I am called once again to revisit what it is to be engaged in spiritual bypassing and the harm it causes. I am especially moved to do this post, and others that will follow, in the wake of the tragic death of the adult daughter of old friends of ours... which has triggered so much grief for so many. Here I am highlighting that those who promote spiritual bypassing are among the spiritual leaders and teachers, the New Age healers, the therapists and counselors who lead us astray and sometimes with devastating consequences.
Many years ago I was totally pulled in by faux spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle. I read his book The Power of Now, I listened with rapt attention to his 10 tapes (before everything was on our phones), I tried to share the information with my oldest son (who recognized its shortcomings long before I did), and, at the time, I believed Eckhart Tolle to be among the significant teachers in my life.
That was then, before I recognized the barriers that are embedded in these teachings to fully embracing what is often multi-generational and cultural trauma. With the focus on witnessing, rising above, transcending "negative emotions," labeling some of our emotions as "negative," and on and on — the end results are building more obstacles to healing and to being fully embodied human beings. I have experienced this harm myself, in those I love, and others. And I am channeling my anger at the harm caused to vulnerable and wounded people by again illuminating the dangers of spiritual bypassing.
The below are the well articulated writings of author Jeff Brown and his critique of Eckhart Tolle. Here it is clearly illuminated the harm brought on through spiritual bypassing and all those who direct us away from embracing with courage, compassion, and great love the trauma, grief, and loss that is part of the human experience. May we all move more deeply into who we most deeply are and what it is to be wholly human.
Jeff Brown: In Grounded Spirituality, I critically review Eckhart Tolle’s book, The Power of Now. It is my personal view that it is a first stage awakening manual, that is calling itself “A guide to spiritual enlightenment”. It begins with Tolle’s story of years of shifting from suicidal depression to his “true nature” in the course of a single night. In the attached article, Tolle endeavors to make a distinction between “spiritual bypassing” and “avoidance”. It doesn’t work. Because spiritual bypassing IS self-avoidance… masquerading as awakening. Critique below…
Eckhart Tolle: Awareness or presence is never avoidance. In awareness, you allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel; you do not repress it in any way. Do you sense unresolved pain within? How are you going to resolve the pain except by allowing yourself to feel it?
Jeff Brown: Actually, awareness/presence can be AVOIDANCE, if the motivation of our quest for it is primarily to avoid elements of the human experience that are painful and uncomfortable, or if the techniques employed prevent a true access to all that we are holding emotionally/energetically.
An emotionally blocked person’s experience of presence is not the same as one whose entire being is energetically fluid and present. We may believe we are “present”, but we cannot be fully present if we are not able to access — somatically, energetically, emotionally — our unhealed traumas. If we have spent years burying our stuff somatically, and trying to rise above it with an addiction to witnessing and meditation, then we are not fully present. We are actually quite the opposite. We are trapped inside the witnessing mind (and confusing that head-tripping game with presence), and somewhat or altogether dissociated from the world of feeling.
Only through deep, enlivened, embodied feeling can we open the gate to presence. Presence is a whole-being experience, and it’s also a full-energy experience.
In Power of Now, Tolle says, “silence is an even more potent carrier of presence.” This idea is very common in the patriarchal spiritual traditions, as is the suggestion that our ego, the mind, our ‘stories,’ our feelings, somehow prevent us from being present. In truth, we cannot be fully present if all of our aspects aren't welcome. Nor can we be fully present if we confine ourselves to silence or stillness alone. Those states only access some threads of the human experience. Others arise through sound, energy, vitality, activity.
We can understand why some bypassers and trauma-survivors would choose to elevate silence as the path. It may be less triggering for them, particularly if they were wounded by word and tone. It’s a way to control their environment, so that the triggers momentarily subside. But its only accessing one level of presence. Because we are built to move, and to sound, and to shout, and to also access feeling in these ways.
To put it simply, most of us cannot access the true and inclusive “power of now”, because we are still ruled — individually and collectively — by the “power of then”. If we want to be truly present, we must…. come back to life in all regards and clear our emotional debris. Detachment is a tool — it’s not a life.
Eckhart Tolle: I believe it was Carl Jung who said, “The fundamental problems are never solved but they are outgrown,” which means you reach a different level of consciousness and there the problem is no longer that important. You grow out of it.
Many problems cannot really be solved. Psychoanalysis tries to solve all the unresolved issues in your life, but you can go on and on with that because the more you delve into it, the more things you’ll discover and at some point you have to step into another state of consciousness that is simply awareness. And then, those things are transcended. You don’t suppress; they’re no longer that important. And some things will subside and dissolve.
Jeff Brown: It is true that some problems cannot be solved, and that psychoanalysis is not the solution to many problems. Because excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis.
But the answer is not to ‘transcend’ our issues, nor is it to ‘turn around’ our stories. It’s to go deeper into them, through feeling-based practices — in the hopes of healing and transforming them.
Repressed emotions are unactualized spiritual lessons. If we don’t work through our material, we can’t actually grow as spiritual beings. Because emotional and spiritual maturity are synonymous. We can’t grow or become more truly present if we keep ‘rising above’ our stuff. We can't become fully "aware", if we limit our range of e-motion to silence and stillness.
What he is talking about is what I call the “transcendence bypass”, which I define as so: The tendency to bypass reality through ‘transcendent’ means: a rising above, a ‘heightened’ quest, an ungrounded flight of fancy. Common amongst those who identify themselves as “spiritual,” the transcendence bypasser has abandoned healthy detachment, floating off into the dissociative abyss until reality brings them back to the ground.
The great irony is that transcendence bypassers are actually the ones most controlled by earthly matters. Their addiction to the above is driven by their unresolved issues down below. They have actually trance-ended nothing. It’s all still waiting for them here on Mother Earth.
Eckhart Tolle: Whatever it is you need to understand about your unresolved issues will come into the light of awareness when you allow yourself to feel what you feel. You may occasionally get an insight into something that happened in the past or that caused the pain. The important thing is that you don’t perpetuate or add to the muddle of painful feelings within through mind-identification and further thinking so that your emotions begin to use your mind.
Jeff Brown: Yes, but we can’t ‘feel what we feel’, if we don’t engage in body-centered practices that access/open the holdings. Simply sitting in silent stillness will not bring us into contact with all of our unresolved issues and feelings. Some of it, perhaps, but not all. It’s too controlled and contained to activate many of the holdings.
This is why I believe that body-centered psychotherapies like bioenergetics and core energetics are actually spiritual practices that support a full-bodied experience of presence. Because they make us aware of what we are holding within the body, itself. And they provide techniques to excavate the memories, the feelings, the unsaid words, the aliveness (presence) that got buried with the traumas.
Most of us are graveyards of trauma, and transcendence practices can provide us much needed relief, but they will not bring us fully back to life or save our species. Because we are not automatons — we are beings of deep feeling. We have to go down into the body, and bring ourselves back to life through healing and enlivening practices.
As for the backwards idea that “mind-identification” is the issue, it is not. The primary cause of our unhappiness is not our thoughts. The monkey mind is not the source of our anxiety. It’s a symptom of it. Forget the monkey mind. The mind is not the enemy—unhealed pain is.
Men have been blaming the mind for their neuroses for centuries, while deftly avoiding that which sources its maladies — somatic constrictions, and unprocessed emotions stored in the body itself. It’s like losing your keys somewhere in the house, and looking for them in the car. Useless, useless, useless. Until they stop blaming the mind — and recognize that its neuroses stem from the unresolved emotional body — there will be no liberation.
Shifting out of unhappiness is not a cerebral process — that’s just another ineffective band-aid. It is a visceral full-body experience. It’s the “monkey heart” that’s the issue: the state of inner turbulence and agitation that emanates from an unclear heart.
The more repressed your emotional body, the more repetitive your thoughts. Flooded with unhealed emotions and unexpressed truths, the monkey heart jumps from tree-top to tree-top, emoting without grounding, dancing in its confusion. Often misinterpreted as a monkey mind, the monkey heart is reflected in repetitive thinking, perpetual anxiety, and negative imaginings. All of which are emanating from the emotional body.
Bottom line is that you cannot heal and resolve your emotional material with your mind. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues.
Your emotional material does not evaporate because you watch it. I have known many who could watch and name their patterns and issues — as if they were scientists, researching their own consciousness — but nothing fundamentally changed, because they refused to come back down into their bodies and move their feelings through to transformation. It’s safe up there, above the fray, witnessing the heartache without actually engaging it.
Yes, you may be able to get so skilled at a witnessing consciousness that you can overpower your triggers. But that’s not presence. Real presence comes through the open heart. The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyze them, not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love.
You want to live a holy life? Heal your heart. That’s the best meditation of all.
Eckhart Tolle: You can’t achieve absolute perfection on the level of form. There will always be certain limitations here and there, things that have been around and lived inside you perhaps, since childhood. They may continue. So it’s only really through transcendence that you go beyond whatever is there that is unresolved but still carried around within you. If you don’t add to the pain within, then it gradually subsides and dissolves in the light of presence.
Jeff Brown: NO. Backwards again.
First of all, we are not here to become perfect. We are here to become real… truly fiercely heartfully human.
Second, we are ONLY form. The bashing of the allegedly imperfect nature of form is fundamental to patriarchal spiritualities, because they are in so much pain that they elevate formlessness, as though we can actually become that. We can’t become that, until we die. Until then, we are in-form and we must work to heal and integrate all of our aspects.
Third, what he is saying is that if you float above your humanness for long enough, your pain will simply fade away. This is patently untrue. What actually happens is that it actually concretizes and solidifies, and turns inward against the self in the form of emotional and physical disease.
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