John Welwood, a psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher, coined what has become the very useful term “spiritual bypassing.”
In 2010 Integral Psychotherapist Robert Masters wrote an entire book about the phenomenon. He describes spiritual bypassing as “The use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”
As Dr. Masters explains, “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.”
I had to read that a couple of times to digest the magnitude of what he was describing.
So…
- shortcomings
- painful experiences
- disappointments
- weaknesses
- character flaws
Don’t we all have some of these?
Attempting to become a better person and seeking enlightenment was never meant to deny these aspects of our humanity – what is now often termed our “shadow side” — but to learn how to confront those less-than-pleasant aspects and grow in the face of them in spite of them, sometimes with them. Acknowledging them is necessary.
I love that Masters refers to spiritual bypassing as “avoidance in holy drag.” Humor (Practice XIII, “Finding the Funny” in Beauty As Action, by the way) is a necessary element in the ability to evolve and grow. It lends perspective and irreverence.
But really, this concept of spiritual bypassing is just the latest iteration of an old and very tiresome dynamic of oppression via godliness: it is not so different from how all organized religions’ dogma has worked in the past to justify man’s need to be right, to control, to avoid the difficult learnings that can emerge as we face our own shadows, our limitations.
Think of the Inquisition, The Crusades, the Salem witch trials, the concept of “infidels” – in short, all the wars that have ever been fought because “God is on our side.” What else is this, really, but institutionalized outcomes of spiritual bypassing.
Whatever it is called, in whatever era, Spiritual bypassing is a dangerous form of denial, perhaps the most dangerous form. It harms the person practicing it and inevitably harms those around and closest to that person.
Believe me, I know.