooting into an authentic grounded spirituality one that empowers us to bring our greatly needed gifts forward which serve to alleviate the suffering within ourselves and within this beautiful hurting Earth that we all share. We are all related, all family. And we are all needed. Molly


I first heard about spiritual bypassing on one of my favorite podcasts, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour.

For those of you that haven’t had the privilege of hearing Duncan orate, it’s kind of like listening to a raspy hybrid of Alan Watts and Jim Breuer — wise enough to capture your attention, with a certain stoned goofiness that keeps it all playful.

Duncan talks about spirituality in nearly all of his interviews — most guests will happily indulge him in doing so. Naturally, spirituality is a big reason why people tune in to the podcast. So it took me by surprise when he mentioned that spirituality, as a set of ideas and practices, could actually be selfsabotaging.

Spiritual bypassing, a term coined in the early 1980s by psychologist John Welwood, refers to the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing
 with uncomfortable feelings, unresolved wounds, and fundamental emotional and psychological needs. The concept was developed in the spirit of Chögyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, which was one of the first attempts to name this spiritual distortion.

According to teacher and author Robert Augustus Masters, spiritual bypassing causes us to withdraw from ourselves and others, hiding behind a kind of spiritual veil of metaphysical beliefs and practices. He says it “not only distances us from our pain and difficult personal issues, but also from our own
 authentic spirituality, stranding us in a metaphysical limbo, a zone of
 exaggerated gentleness, niceness, and superficiality.”

My Own Bypassing

Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated
 detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, 
anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous 
boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead
 of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s
 negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the
 spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being. 

Before listening to Duncan wax lyrical about this, I never imagined there could be such subtle and complex consequences of pursuing spiritual matters. And thinking that I, a cautious and sincere spiritual seeker, could be suffering such consequences seemed equally absurd.

But after reading the detailed description of symptoms, I knew it applied to my situation. I realized that at a certain point in early adulthood, I had perverted spirituality into a defense mechanism — a mechanism that enabled me to disavow any negative quality or behavior in myself.

I recall a few specific patterns taking place:

  • Whenever I became anxious, I would immediately reach for the nearest Eckhart Tolle or Alan Watts text on my bookshelf. Instead of sitting with the anxiety and checking in to see if it was coming from an innocuous source, I would quickly find refuge in spiritual philosophy.
  • I would strive to maintain the appearance of someone who is constantly at peace with oneself, even though inside I may have felt like the weight of the world was crushing down on my soul. This kind of faux spirituality had a complete stranglehold on my speech and behavior and caused intense cognitive dissonance.
  • Whenever I had done something hurtful or wrong to another person, I would rarely take responsibility for it. I deflected that responsibility by saying things like “that person just needs to grow spiritually” or “it’s just an illusion anyways” — all in a naïve tone reminiscent of the time I thought I was a bonafide professor of quantum physics.

The process of realizing when you’re to blame in any given situation is no easy task. But spiritual bypassing enables one to ignore that difficult process altogether. It led me to believe I was always right because I was more “enlightened” than all the ignorant sheeples who just couldn’t see the damn light. But the harsh truth of this spiritual arrogance is that I was ignoring the pain I caused in others because I was ignoring a similar pain in myself. 

Reinforcements From Our Culture 

Masters writes:

Part of the reason for [spiritual bypassing] is that we
 tend not to have very much tolerance, either personally or collectively, for 
facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring 
pain-numbing “solutions,” regardless of how much suffering such “remedies” may 
catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our
 culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost
 seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a 
kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a 
spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing
 such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely 
subtle.

The subtlety of recognition seems to be the root of why this affliction is so widespread and under-diagnosed. Psychologist Ingrid Mathieu also notes this subtlety in her article Beware of Spiritual Bypass:

Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in — and the difference is so subtle that we usually don’t even know we are doing it.

Considering our culture generally shuns negative emotions, it’s no surprise many of us respond to those emotions with repression.  Prominent manifestations of repression, such as alcoholism and drug addiction, are forms of relief whose conspicuous quality makes them easier to identify and intervene. Spiritual bypassing, while seemingly more benign, is much more difficult to notice because it’s guised in the appearance of wholeness and wisdom.  It’s much harder to recognize our repression when we’re chanting “Om Shanti” on a regular basis or repeating positive affirmations that “everything is okay” or “all is love.”

Yoga, meditation, psychedelics, prayer, affirmations, deeply engaging with the present moment, etc. are all incredibly powerful spiritual tools if used appropriately. But sometimes, and if we’re not careful, those things can end up masking deeper issues lingering both inside and outside of us.

To me, spiritual bypassing is fundamentally about taking a so-called absolute truth — such as “everything is okay” — and using it to ignore or deny relative truths — such as the grief we feel when we lose a loved one, or the shame that arises when we fail at something important. On the personal and interpersonal level, sometimes everything isn’t okay. And that’s okay. 

That may seem trite, but in the context of spiritual bypassing, it’s a platitude that I feel requires frequent repetition. 

Before we can heal our pain, we have to be honest about it and accept it — which is ideally what spirituality should help realize. As Masters suggests, this is certainly easier said than done and requires a level of vulnerability which most of us are uncomfortable with.

Nonetheless, if we grant validity to the many claims that spirituality is shaping the evolution of humanity, it seems wise to confront the intricacies of our own bypassing sooner rather than later. Doing so could not only prevent years of developmental stagnation, but also help implement new angles of self-awareness that our world so desperately needs. Acknowledgment and acceptance were the first major steps for me, and I sense a deeper spirituality is following in their wake. 

Further Study: Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters by Robert Masters

spiritual bypassing shadow how spirituality sabotaged my growth 2

Please go here for the original article: https://highexistence.com/spiritual-bypassing-how-spirituality-sabotaged-my-growth/

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