“Spiritual Bypassing is a tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” -John Welwood
[Sag] Season’s greetings, everyone! Sagittarius, the Archer, always aims for the truth. He is blunt, optimistic, exploratory, a bit preachy, and naturally interested in spirituality, religion, and philosophy. The 9th house, ruled by Sagittarius, is the place of gurus, spiritual teachers, and spiritual paths. It is for this reason I have chosen to explore the idea of Spiritual Bypassing in honor of Sag Season.
When I first discovered astrology years ago, I was delighted to meet other humans who were interested in walking a more spiritual path. However, I quickly found myself disappointed when I noticed the same people who were saying all the right things and reading all the right books, engaging in behavior that very clearly contradicted the ideas they were espousing. It was confusing to see these “spiritual” people, say one thing and do another. In my excitement to meet fellow spiritual beings having a human experience, I was quickly disillusioned. Around that time, I learned about “Spiritual Bypassing,” a term coined by transpersonal psychotherapist John Welwood in the ‘80s. Welwood defines this as a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” Or as Integral psychotherapist Robert Masters puts it so succinctly, “Avoidance in holy drag.” He continues that, “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 elements, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.”
My interest was piqued! What did this mean? I had been aware of the shadow side of spirituality and the inflated ego that could accompany “enlightenment,” but I was unaware of how people could use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid their own humanness or vulnerability. But it made sense. Reading self-help books or adopting a spiritual practice can make us feel as if we are living a deeper life or that we are more evolved, but that can also result in thinking that we’re “above” certain feelings or thoughts. Or that by reading this book or doing that plant medicine, that we have “dealt” with consciously facing unresolved emotions, issues or pain.
Let it be known: I am not against self-help books, plant medicine, or spiritual practice. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. I applaud and respect everyone who wants to live a more spiritual life. However, I also believe that there are no short-cuts. That pain and suffering must be experienced consciously, and that you cannot Ayahuasca yourself out of it (yes, I just used “Ayahuasca” as a verb). You may get incredible insights and breakthroughs through a medicinal ceremony, but you still have to suffer the feelings that come from these realizations, and come to terms with your own humanness, and integrate these breakthroughs into your life. The ultimate paradox is that when we are on a Spiritual Path, we are shown our own divinity: that we are part of the cosmos and we have a piece of it within us. However, in learning that, I believe that we must also own our own human nature. That, ultimately, it is not our divine piece we must embrace, but our human piece. We will never be all ZEN all the time here in the Western world; we will never transcend icky human emotions. We will continue to get angry, irritated, scared, sad or disgusted. But we will become more aware of these less desirable feelings when they occur, and more aware of how normal and okay that is, and be more accepting of it.
I think there’s a misconception that we should be able to rise above emotions that are considered “low-vibe,” because we “know better,” or we are more “evolved.” But just because you are more evolved does not mean you can circumvent the fact you are a human being. You are a spiritual being having a human experience AND you are a human being having a spiritual experience. It’s both. And it’s beautiful.
“Spiritual Bypassing is avoidance in holy drag.” -Robert Masters
All the time we are trying to rationalize our feelings: “This anger doesn’t serve me. What’s the point of it?” These are thoughts. These are thoughts that take us out of the feelings. Because we don’t want to feel the feeling, because it doesn’t feel good. The truth is that this anger does serve you because somewhere a boundary has been crossed and you need to reflect on that. Every feeling is telling us something, and giving us more in-ormation to our own complexity. We are all just here to learn about ourselves and experience it, and it’s all really amazing, and painful and incredibly interesting.
It’s also funny how we have such crazy expectations of gurus and spiritual teachers. When Wild, Wild County came out I was pretty surprised, because I had no idea about a lot of details of Osho’s life. So I wondered now that I’d seen this documentary that portrayed him as a weird, controversial cult leader, would I negate all the wisdom I’d read in his books? Does it have to be so black and white? Or do we expect our gurus to be superhuman, just as we expect ourselves to be when we adopt a spiritual path?
I guess the point is that no matter how much work we do, no matter how much therapy, reading, plant medicine, or healings we have, we cannot ever avoid the pain, the wounds, or the suffering, and we can never transcend our own humanness. We must go through them, feel them, and integrate them and then say, “Fuck, that was rough.” And embracing the human parts of ourselves is actually the most freeing experience. Humbling, yes. But also funny and extraordinary in it’s own way. Our vulnerability is not a thing to avoid, but a thing of beauty. The only way out is through.