What is Spiritual By-Passing?

Years ago as I stumbled along on my path of learning, personal growth and healing the phrase “the path of being fully human” popped into my mind. I had been exposed, as many others were in the late sixties, to spiritual philosophy and for a time felt that my very real human emotions were something to be “gotten over” or at least wiped clean or transcended.

As I became more and more immersed in learning about energy it began to slowly dawn on me that perhaps there was a broader view to be had. And I was fortunate enough to learn of people who were addressing this perspective. It made a lot more sense to me that we were to find the means to own all our parts and integrate our human and spiritual capacities.

It has been a long journey of understanding exactly what that meant AND to be able to engage the process! Working with the chakra system for me was of enormous help in understanding and applying the process. Years later some teachers began to speak about the concept of spiritual bypassing. This gave a name to some of the struggle that I and others were having on our developmental journey.

Spiritual Bypassing Defined
Spiritual bypassing is a phrase first used by psychologist John Weldwood to describe the practice of using spiritual principles and practices to avoid dealing with our evolving human development, unresolved issues, and painful feelings.

The advent of eastern spiritual theories and practices both broadened our perspective regarding our human and spiritual nature, as well as provided us with an abundance of new ways to avoid coming to grips with our complex natures. Of course this was not the intent of this more expansive worldview which in fact is an opportunity to integrate all facets of ourselves if used properly. The issue that created a bit of a speed bump actually is our very human desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure.

Our journey to real happiness, healing, peace and abundance however requires an honest integration of our human and spiritual natures and that requires “working” with our less than attractive features or difficulties and integrating all of our “parts”. So we can settle for fabricated spiritual lite or we can settle into the healing and wholeness that comes with honest appraisal, compassionate self- confrontation and the emergence of our authenticity where true healing, deep inner connectivity and freedom reside.

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