Why It’s Worth Off-Ramping From Spiritual Bypassing

 Spiritual bypassing, a phrase coined by John Welwood and defined as a kind of spiritualized conflict avoidance that demonizes certain natural emotions like anger and can cause us to bypass our need for healing trauma, our activism, and our pain, runs rampant in spiritual and religious circles. It can make us feel good, even ecstatic, but just like any drug, the “hit” is temporary and the crash after the high can be catastrophic.

Some people bypass by meditating- first for a short amount, then increasingly escaping the world with more and more and more meditating. Some bypass by comforting themselves with positive thinking or spiritual teachings that deny and bypass more painful emotions, like grief, despair, anger, jealousy, helplessness, worthlessness, or shame. Some bypass the pain of reality with spiritual fantasies of utopia or benevolent aliens or angelic beings (not that there aren’t life forms in other star systems or beings we can’t see, just that we can get so caught up in imagining such beings that we fail to face the pain of reality on this planet.)

Some bypass by resolving uncomfortable cognitive dissonance with overly simplistic kinds of false certainty. For example, if it’s too uncomfortable to hold the paradox of a great darkening upon our potentially endangered species in contrast to an age of greater awareness of such darkness, we might simplify things into believing a delusion of a Great Awakening that will take us into the 5D and leave the darkness behind in the 3D....<<<Read More>>>...