Hey there! I want to address Spiritual Bypassing. If you have never heard this term before, you’re not alone. Among those with spiritual practices, this is often not well known or talked about. Spiritual Bypassing was defined by John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, in the mid 1980s as “Resorting to spirituality to avoid difficult or painful emotions or challenges resulting in a tendency to suppress aspects of their identity and needs and stall their emotional development.”
Let me repeat that again - “Resorting to spirituality to avoid difficult or painful emotions or challenges resulting in a tendency to suppress aspects of their identity and needs and stall their emotional development.”
Take a moment to digest those words.
Connection with spirit is amazingly healing, and for many people, can transform their life. But the veil of spirituality can also be used to conceal issues lying below the surface instead of addressing them. Have you ever felt that spirituality was more something you DO, than something you HAVE? In big or small ways, most of us experience spiritual bypassing, and can remain completely unaware of this if we do not explore our shadow.
Spiritual Bypassing can lead us to:
Excuse ourselves from negative behaviors because we are “spiritual”
Refuse to acknowledge difficult emotions or shadow expressions because we believe we are above feeling that way (for example, we may deny feelings of jealousy, even when we are feeling very jealous)
Pretend we don’t have shadow work to do because we are already “enlightened”
Hide behind a spiritual practice by only engaging in the practices that feel good
You may have had experiences in your life with others who spiritually bypassed in various ways, causing harm to you or others around them. But don’t make the mistake of believing that your experience with this exempts you from doing the same thing. Often, the thing we dislike or resent the most in others triggers us because it lingers below the surface in our own self. Triggers are important doorways into ourselves and yet we deny them when we Spiritually bypass.