An Excellent Article: What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

This is an excellent and important article with both personal and collective implications. 

Although it's just recently — specifically through the work of Jeff Brown — that I have been learning about "spiritual bypassing," I'm also now aware that this term and its breathtaking impact has existed for many years. That said, it's also been quite some time since I first began to recognize the limitations and the harmful consequences of the teachings of many revered spiritual teachers and religious leaders. 

For me personally, there were several faux "enlightened" New Age teachers — those such as Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, David R. Hawkins, and others — who I'd been drawn to and who ultimately served to sabotage my emotional and spiritual growth rather than empower me to heal, integrate, and deepen into the wholeness of myself as a human being. Instead, it was my disassociation and fragmentation that was enabled. Gratefully, at some point I recognized that something was truly wrong with these teachings. 

What the language and consciousness of spiritual bypassing has given me is an increased depth of clarity that is an additional gift in my ongoing journey of awakening. And this is also much larger than me as an individual. Any ideology which takes any of us further away from our hearts — from loving ourselves and others, from the wholeness of our sacred human bodies, from the development of a strong healthy ego, from deep healing and integration of our life experiences, and from the cultivation of a rich and deep emotional life — also causes harm to the greater whole of which we are all deeply connected with. Therefore, insights such as those provided here hold the potential to be of benefit to our collective growth as a human species. 

As Jeff Brown also wisely articulates, emotional maturity is synonymous with spiritual maturity. Deep bow of gratitude to all that supports our ongoing awakening and evolution. — Molly

 By 

Kendra Cherry

What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

Spiritual bypassing describes a tendency to use spiritual explanations to avoid complex psychological issues.1 The term was first coined during the early 1980s by a transpersonal psychotherapist named John Welwood in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening. According to Welwood, spiritual bypassing can be defined as a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."2

As a therapist and Buddhist teacher, Welwood began to notice that people (including himself) often wielded spirituality as a shield or type of defense mechanism. Rather than working through hard emotions or confronting unresolved issues, people would simply dismiss them with spiritual explanations.

While it can be a way to protect the self from harm or to promote harmony between people, it doesn't actually resolve the issue. Instead, it merely glosses over a problem, leaving it to fester without any true resolution.

While spirituality can be a force that helps enhance an individual’s 

well-being, engaging in spiritual bypassing as a way to avoid 

complicated feelings or issues can ultimately stifle growth.

Signs

Spiritual bypassing is a way of hiding behind spirituality or spiritual practices. It prevents people from acknowledging what they are feeling and distances them from both themselves and others. Some examples of spiritual bypassing include:

• Avoiding feelings of anger

• Believing in your own spiritual superiority as a way to hide from insecurities

• Believing that traumatic events must serve as “learning experiences” or that there is a silver lining behind every negative experience

• Believing that spiritual practices such as meditation or prayer are always positive

• Extremely high, often unattainable, idealism

• Feelings of detachment

• Focusing only on spirituality and ignoring the present

• Only focusing on the positive or being overly optimistic

• Projecting your own negative feelings onto others

• Pretending that things are fine when they are clearly not

• Thinking that people can overcome their problems through positive thinking

• Thinking that you must “rise above” your emotions

• Using defense mechanisms such as denial and repression

Spiritual bypassing is a superficial way of glossing over problems in a way that might make us feel better in the short term, but ultimately solves nothing and just leaves the problem to linger on.

Examples 

Spiritual bypassing can sometimes be difficult to spot because it is often very subtle. However, looking at examples can help make this phenomenon more apparent:

• Following the death of a loved one, people tell surviving relatives that the deceased is “in a better place” and that it was “all part of God’s plan.” 

• A woman is angry and upset about something that someone else has done. When she tries to share her feelings, her friends tell her to stop being so negative.

• A relative regularly crosses boundaries and behaves in ways that are hurtful to other family members. Rather than confront this behavior, those who have been harmed feel that they need to repress their anger and remain overly tolerant.

Spiritual bypassing is also often used to dismiss the very real concerns of people who are dealing with problems. People who are faced with discrimination are often advised to simply be “nice,” “civil,” or “patient” when dealing with blatant abuse. It suggests that people can rely on individual positive thinking to overcome complex social issues.

Recognizing Spiritual Bypassing

If you say these things, you might be engaging in spiritual bypassing:

• "Everything happens for a reason."

• "You create your own happiness."

• "It was for the best."

• "It was a blessing in disguise."

• "Good vibes only!"

• “Thoughts and prayers!”

Before resorting to platitudes, ask yourself who the comment is really helping. Is it really giving someone comfort or insight, or is it just a way of dismissing a difficult situation so that you can feel better?

Causes 

Spiritual bypassing acts as a form of defense mechanism. It protects us from things that seem too painful to deal with, but this protection comes at a cost. Ignoring or avoiding the issue can make stress worse in the long-term and make the problem more difficult to solve later on. While avoidance is a primary motivator behind this type of behavior, there are other factors that play a role in shaping it.

Wellness culture, which often perpetuates ideas of toxic positivity and permanent optimism, is sometimes a driving force behind spiritual bypassing. It teaches people that they cannot be well or healthy unless they are able to rise above any negativity. The problem with this is that negative emotions are normal and often a sign that something needs to change. Ignoring these signs can lead to worse problems down the road.

An individualistic culture that promotes the idea that people must aim for self-actualization in order to achieve true happiness also contributes to a tendency to avoid difficult or painful emotions. Rather than trying to solve problems in the environment that lead to pain, individualism teaches people that they alone are responsible for their destiny. 

Impacts

Spiritual bypassing isn't always a bad thing. In times of severe distress, it can be a way to temporarily relieve frustration or anxiety. However, researchers suggest that it can be damaging when used as a long-term strategy to suppress problems.1

Spiritual bypassing can have a number of negative effects. It can affect individual well-being as well as relationships with others. Some of the potential negative consequences include:1

• Anxiety

• Blind allegiance to leaders

• Codependency

• Control problems

• Disregard for personal responsibility

• Emotional confusion

• Excessive tolerance of unacceptable or inappropriate behavior

• Feelings of shame

• Spiritual narcissism

Spiritual narcissism involves using spiritual practices as a way to

increase self-importance. It often involves using spirituality to build

the individual up, while also wielding it as a weapon to tear others

down.

Denying Difficult Emotions 

People often engage in spiritual bypassing when they think that they should not be feeling what they are feeling. Negative emotions can be overwhelming at times. Feeling of anger, jealousy, disgust, annoyance, and rage can be distressing, and people may find themselves feeling ashamed or guilty for feeling or thinking such things. 

Rather than deal with the negative feelings—and any resulting reactions to those feelings—spiritual bypassing becomes a tool for avoidance.

Just as you shouldn’t try to suppress your own negative emotions in order to avoid discomfort, you should also avoid the desire to save other people from emotions or situations that make you uncomfortable. Trying to save or shield others—either from their circumstances or their own poor choices—can also become a form of spiritual bypassing.

Dismissing Other People's Emotions

Spiritual bypassing can be a tool to dismiss what others are feeling. At times, spiritual bypassing can be used as a tool to gaslight others into staying silent about things that have harmed them.

Rather than being allowed to express their pain, people who have been harmed are told by others that they are being a negative person. This tendency uses spirituality to reframe events in a way that lets people off the hook for the harm they may have caused. 

Related: What Is Gaslighting?

Avoiding Responsibility

Spiritual bypassing also reduces the discomfort that people may feel as a result of cognitive dissonance. People feel uncomfortable when they hold two conflicting beliefs or when they behave in ways that are not in accordance with their beliefs.

For example, if you believe yourself to be a good person, you might struggle to take responsibility for hurtful things that you have done. Admitting that you have harmed someone else through your actions not only causes feelings of guilt—it also conflicts with your desire to see yourself in a positive light. In this way, spiritual bypassing becomes a way to shift the blame back onto the other person while absolving yourself of any responsibility.

Judging Others 

Judging other people for expressing justifiable anger is a form of spiritual bypassing. Anger is a normal emotion and a perfectly reasonable reaction to many events and situations. It means that there is something wrong and that action needs to be taken to fix a situation or mend a relationship. Authentic spirituality doesn't suppress valid emotions just because they're uncomfortable. 

It’s okay to feel difficult emotions like anger, jealousy, and 

disappointment. The key is to deal with those emotions 

in healthy ways.

Justifying Suffering 

Another example of spiritual bypassing is using supposedly spiritual actions to justify not taking action. Examples of this include saying things such as "it's that way for a reason," "it's as nature/God intended," or "it is what it is." It lets people off the hook for taking any responsibility, because according to such explanations, these things are natural, unchangeable, or divinely caused. 

Such explanations make it easy to just accept things as they are and not focus on the steps that we can take to make a difference. Some situations may be outside of our control or we might face obstacles that make change difficult, but it is important to acknowledge and accept the responsibility for what we can do to make a situation better.

Bypassing also becomes a form of victim-blaming, especially in cases where people are experiencing the negative effects of various kinds of trauma. Telling people that they should just stop being negative in order to avoid exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and other physical and psychological manifestations of stress is essentially telling them that they are to blame for their own pain and suffering.

How It Hampers Growth 

While spiritual bypassing may be less harmful than some other coping mechanisms, it can still lead to negative outcomes that hurt an individual’s ability to grow as a person and fulfill their potential. It can stifle emotional development and even stand in the way of fully realized spirituality.

Spiritual bypassing can also sometimes involve participating in "spiritual" activities in order to feel superior or to get around having to take any meaningful action. Instead of talking about a conflict, you'll meditate. Instead of participating in your community, you'll visit a temple. Instead of confronting your discomfort, you'll recite a prayer. The problem does not lie in engaging in these spiritual practices. The problem is that you're using them as a shield to make yourself feel better—not for truly spiritual reasons. 

This is why spiritual bypassing can sometimes be so subtle and difficult to spot both in yourself and others. Meditation can be a helpful way to deal with stress that will help you cope with conflict. Visiting meaningful places can help give you a connection to your community. Praying can give you a sense of peace or comfort when confronting an uncomfortable truth. 

The difference lies in the intentions behind those actions. Are they a way of making yourself feel spiritually superior to others? Then they are likely functioning largely as a spiritual bypass preventing true growth.

Healthy expressions of spirituality help you grow as a person while 

bypassing creates a barrier between you and authentic growth.

Tips and Tricks

Spiritual bypassing may act as a way to protect the self from things that we find threatening, but it neglects an important truth. We cannot pick and choose which emotions we experience. Life cannot be good thoughts, feelings, and emotions alone. In order to experience the highs, we must also endure the lows. 

Some things that you can do to try to confront a tendency to spiritual bypass include:

• Avoid labeling emotions as good or bad. While some emotions may be negative or unpleasant, they serve a purpose. Emotional experiences are not wrong or taboo, and feeling these emotions does not make you a bad person. Try viewing your emotions with acceptance and remember that all emotional states are only temporary.

• Remember that negative thoughts and feelings serve a purpose. The goal of life is not to avoid having such thoughts, it is to use those thoughts to propel positive actions. Simply putting on rose-colored sunglasses and ignoring a problem does not solve it.

• Remember that uncomfortable feelings are often a sign that there’s something wrong and something needs to change. If you are always trying to reduce discomfort by simply avoiding it, the situations that are causing you distress will stay the same. Look at these uncomfortable emotions as an opportunity for transformation rather than a burden to avoid.

While spiritual bypassing makes it difficult to acknowledge valid feelings, it is important to remember that spirituality itself can be a positive force in your life. Research suggests that spirituality can often have a number of physical and mental health benefits.3 People often turn to spirituality to restore hope, cope with distress, to find support, and to find meaning in life. 

Studies have shown, for example, that people who engage in spiritual practices are less prone to depression, cope better with stress, experience better overall health, and have better psychological well-being.4

A Word From Verywell

Don't be too hard on yourself for mistakes. Growth is a process and it's easy to fall into old habits, especially when you are trying to cope with something difficult. Spirituality can be a positive force in your life and many spiritual practices can be excellent stress management tools. By actively avoiding spiritual bypassing, you can make spirituality a practice that will help you live a more harmonious and fulfilling life.

__________

Please go here for the original article: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-spiritual-bypassing-5081640

Jeff Brown: Rooting Our Decisions In Deep Knowing

I was often criticized for being indecisive, particularly when confronted with decisions around career and relationship. In the practical, survivalist world I came from, there was no time to waste. Decisions had to be made quickly, positions had to be claimed, even if they weren’t true to path. But in the authentic world I longed for, significant decisions had to be made slowly, because it often took years to clarify the soul’s journey. Because it took years to distinguish true path from conditioned path. Because it took years to learn the lessons necessary to inform significant directional decisions. What they call a late-bloomer in a survivalist world, I call a grounded grower in an authentic world. Better to take our time and root our decisions in a deep knowing, than race to a path that is not truly our own.

 

— Jeff Brown

 

The Economy Isn’t Working. That’s Exactly the Plan.

An excellent, deeply disturbing, spot on article. Included here is the importance that we know that Biden has long been among the strong proponents of the neoliberal order and the policies and deadly ideology which has brought us to the precipice where we are today. Trump may be on his way out, but he was just a symptom of a deadly disease that remains. It is only in realizing this that we will understand the urgency of our need to rise up together and unite in every way humanly possible in the great struggle for economic, racial, social, and environmental justice. It is also true that we need to wage this fierce fight as though the lives of us all, and including our children and all children everywhere, depend on our resistance to the insanity of the toxic status quo and our commitment to the radical transformation of our nation and world — because they do. — Molly

The second element of the controlled demolition of the economy was that the U.S. embarked on a plan to shift massive shares of U.S. income and wealth from the working and middle classes to the already wealthy. This is what was called “supply side economics.” It was Ronald Reagan’s signature economic policy when he ran for president in 1980.

Inequality is reaching feudal proportions, where very few own almost everything, and everyone else is crushed under the wheel of engineered destitution.

 

By

Robert Freeman

The reason everybody is so angst-ridden about the economy is because we all have the wrong idea about what it is supposed to do and how it’s supposed to work. 

Most of us have a quaint, 19^th century idea about free markets and all that up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger stuff. You know, work hard, play by the rules, keep your nose clean, and you’ll do well. That is certainly the cultural myth our society bathes us in.  

But that’s not how things actually work.  It’s the dissonance between how we imagine things work and how they really work that causes our perplexity and angst, and rage.  It is also that dissonance that has been so deftly manipulated by Donald Trump and given rise to Trumpism. 

Forty years ago, around 1980, the uber-wealthy decided they wanted to get their money out of the economy. There was too much political turmoil (Vietnam, Watergate), too much economic turbulence (Arab oil embargos, stagflation), and too high of a cost of production (high wages, environmental and labor protections).  

They wanted to take their money somewhere where they could pay people 1/20^th what they paid here (less than $1 an hour), where there were no environmental or labor laws, where the workforce was plentiful, hungry, and docile, and where politicians could be bought cheap. 

So, they engineered a controlled demolition of the U.S. economy.  The plan had two elements.

In the first part, they began systematically de-industrializing what had been the mightiest economy in the history of the world—the same economy that had almost single-handedly won World War II, the greatest industrial enterprise ever undertaken. They dismantled tens of thousands of factories, creating what became known as the “Rust Belt.”  They literally sent factory designs to east Asia, rebuilt them, and when they were ready to go, flipped the switch, shut down here, and opened up there. The consequences were devastating.   

Tens of millions of white, working-class factory workers were put out of work, losing their high-paying jobs. Forever. With nothing to replace them. Major cities became hollowed out hulks of a once-glorious industrial past, bywords for decline. Think Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Toledo, and more. The data tell the story.

In 1980, manufacturing accounted for about 22% of the U.S. economy. By 2012, just 30 years later, it contributed only 12%, an astonishingly rapid decline in historical terms, effectively a controlled demolition. The U.S. trade deficit, where we buy more from other countries than we sell, went from $19 billion in 1980—pretty close to a rounding error—to what looks to be almost $1 trillion this year. That is money that is sent directly out of the country to buy other countries’ goods. $1 trillion. 

The second element of the controlled demolition of the economy was that the U.S. embarked on a plan to shift massive shares of U.S. income and wealth from the working and middle classes to the already wealthy. This is what was called “supply side economics.” It was Ronald Reagan’s signature economic policy when he ran for president in 1980.

The mythical story was that if we all gave more of our money to the already wealthy, they would invest it for us and the resulting economic boom would more than pay back the transfer, even after taxes and inflation. It sounded too good to be true. It was. 

Taxes on the highest income brackets were lowered from 71% to 38%, essentially cut in half. Importantly, there was no requirement that the beneficiaries actually invest their new-found gains in the U.S.  So, they didn’t.  They invested them in the those east-Asian countries that were the beneficiaries of the deindustrialization discussed above.  

What happened? 

In the first full year under Reagan’s plan, the economy shrunk by 2.1%, the greatest shrinkage since the Great Depression. Factory workers were out of work, so they weren’t paying taxes.  And, because the wealthy were paying so much fewer taxes, the government didn’t have enough income to cover its expenses. It had to make up the difference by borrowing. That is what is called a “budget deficit.” 

Jimmy Carter’s last budget deficit was $78 billion.  Reagan’s first full-year budget deficit, after his supply side tax cuts were put in place, was $128 billion, a 64% increase. The next year, 1983, the deficit exploded again, to $208 billion, another 63% increase. By 1992, when Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush finished office, the deficits were running $300 billion a year.  

Of course, annual deficits accumulate into the national debt. When Reagan took office in 1981, the national debt (the accumulation of all the annual deficits since the country began) was $1 trillion. In 1993, just 12 years later, when George H.W. Bush left office, it was $4 trillion. Think about that. 

Over 204 years, paying off the costs of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, building out the entire continent, fighting World War I, surviving the Great Depression, fighting and winning World War II, and winning the better part of the Cold War, the country only had to borrow $1 trillion. Then, in the next 12 years, years of peace and prosperity, that debt quadrupled, to $4 trillion. 

These deficits and this debt benefit the very wealthy, because it is they who fund them, who loan the money to the government, at interest, that it has to borrow because it can’t pay its bills from the taxes it’s no longer bringing in. As with the deindustrializing of the economy, this was exactly the plan: to benefit the wealthiest people in the world. 

Today, average working-class wages, adjusted for taxes and inflation, are the same as they were in the 1970s.  For a stark comparison, average incomes in China are up more than 10 FOLD over the same period. This is why the U.S. has massive civil tension among its people and record distrust of the government while the people of China are ferociously loyal to their government. 

The annual trade deficit—that money we ship out of the country to buy things we don’t make anymore—is on track to exceed $1 trillion this year. That’s $1 trillion taken straight off the top of what would otherwise be available national income, and shipped abroad. The national debt has exploded beyond belief, to over $27 trillion. This year’s increment, the annual budget deficit, will exceed $4 trillion. That’s four times as much as was incurred in the first 204 years of the country, combined. This is not a picture of economic vibrancy.

For the past forty years, the government has had to run average budget deficits of $675 billion a year just to keep the holes in the economy plugged. Otherwise, it would have fallen into recession, or depression.  And the borrowing is going vertical.  

This is a tremendous boon to the very wealthy because, as mentioned above, it is they who loan the government all that money.  And importantly, they do so at higher interest rates because when anything is in higher demand, in this case, borrowed money, its price goes up. The price of borrowed money is the interest rate.  But wait, it gets better—or worse—depending on whether you are a borrower or a lender. 

Higher interest rates in one part of the economy mean higher rates in all of the economy, because the pool of loanable funds is essentially the same pool for all.  That means that when budget deficits rise, the interest rates on mortgages, credit cards, automobiles, student loans—anything bought on borrowed money—goes up, too. This is a stealth way for the government to transfer still more money to the already wealthy, but with the appearance that it’s an arms-length private transaction, between borrowers and lenders, involving interest rates. 

What does all of this add up to?

For the four decades between 1940 and 1980, the share of national income that went to the top 10% of income earners was remarkably stable, around 34%. This included those decades that are generally regarded as “the golden age of capitalism” 

But in the four decades since 1980, the share of the same top 10% has skyrocketed to 47%, a breathtaking upward shift in national income to those who are already the richest.  The upward distribution of wealth over the same period is actually even greater. 

It’s a cliché, but like so many cliches, it is grounded in reality. The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. That is exactly the plan, and the plan is working exactly as intended. In fact, it is accelerating, as every new crisis becomes a new pretext for ladling more and more and more of the nation’s wealth into the coffers of the already wealthy. 

Inequality is reaching feudal proportions, where very few own almost everything, and everyone else is crushed under the wheel of engineered destitution. This directly degrades democracy, because since it costs so much to run for office, office seekers pay attention to those who can write big checks.  Have you written a $50,000 check to an office seeker lately?  No?  Again, that is exactly the plan. They don’t want to hear from you because you can’t help fund their expensive campaigns. But write a big check and you’d be amazed at how fast the doors fly open.

Two last, quick words on the politics of this all.  Donald Trump has been stunningly successful for the very wealthy which is part of the reason they have backed him. He passed massive tax cuts that accelerated the upward transfer of wealth. But that is actually the lesser part of what makes him so valuable to the wealthy.

The far greater part is that he has re-directed the rage of the dispossessed, downwardly-mobile working class from the economic system that has caused their distress—those intentional policies mentioned above—to the altogether bogus factor of race. This has shielded the wealthy from being held accountable for having engineered and built an economy that has intentionally shafted the vast majority of its own citizens. 

The mainstream media has been altogether complicit in this deception, focusing, laser-like, on the racist dimensions of Trump’s issuances, but almost never on the much more legitimate economic origins of his base’s rage. This is perfectly understandable because the mainstream media is owned by the very wealthy. They use it to condition cultural awareness of vital issues in ways that benefit them, like when they laundered the idiocy of supply side economics as some kind of divination come down from the mountain on stone tablets that would save the country. 

The second political point is that we would be worse than naïve, even worse than stupid if we imagine that Joe Biden is going to do anything at all about this. We would be deceitful. Biden is one of the doyens, the stewards, the consiglieres of the neo-liberal order described here. He has spent almost five decades servicing the interests of the very wealthy who put him in power and kept him there and recalled him to service when it became apparent that Trump’s utility had been exhausted. They didn’t use to call him “The Senator from MasterCard” for nothing. 

Biden is already discovering that there’s not enough in the coffer to afford the kind of stimulus needed to simply feed people, to keep them housed, to help small businesses stay alive, to help schools reopen. But watch, he’ll find plenty of money for weapons makers, for the Federal Reserve to buy the garbage debt of over-leveraged corporations, money for hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies, and for banks, and for all the members of the neo-feudal aristocracy that he helped build and who are our new masters. 

The economy is working exactly as it is intended to work, the way it has been designed to work, to benefit the wealthy and to crush everybody else. The problem for the mass of the rest of us is that we didn’t get the memo. 

Please go here for the original article: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/11/30/economy-isnt-working-thats-exactly-plan?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=echobox&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1606752751

"THIS MUST STOP" Georgia Election Officials Say Trump Supporters Are MAKING THREATS

WOW. NAILS THE HORROR AND SOCIOPATHIC DELUSION AND INJUSTICE AND INSANITY OF ALL WHO ARE IN ANY WAY COMPLICIT WITH THIS VIOLENCE. IT MUST STOP!!! — Molly

Voting System Implementation Manager Gabriel Sterling calls on President Donald Trump and other elected officials to condemn threats of violence against election officials, workers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyzw71kLPj8 

Rainer Maria Rilke: I Believe In All

 

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

 

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

 

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

 

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing to you as no one ever has,

 

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

 

— Rainer Maria Rilke