What if we are discarding something valuable when we admonish spiritual bypassing wholesale?
I’ve been contemplating this paradox for years. I’ve definitely been a culprit of spiritual bypassing—I admittedly prefer peak experiences and moments of ecstasy to the painful shadow work of feeling my unpleasant emotions. I can push for the ‘love and light’ narrative instead of simply being with what is.
But I’ve also noticed something else: I can get caught dwelling on what’s wrong, even in a generalized way, stuck in a malaise of disappointment with the present moment.
Understanding the Protective Function
Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid facing uncomfortable aspects of ourselves or reality. We are often warned against spiritual bypassing because it can cause harm; harm to us because it buries things that need seeing and healing. And harm to others when it dismisses or shames them for the difficult feelings they are having.
I believe that our spiritual bypassing parts are trying to protect us from what they think would be overwhelming emotional pain. Good chances they were right at some point in the past, when we may have been too young or under-resourced to handle the depth of our pain. But chances are that if you are reading this now, you are an adult with a lot more personal and relational resources to meet and engage with the feelings you have otherwise needed to avoid in order to survive so far. De-pathologizing spiritual bypassing is a first step to reducing the internal blame and shame we put upon ourselves.
The Problem Seeking Mind
Years of mindfulness training has me witnessing my mind throughout the day. I’ve noticed what I call the “Problem Seeking part” in me. I’ll be driving on a pleasant afternoon or sitting with tea, and I notice thoughts popping up as this part engages and efforts to find a problem. This feels so insane!
Have I trained myself to seek out what’s wrong because I’ve so diligently done therapy and shadow work? Maybe it’s that combined with what Dr. Rick Hanson calls our minds being “like velcro to negative experiences and teflon to positive ones.” We’re biologically wired to watch for what could harm us.
We often need to work on developing habits to orient toward the positive, actively dwelling on what we are blessed and grateful for. This isn’t spiritual bypassing—it’s spiritual homework.
The Need for Spiritual Nourishment
Especially in the modern media culture where “blood leads,” and we get bombarded with all the horrible news of the day, we need to go out of our way to recognize and celebrate the countless miracles, good deeds, and positive events going on all the time. This is not spiritual bypassing. To me, this is spiritual homework. While we need to be aware of the fear and grief soaked realities of our world, we also need to be in awe, reverence, and recognition of the amazing beauty and brilliance of our world. Our minds and what we focus on are the building blocks of our collective consciousness. The world needs us to dwell more in beauty, kindness, forgiveness, celebration, joy.
The Wisdom of Skillful Bypassing
There’s an old story of an elderly monk who compares his mind to a glass jar of water mixed with sand and sediment. He says it’s not that his water is completely clear of accumulated gunk, but that he’s learned he doesn’t always have to stir it up. It’s okay to leave some gunk undisturbed on the bottom and carry on.
A recent example of this playing out in my own life is the anxiety and corollary chest pain I experience right at bedtime. For months, I turned directly into the chest pain, keeping vigil with my broken heart. But when the sensation never abated, I wondered: was I amplifying it by putting all my attention on it? So I called on spiritual refuge—I bypassed the heck out of that feeling!
I’ve imagined a wood chipper in my mind pulverizing every anxious thought, or envisioned an angelic being with infinite caring eyes cradling me in its arms. Even maintaining this practice for a few minutes feels like years of healing.
My conclusion: both methods are important. Feeling into the depth of pain is essential. And so is turning attention away from that and taking refuge in what soothes and uplifts.
Finding Balance
Every time we engage with something—a thought, emotion, anything—we strengthen those neural pathways. We’re forming habits constantly. One result of meditation is actively changing habitual grooves by training our attention on what we choose (versus it moving willy-nilly to whatever arises or that billboard or social media feed).
It can be tempting in therapy culture to dig into everything painful, thinking this is the key to healing. But digging into our hurt is just one move. We need to give equal emphasis to redirecting the mind toward thoughts and activities that foster joy, gratitude, and peace. Sometimes what is most needed is that we bypass the thinking mind, the story creating and meaning making intellect and to drop into our bodies and be directly with the sensations in the body, bringing compassion and breath.
The inquiry I have for myself: am I utilizing spiritual teachings to support me through my days—not to avoid reality, but to live even more fully into what is truly here? Without this, I’m prone to getting mired in the cacophony of all that’s not going well. And I think that would be a tragic loss of this precious opportunity of life.
