Spiritual Bypassing: Using Practice to Avoid Pain

note: I know this happens in the Taoist community, altho perhaps less often as we have more in the ody practices. – michael

Spiritual Bypassing*

By Robert Augustus Masters

http://nhne-pulse.org/spiritual-bypassing/

Original Link <http://www.realitysandwich.com/spiritual_bypassing>

/The following is excerpted fromSpiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality
Disconnects Us from What Really Matters
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556439059/newheavenneweart>, 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.

Watch Rick Archer and friends talk with Robert Augustus Masters about
spiritual bypassing:

081. Robert Augustus Masters

http://nhne-pulse.org/spiritual-bypassing/