The following is excerpted from Spiritual Bypassing: When

Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters, by Robert Augustus Masters, available from North Atlantic Books.



Avoidance in Holy Drag: An Introduction to Spiritual

Bypassing

Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined by psychologist John

Welwood in 1984, is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing

with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is

much more common than we might think and, in fact, is so pervasive as to go

largely unnoticed, except in its more obvious extremes.

Part of the reason for this is that we

tend not to have very much tolerance, either personally or collectively, for

facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring

pain-numbing "solutions," regardless of how much suffering such "remedies" may

catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our

culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost

seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a

kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a

spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing

such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely

subtle.

Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent

shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many forms, often without being

acknowledged as such. 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 side, devaluation of the personal relative to the

spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.

The explosion of interest in

spirituality since the mid-1960s, especially Eastern spirituality, has been

accompanied by a corresponding interest and immersion in spiritual

bypassing — which has, however, not very often been named, let alone viewed, as

such. It has been easier to frame spiritual bypassing as a

religion — transcending, spiritually advanced practice or perspective, especially

in the fast-food spirituality epitomized by faddish phenomena like The

Secret. Some of the more glaringly facile features, such as drive-through

servings of reheated wisdom like "Don't take it personally" or "Whatever

bothers you about someone is really only about you" or "It's all just an

illusion," are available for consumption and parroting by just about anyone.

Happily, the honeymoon with false or

superficial notions of spirituality is starting to wane. Enough bubbles have

been burst; enough spiritual teachers, Eastern and Western, have been caught

with pants or halo down; enough cults have come and gone; enough time has been

spent with spiritual baubles, credentials, energy transmissions, and

gurucentrism to sense deeper treasures. But valuable as the desire for a more

authentic spirituality is, such change will not occur on any significant scale

and really take root until spiritual bypassing is outgrown, and that is not as

easy as it might sound, for it asks that we cease turning away from our pain,

numbing ourselves, and expecting spirituality to make us feel better.

True spirituality is not a high, not a

rush, not an altered state. It has been fine to romance it for a while, but our

times call for something far more real, grounded, and responsible; something

radically alive and naturally integral; something that shakes us to our very

core until we stop treating spiritual deepening as something to dabble in here

and there. Authentic spirituality is not some little flicker or buzz of

knowingness, not a psychedelic blast-through or a mellow hanging-out on some

exalted plane of consciousness, not a bubble of immunity, but a vast fire of

liberation, an exquisitely fitting crucible and sanctuary, providing both heat

and light for the healing and awakening we need.

Most of the time when we're immersed in

spiritual bypassing, we like the light but not the heat. And when we're caught

up in the grosser forms of spiritual bypassing, we'd usually much rather

theorize about the frontiers of consciousness than actually go there,

suppressing the fire rather than breathing it even more alive, espousing the

ideal of unconditional love but not permitting love to show up in its more

challenging, personal dimensions. To do so would be too hot, too scary, and too

out-of-control, bringing things to the surface that we have long disowned or

suppressed.

But if we really want the light, we

cannot afford to flee the heat. As Victor Frankl said, "What gives light must

endure burning." And being with the fire's heat doesn't just mean sitting with

the difficult stuff in meditation, but also going into it, trekking to its

core, facing and entering and getting intimate with whatever is there, however

scary or traumatic or sad or raw.

We have had quite an affair with Eastern

spiritual pathways, but now it is time to go deeper. We must do this not only

to get more intimate with the essence of these wisdom traditions beyond ritual

and belief and dogma but also to make room for the healthy evolution, not just

the necessary Westernization, of these traditions so that their presentation

ceases encouraging spiritual bypassing (however indirectly) and, in fact,

consciously and actively ceases giving it soil to flower. These changes won't

happen to any significant degree, however, unless we work in-depth and

integratively with our physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and

social dimensions to generate an everdeeper sense of wholeness, vitality, and

basic sanity.

Any spiritual path, Eastern or Western,

that does not deal in real depth with psychological issues, and deal with these

in more than just spiritual contexts, is setting itself up for an abundance of

spiritual bypassing. If there is not sufficient encouragement and support from

spiritual teachers and teachings for practitioners to engage in significant

depth in psychoemotional work, and if those students who really need such work

don't then do it, they'll be left trying to work out their psychoemotional

issues, traumatic and otherwise, only through the spiritual practices they have

been given, as if doing so is somehow superior to — or a "higher" activity

than — engaging in quality psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is often viewed as an

inferior undertaking relative to spiritual practice, perhaps even something we

shouldn't have to do. When our spiritual bypassing is more subtle, the idea of

psychotherapy may be considered more acceptable, but we will still shy away

from a full-blooded investigation of our core wounds.

Spiritual bypassing is largely occupied,

at least in its New Age forms, by the idea of wholeness and the innate unity of

Being — "Oneness" being perhaps its favorite bumper sticker — but actually

generates and reinforces fragmentation by separating out from and rejecting

what is painful, distressed, and unhealed; all the far-from-flattering aspects

of being human. By consistently keeping these in the dark, "down below" (when

we're locked into our headquarters, our body and feelings seem to be

below us), they tend to behave badly when let out, much like animals that have

spent too long in cages. Our neglect of these aspects of ourselves, however

gently framed, is akin to that of otherwise caring parents who leave their

children without sufficient food, clothing, or care.

The trappings of spiritual bypassing can

look good, particularly when they seem to promise freedom from life's fuss and

fury, but this supposed serenity and detachment is often little more than

metaphysical valium, especially for those who have made too much of a virtue

out of being and looking positive.

A common telltale sign of spiritual

bypassing is a lack of grounding and in-the-body experience that tends to keep

us either spacily afloat in how we relate to the world or too rigidly tethered

to a spiritual system that seemingly provides the solidity we lack. We also may

fall into premature forgiveness and emotional dissociation, and confuse anger

with aggression and ill will, which leaves us disempowered, riddled with weak

boundaries. The overdone niceness that often characterizes spiritual bypassing

strands it from emotional depth and authenticity; and its underlying

grief — mostly unspoken, untouched, unacknowledged — keeps it marooned from the

very caring that would unwrap and undo it, like a baby being readied for a bath

by a loving parent.

Spiritual bypassing distances us not

only from our pain and difficult personal issues but also from our own

authentic spirituality, stranding us in a metaphysical limbo, a zone of

exaggerated gentleness, niceness, and superficiality. Its frequently

disconnected nature keeps it adrift, clinging to the life jacket of its

self-conferred spiritual credentials. As such, it maroons us from embodying our

full humanity.

But let us not be too hard on spiritual

bypassing, for every one of us who has entered into the spiritual has engaged

in spiritual bypassing, at least to some degree, having for years used other

means to make ourselves feel better or more secure. Why would we not also

approach spirituality, particularly at first, with much the same expectation

that it make us feel better or more secure in various areas of our life?

To truly outgrow spiritual

bypassing — which in part means releasing spirituality (and everything else!)

from the obligation to make us feel better or more secure or more whole — we must

not only see it for what it is and cease engaging in it but also view it with

genuine compassion, however fiery that might be or need to be. The spiritual

bypasser in us needs not censure nor shaming but rather to be consciously and

caringly included in our awareness without being allowed to run the show.

Becoming intimate with our own capacity for spiritual bypassing allows us to

keep it in healthy perspective.

I have worked with many clients who

described themselves as being on a spiritual path, particularly as meditators.

Most were preoccupied, at least initially, with being nice, trying to be

positive and nonjudgmental, while impaling themselves on various spiritual

"shoulds," such as "I should not show anger" or "I should be more loving" or "I

should be more open after all the time I've put into my spiritual practice."

Fleeing their darker (or "less spiritual") emotions, impulses, and intentions,

they had, to varying degrees, trapped themselves within the very practices and

beliefs that they had hoped might liberate them, or at least make them feel

better.

Even the most exquisitely designed spiritual methodologies

can become traps, leading not to freedom but only to reinforcement, however

subtle, of the "I" that wants to be a somebody who has attained or realized

freedom (the very same "I" that doesn't realize there are no Oscars for

awakening). The most obvious potential traps-in-waiting include the belief that

we should rise above our difficulties and simply embrace Oneness, even as the

tendency to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower,

spiritual and nonspiritual, runs wild in us. Subtler traps-in-waiting, less

densely populated with metaphysical lullabies and ascension metaphors, and

cloaked in the appearance of discernment, teach non-aversion through

cultivating a capacity for dispassionate witnessing and/or various devotional

rituals. Subtler still are those that emphasize meeting everything with

acceptance and compassion. Each approach has its own value, if only to eventually

propel us into an even deeper direction, and each is far from immune to being

possessed by spiritual bypassing, especially when we are still hoping, whatever

our depth of spiritual practice, to reach a state of immunity to suffering

(both personally and collectively).

As my spiritually inclined clients

become more intimate with their pain and difficulties, coming to understand the

origins of their troubles with a more open ear and heart, they either abandon

their misguided spiritual practices and reenter a more fitting version of them

with less submissiveness and more integrity and creativity or find new

practices that better suit their needs, coming to recognize more deeply that

everything-everything!-can serve their healing and awakening.

If we can outgrow spiritual bypassing, we might enter a deeper life-a life of full-blooded integrity, depth, love, and sanity; a life of authenticity on every level; a life in which the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal are all honored and lived to the fullest.

May what I have written serve you well.

Copyright © 2010 by Robert Masters. Reprinted

by permission of publisher.

Teaser image by leolintang, courtesy of Creative Commons license.