This is such a vital 100% spot on piece! Thank you, Jeff Foster.
As someone with a history of deep trauma, I’d been very disassociated — which is something that served me through my childhood and helped me to survive. In sobriety and once on a healing journey, my ongoing untouched and unhealed deeper trauma also made me vulnerable to faux spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, David Hawkins, Bryon Kate, and others who reinforced spiritual bypassing — with harmful consequences to myself and those around me, including my children. This has been among the painful and yet also empowering lessons that I have learned and have come to be deeply grateful for today.
As others have said, in far too many nonduality spiritual circles it is the inner work that is bypassed. In these cases, what can appear like transcendence is actually disassociation from our fullness as embodied human beings.
It’s my belief that it is deeply important to shine bright light on the shadow side of what we experience and witness as human beings — and this includes many revered spiritual teachers. We need to name them, expose the harm that is caused through spiritual bypassing, and illuminate the devastating abuse by those such as Deepak Chopra and so many others. For me personally, this has included a therapist who abused and traumatized me, and also the former leading teacher of our spiritual community who had an affair with a sangha member who then committed suicide. As I have engaged in healing my injured instincts, what I have come to realize today is how pervasive those who offer teachings, therapy, spiritual guidance, and more actually can often cause more harm than healing and empowerment to their patients, clients, and followers.
For years into my sobriety, in addition to the abuse I had experienced by a therapist, I had unknowingly also remained vulnerable to illness (fibromyalgia, which I’ve now been completely symptom free of for 20+ years), other non substance addictions, impaired parenting, unhealthy relationships, and more because of my unprocessed trauma. Even with years of sobriety and counseling, there had unknowingly remained abandoned exiled parts of myself. And these old untouched wounds continued to serve as obstacles to a strong connection with my heart and the experience of being a fully embodied human being.
Today I recognize that I am far from being alone. Which is why pieces like this one by Jeff Foster and others are so important. It is my belief that there is a duty to warn, a responsibility to shine light on the shadow side of those whose teachings can both sometimes be helpful but also cause harm, and to hold accountable those whose spiritual bypassing and/or abuse further traumatizes already traumatized people.
I appreciate Jeff Foster, Lissa Rankin, and others for empowering us through speaking the truth and sharing and inspiring us with their wisdom, insights, compassion, and deep caring. May we all connect with those resources which are truly helpful to us on our sacred human journeys. 🙏 Molly
When Disassociation Masquerades
as Awakening
“You don’t have to take six months to get over this. Just step out of it now.”
The spiritual teacher Rupert Spira responded this way to someone who vulnerably shared in a group about their heartbreak over a recent breakup. I have heard similar responses from Rupert in other contexts.
(The following is not an attack on Rupert personally, or on this particular quote, but a challenge and a critique of a more general philosophical position of which Rupert is a well known representative. It is said with love and respect. Being loving does NOT always mean agreeing with someone. Sometimes it means discernment, pushing back, asking robust and honest questions, speaking up when we feel someone has missed the mark.)
When I first encountered Rupert’s teaching many years ago, and Advaita more generally as shared by many teachers, I resonated deeply with much of it. The clarity around Awareness. The relief of recognising that we are not limited to thought, feeling, or the body. That understanding genuinely helped me at a certain stage of my spiritual path. Rupert was never my teacher, but like many, I was influenced by that general perspective.
Today, as a husband and father, having travelled to the mountaintops of spiritual awakening and walked back down into the marketplace of ordinary life, having been brought kicking and screaming to death’s door with Lyme disease and burned clean and reborn in that sacred fire, I stand somewhere else now.
When someone says they have just been through a rupture in their reality and it has hit them hard, suggesting they can simply “step out of it” and return to a “non suffering” Awareness may sound appealing. It may even be metaphysically correct within a very strict non dual framework.
But psychologically, it can easily land as bypassing.
Heartbreak is not a philosophical error. It is attachment rupture. It is sacred grief moving through the nervous system. It is shock, loss, disorientation. From a trauma informed perspective, these responses are not illusions or mental mistakes to transcend. They are embodied processes that demand presence. The body needs time. Safety. Witnessing. Integration. We are beginning to understand this more clearly as a collective.
Telling someone to “step out” of heartbreak can subtly teach them to step out of themselves. Of their own hearts. Of their own bodies.
And that is not liberation, that is dissociation.
Dissociation can feel spacious at first, of course! It can masquerade as awakening, and I have written at length about this very thing. When grief is not met and integrated and metabolised, it does not simply disappear. It goes underground. Hardens. Shape-shifts. Eventually resurfaces as anxiety, depression, numbness, relational volatility, even abuse directed at self or others.
What we do not fully face comes back to haunt us in our personal lives.
This matters.
Please understand, I am not rejecting non dual insight. There is real depth there. I have written several books from that understanding myself. It still forms the bedrock of everything I do.
What I am challenging is the automatic reflex to prioritise transcendence over integration. To reach directly for the Absolute when the human nervous system is crying out for tenderness, care, emotional validation, deep human honesty.
*To offer the sky when someone actually needs far more ground.*
(Rupert, I’m not attacking you. I recognise this reflex. I have been very guilty of it myself in the past!)
For me now, spiritual maturity is not about floating above experience and chasing Pure Awareness. It is about inhabiting life. Fully. In the body. Messily. Tenderly. With curiosity, playfulness, and profound presence. It is about staying with difficulty instead of fleeing to the seeming cleanliness of the infinite.
Yes, we are Awareness. Now.
And… heartbreak hurts like hell and can take lots of time to heal.
Lots of time.
Both perspectives can be true. Both are absolutely essential.
It takes real maturity to hold these two perspectives AT ONCE. To hold this stunning paradox as you would hold a most beloved newborn.
If Advaita is to mature, it MUST include the nervous system. It MUST honour and include attachment, trauma, embodiment. Otherwise it remains metaphysically elegant, but psychologically naïve.
For me, spirituality must be LIVED. In the body. In relationship. In fierce honesty. In responsibility to our kids and partners. In integrity. In the raw, wild, sensual, erotic, agonising, glorious shaking vulnerability of being fully human.
It is saying sorry. It is vulnerably sharing your doubts. It is telling the truth. It is sharing your pain and your joy. It is standing with your partner, looking into her eyes, trembling, speaking your deepest truth and receiving hers without escaping into transcendence. No bypassing. No hiding in the Absolute. Just two nervous systems meeting in honesty. THAT is fucking Advaita. It’s not concepts, it’s not just pretty words on paper, it’s visceral and tangible and noisy and imperfect and real.
Heartbreak is not a mistake in consciousness, or a shameful remnant of the “separate self” to be extinguished somehow. As I wrote several years ago, upon waking up to the shadow side of Advaita:
“…I vowed to bow to that fucking broken heart as if it were God Herself. Until the end of time.”
I still mean that.
Anything less no longer moves me, and no longer feels true.
No comments:
Post a Comment