Spiritual Bypass: 5 Common Examples, Why It Happens, and What to Do

This is an important, illuminating, compassionate, and wise article. So many of us have found ourselves vulnerable to being led astray by spiritual or religious teachings — and also in models of therapy and cultural beliefs— which may initially appear helpful, true, and wise, but which upon deeper exploration and experience end up causing us harm. I have certainly experienced this myself and witnessed it in others. I have also found it important to learn from these ways that we have been individually and collectively wounded and to transform these experiences into valuable lessons. 

Learning about spiritual bypassing is one such opportunity to strengthen and empower ourselves. In this process we become less vulnerable to harmful beliefs and to spiritual leaders, therapists and helping professionals, and other teachers who falsely profess to hold higher truths, but who in actuality are an obstacle to our spiritual growth and to becoming more fully and wholly human. 

Healing our injured instincts and growing in our capacity for discernment is such a gift, and often one hard earned. This has certainly been my experience. And we are not alone. We can reach out our hands and hearts and share the wisdom, compassion, and healing and helpful lessons that we are learning along the way.

Bless us all on our journeys,

Molly

 

By Melissa Noel Renzi 

 

Spiritual bypass is a term that describes attempts to rise above and effectively deny unpleasant emotions, experiences, and realities in order to feel good and avoid discomfort and painful truths.

 

Though the term only entered my vocabulary and cognitive understanding in recent years, I’ve witnessed this pervasive defense mechanism repeatedly in my 20 years of involvement in yoga and wellness communities. Of course, I’ve also unwittingly done my share of spiritual bypassing in the name of healing and helping while not understanding the harm caused.

 

It’s quite common for people with good hearts and intentions to engage in spiritual bypassing making it easy to miss how it negatively impacts individuals and collective society.

 

Today I want to share with you:

  

• What spiritual bypass is and why it’s a problem
• Why it happens so often in spiritual communities
• Common examples of spiritual bypassing that cause harm
• How to address it without further harm to yourself or others

What Is Spiritual Bypass?
 

Spiritual bypass was coined by the late psychologist John Welwood in 1984 to describe what he saw in a Buddhist community in which he was involved. He describes it as the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”

 

We all have parts of ourselves we’d rather not look at, so we deny or push them aside. When we bury these aspects in the subconscious rather than resolve and integrate them, they often take on dysfunctional roles and behaviors that prevent healing and cause harm to ourselves and relationships.

 

At a societal level, there are uncomfortable realities and injustices to acknowledge and address. When we avoid facing problematic issues in our outer systems, we invalidate the lived experiences of others while shirking our own accountability in creating healthier systems that support everyone. 

 

In both situations, offering up only positive thinking or “love and light” is an approach that circumvents the roots of the issues at hand and causes further harm.

 

Why Spiritual Bypass Happens in Spiritual Communities  

 

First, spiritual bypassing is not only a spiritual community phenomenon. Even in the world of therapy, there are methods overly focused on behavioral change and challenging “irrational” emotions that can be bypassing and dismissive in effect. 

 

I’ll also note that many people drawn to spirituality and wellness are often seeking answers and cures for deep-seated pain and feelings of unworthiness. If we find a healing practice, it’s easy to cling to those teachings as the answer to all problems while dismissing the fundamental variation and nuance of our relative world.

 

This brings me to the essential reason for spiritual bypass in spiritual communities

 

The wisdom teaching of reality is frequently misconstrued and misguided. We confuse absolute reality with relative reality. Allow me to explain the basics according to some non-dual Vedic and Buddhist traditions, which may overlap with other traditions as well.

 

Absolute reality is that which is changeless, eternal, and transcendent. It is the absolute truth of oneness of all and the nature of how things really are in the universe.

 

Relative reality is that which is subject to change, timebound, and dependent. It is the observable phenomena of worldly existence–your environment, circumstances, resources, relationships, identities, and feelings you experience.

 

Many spiritual seekers come to contemplative practices seeking transcendence. Experiencing a glimpse of the absolute or deeper consciousness in a meditation practice can make it tantalizing to root yourself in the notion of absolute reality while denigrating the relative as simply an illusion.

 

The absolute is not superior over the relative. Both realities are true.

 

Let’s take a look at a few common examples of spiritual bypass to understand this better.    

 

5 Common Ways People Spiritually Bypass

 

1) I don’t have attachments. 
    I’m not affected because I’m not attached.

     

The teaching of non-attachment in many traditions is commonly misapplied. From an absolute perspective, one may get the idea that they don’t need material possessions, relationships, and so forth. Yet, from a relative perspective, everyone needs healthy attachment and relationships, shelter, clothing, and means to eat. The teaching is not to overvalue the objects of your life and understand their place. Denial of this truth can easily lead to avoidance and repression of fundamental needs. Further, suggesting you or someone else is “too attached” is shaming and unhelpful.

2) I don’t see color.
    All lives matter. 
    We are all one human race. 

In the absolute reality, oneness is true. And from a non-dualistic perspective, you could even add in animals, plant life, and all of manifestation. Yes, we are absolutely one. In a relative reality, this is a harmful dismissal of the very real world we live in where we are not treated as one human race nor do we have the same “one” access to safety, healthcare, housing, food, education, and other basic human needs that matter for all lives. Denying color not only invalidates experiences and tells people you don’t see them, but it also permits avoidance of responsibility of doing your part to create the conditions that are equal and beneficial for everyone. 

3) Good vibes only. 
    Focus on the positive. 

The intention may be to encourage yourself and others or set boundaries with toxic behaviors and actions. Yet, the impact is toxic positivity, which can be shaming and alienating to those (including you!) struggling with trauma, grief, mental health issues, or systemic injustice.

If you struggle with depression, you know that someone telling you to “be positive” is not effective in addressing the underlying reasons. “Good vibes only” is far from an invitation for someone to open up about an abusive relationship or a loss they’re grieving. I can’t imagine telling a community whose people are being killed in the streets or caged at the border to “focus on the positive” or that I’m sending “love and light”.   

Finding the good in the world and having hope are useful and necessary, but welcoming all feelings and parts of yourself is a vital principle for uncovering authentic hope. 

4) Anger is a destructive emotion. 
    The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

The harm of statements such as these is grossly overlooked in our society. Anger and fear are often considered to be negative, destructive emotions that need to be banished from your psyche. This is another form of bypass. While it may not be helpful to live from anger or fear, bypassing them is not the answer for two reasons:

1) Both anger and fear are normal human emotions that help you survive and can even be beneficial in certain circumstances. Anger can protect more vulnerable emotions, illuminate injustice, and provide the motivation and fuel for engaged action. Fear also serves to protect and can give you important information you may need.

2) Silencing or condemning anger or fear is like putting a bandage on a gash that requires stitches. You may manage to stop the bleeding and cover the wound momentarily but it is sure to open back up without proper attention, care, and treatment.

5) You create your reality. 
    Raise your vibration/frequency.
    Manifest your way to ____.

Law of attraction lures many people in. I even found myself pulled in years ago, but there was always something unsettling for me. The charlatans in this industry aside, the law of attraction belief system is hyper-individualistic and blaming and shaming in nature. It ignores the systemic power structures that enable injustice and reinforces the human predicament of not feeling good enough. You wouldn’t tell a Syrian refugee that they can create their reality if they think positively and you wouldn’t tell this person that they attracted their horrific circumstances. So, what makes those with more privilege so much more apt to be able to work with the mystical force of law of attraction? If you’re not manifesting the reality of your dreams, you’re not to blame and that should be clear if you look around to the circumstances of our time.    

How To Handle More Spiritual Bypassing Without More Harm  

1) Build your awareness. If the concept is new to you, take some time to understand and reflect on the concepts I’ve outlined. Consider whether you’ve been the recipient or perpetrator of spiritual bypassing. Most of us have participated in both, so you can examine your role in doling it out and also what it was like to be on the receiving end. Also really take a look at how you’ve bypassed your own emotions and experiences.

2) Understand intention vs. impact. You can read every example I’ve given and see how anyone who says these things likely means well and even wants to be helpful. Yet, you might also see that the impact can still be hurtful and/or shaming, causing further issues for both our inner and outer systems. A common way to bypass responsibility is rooting oneself in “but I didn’t mean to…” rather than owning the impact of our words and actions. You can have good intentions and still apologize and validate when your intentions land in a way that causes harm. Truly, this latter approach is the path toward greater empathy, trust, and intimacy.

3) Have compassion with your bypassing parts. My purpose in writing this article was to bring attention to common problematic phrases and viewpoints in spiritual communities while doing my best to not come off as snarky or shaming. My request to you is to consider what I’ve written without telling yourself you’re bad for engaging in bypassing and without telling others they’re bad for doing it. Instead, I encourage you to be present and compassionate with the parts of you that may have bypassed and understand their intentions. When you can do this for yourself, you’ll be more able to have compassion for other people’s tendencies and address them without shaming and exiling parts of them.  

Please go here for the original article: https://melissanoelrenzi.com/spiritual-bypass/ 

Patrick Mazza — Seattle and the Global: A Center of Empire

This is an illuminating article. People think of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest as a haven of progressivism and peace. Think again. A peaceful world is possible. And, indeed, "the future starts in our hearts and minds." — Molly

 Getting real about the place I live

By Patrick Mazza

Big trees and the global market

Seattle was born in the global marketplace. The big trees that greeted the first settlers became the city’s earliest major industry, timber. Seattle had the broad, deep Puget Sound to ship boards around the Pacific, building cities from San Francisco to Manila. Old growth trees logged on the hills were sent down a muddy “skid road” to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on Elliott Bay. The trees skidded down first, then the workers spending their earnings on booze. That was the origin of the term “skid row.” The mill is long gone, but the troubled and addicted still sleep in doorways in what is today the Pioneer Square neighborhood.

In The Pacific Raincoast, an ecological history of Washington and Oregon west of the Cascade Mountains, author Robert Bunting notes that this early link to the global economy imbued Seattle with the boom-and-bust gold rush mentality that has since gone through iterations from aerospace to computers. That mentality was fortified when Seattle became the jumping off point for the 1890s Yukon Gold Rush. Donald Trump’s German immigrant grandfather, Frederick Trump, came to Seattle then to make his fortune. On Pioneer Square he operated what was called a “fancy restaurant,” said to offer services to meet human hungers beyond food and drink, before he moved on to make the original Trump family fortune up in the Yukon.   

Bunting contrasts the ecological roots of Seattle in logging the big trees with those of it its humbler neighbor to the south, Portland, which grew out of the agricultural Willamette Valley. Portland was a farm service town with a more communitarian air, a place where you didn’t stick your head up too high. They also cut down trees in Oregon, but the hazardous Columbia Bar retarded shipping until later.

Seattle remains one of the major West Coast ports, and the U.S. port closest to Asia. Much of the trade with China flows through here. The largest of container ships dock amid a forest of cranes. Drayage trucks hauling containers choke the highways. Many go to a huge warehouse complex south of the city on flatlands created by mudflows from Mt. Rainier eruptions.

The birth of Boeing

The institution of the global most associated with Seattle when I first lived here in 1977 was Boeing, the corporation’s origin point. It also has ecological roots. Bill Boeing was drawn to Seattle by the spruce tree lumber of which airplanes used to be made. About a five-minute walk from my house down the hill to Lake Union is where Boeing assembled and flew his first aircraft, a seaplane. It was 1916 during the First World War. Boeing had a military market in mind. The corporation was nurtured along by the federal government in the interwar period with mail contracts and then in the 1930s, with contracts to build the B-17 Flying Fortress.

With World War II, production amped up. It was the next big gold rush. Seattle experienced revolutionary change. Tens of thousands moved in from all over the country. That included the first substantial African-American community coming mostly from Louisiana and Texas, the one that later birthed Jimi Hendrix. B-17s and B-29s rolled off the lines to fight the war. Today the corporation continues as the second largest military contractor, making everything from fighters to air tankers. It is by reputation more the font of new weapons concepts, such as the satellite-guided bomb, than the number one contractor, Lockheed Martin.

Boeing created the icon of the modern, interconnected global world that emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s, the passenger jetliner. Boeing produced the first successful jetliner, the 707, with the help of Pentagon funding to create the military equivalent, the KC-135 air tanker. The British Comet came before the 707 but its tails had a nasty habit of falling off. With Europe’s Airbus it remains one of the globe’s two major producers of passenger jetliners. Driving up I-5 past Boeing Field in south Seattle, one can often see rows of 737s with different airline liveries parked awaiting final delivery to their customers after rolling off the line at Renton just south of the city. It became quite crowded when the crash-prone 737-800 Max was grounded. Even though headquarters has officially moved to Washington, DC, much of the action remains around the Puget Sound.

The coming of the tech lords   

Boeing linked the globe physically with its jetliners. The matrix electronically weaving the planet together also tracks back in many ways to Seattle, to 1978 when Bill Gates and Paul Allen moved their budding software company from Albuquerque to their hometown, and began its transformation into one of the world’s primary technology centers. It was the next gold rush, and one that continues today. The sons of a top-flight Seattle attorney and a University of Washington librarian, they developed the commercial software business and leveraged control of the PC operating system to dominate application after application, leading to later legal fights.

 Today, Microsoft remains one of the region’s major employers. If seen as a bit faded before platform giants such as Apple and Google, it is still ubiquitous in software, and runs one of the world’s three major web clouds. Like Boeing, one of Microsoft’s largest customers is the Department of Defense. Its backdoor connections to National Security Administration surveillance were exposed by Edward Snowden.

If we thought Microsoft was out to take over everything back in the 1990s and 2000s, we hadn’t seen anything yet. The other major Seattle tech giant, Amazon, not only seeks to dominate the market, but to be the market, ruling e-commerce and the entire retail supply chain from books to food. Its progenitor, Jeff Bezos, seems out to rule Earth and space.

Growing two miles south of my home, Amazon has devoured Seattle. In 2010 the company had around 5,000 employees in the area. Today it has 75,000. No city is more dominated by a single employer. Amazon’s headquarters complex spawls in buildings across South Lake Union. A little over a decade ago it was an area of supply shops and car dealerships. In a stunning urban transformation, it has turned into a new downtown, an ultramodern cluster of low-rise office buildings and skyscrapers. Google and Facebook have outposts here employing thousands. Cranes continue to rise above new construction that continues apace.

Today Amazon, like Microsoft, is a fully integrated element of the national security state. Amazon Web Services, the largest cloud, operates networks for the intelligence complex including CIA, and is joined with Microsoft to put the Department of Defense on the cloud. The tech giants are coming home to the mothership. The Department of War, when they called it for what it really is, funded the first electronic digital computer that could be programmed and used for general purposes, ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania fired up in 1945. IBM’s first mainframe computer was funded by the Pentagon to manage the nuclear alert system. Military microchip purchases brought prices down to where they could gain civilian applications. The first Internet was created to link military research labs. The Pentagon paved the way for the guys in garages.

A center of military empire

If incestuous relations with the military characterize all three of these Seattle corporate giants, the Puget Sound region surrounding Seattle is site to one of the greatest concentrations of military power on the planet. (As if to underscore the point, as I write these words I hear the screeching roar of Navy F-18s flying overhead, the Blue Angels aerobatic team buzzing Seattle in their annual Seafair festival appearance.)

Joint Base Lewis McCord south of Tacoma is the largest Army base in the U.S. west of the Mississippi, running Army operations throughout the Pacific. A jumping off point for operations across Asia, JBLM is home to a large contingent of C-17 air freighters. Along I-5 one can often see processions of Army vehicles headed out to practice desert warfare at the Yakima Firing Range in the dry rainshadow east of the Cascades. During the height of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, one could often tell when units were being rotated back to the States by increased traffic clogs on I-5 between Tacoma and Olympia. It is also the second largest Joint Special Operations Command base, and a site for testing advanced military concepts. The highly mobile Stryker brigades began here.

The Navy is also a looming presence across the region, underscoring why the U.S. insisted on the 49^th parallel in its division of the Oregon Territory with the British, giving it control of the Puget Sound. From the start a maritime empire with a continental interior, the U.S. always saw the Sound, along with San Francisco Bay and Coronado Bay around San Diego, as crucial ports for projecting power and commerce into the Pacific. Today, across the Sound from Seattle at Bremerton, Naval Base Kitsap is home to the two Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and a major naval shipyard servicing nuclear vessels. This is where battleships damaged in the Pearl Harbor attack were restored to service. At the north end of the Sound, Whidbey Island Naval Air Station is a key center of electronic warfare and spy plane operations.

The Navy has a number of other assets and facilities on the Sound, including homeports for guided missile destroyers and attack submarines, fuel and weapons depots, and one of the Navy’s two centers providing technical and engineering support for its sub fleet.

"Auschwitz on the Puget Sound"         

Transcending all the other Navy installations for its apocalyptic level of destructive power is Naval Base Kitsap’s submarine port at Bangor 20 miles west of Seattle. One of two bases for Trident nuclear missile submarines – The other is in Georgia – the location was chosen because the boomers could easily submerge in the deep, ice-age-glacier-cut Hood Canal and sneak out into the Sound to enforce their threat of total nuclear destruction. I was once told by a Puget Sound fisherman how a large wave sweeping under his boat was the only sign a Trident was going out. His fish sonar showed nothing.

The Seattle Times reported, “Nearly one-quarter of America’s 9,962 nuclear weapons are now assigned to the Bangor submarine base on Hood Canal, 20 air miles northwest of downtown Seattle . . . This makes Bangor the largest nuclear weapons storehouse in the United States, and possibly the world.“ The stockpile includes warheads for the eight ballistic missile submarines and reserves stored in bunkers.

From my house, looking west to the jagged chain of the Olympic Mountains, I am often struck by the potential for universal holocaust that sits in between. The nuclear firepower one Trident carries would alone be enough to create a nuclear winter that would block sunlight and hinder food production, killing billions by starvation. The entire Bangor fleet could end complex life on Planet Earth. Even a very limited counterforce war, weapons taking out weapons, would also take out me and my hometown. They say the survivors would envy the dead. I would likely be one of the envied, if not from immediate blast effects, then from the cloud of fallout that would smother Seattle.

Former Seattle Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen called the base “Auschwitz on the Puget Sound.” He withheld part of his taxes in protest and advocated that others do that as well. His Trident opposition and other offenses, such as support for gay rights, divorced Catholics and contraception, drew an investigation from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the modern papal inquisitor who was a onetime Hitler Youth member and later Pope Benedict. Hunthausen was stripped of some of his powers. He retired in 1991 but before he died in 2018 lived long enough to see his old nemesis forced to resign and be succeeded by Francis.

Beyond the global

Seattle is a hotbed of bioregional thinking, with many who identify as Cascadians seeking a new way of life beyond empire and more in tune with the Earth. But, as this review has shown, it is also a center of empire. Seattle and its surroundings not only encompass several of the world’s premier globalizing corporations, but also one of the major concentrations of U.S. military power, including the instrumentalities for the world’s final destruction should humanity be so foolish as to unleash them.

Facing this array of the global on the local landscape, what can be the meaning of a bioregional future?  What does it mean to grow a bioregional life in this center of corporate and military empire? For the empire is certainly here in multiple and highly potent forms. Is a way of life beyond the empire possible here? That is what we must ask, and seek to envision.

Perhaps a clue is in the emergent name for the body of water that includes the Puget Sound and Georgia Strait to the north, the Salish Sea. Proposed decades ago by bioregionalists as an alternative name reflecting the native history of the place, rather than the names given by imperial explorers, the Salish Sea has now been adopted as an official designation. Hearkening to the native roots before empire is a way to begin seeing beyond empire. Even as the global continues to powerfully exist here, we can break beyond its mental confines to make a home place rooted in bioregional nature. It requires acts of revolutionary imagination to make that place. The future starts in our hearts and minds.

David McCloskey’s new Ish River-Lillooet map is an example of revolutionary imagination. It enables us to see the roots of place beyond empire.

Please go here for the original article: https://theraven.substack.com/p/seattle-and-the-global-a-center-of