I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what is and is not healthy spirituality and how I can support spiritual health in my life, in my home, and in my community. I’ve come across a new (to me) term: spiritual bypassing. It was coined in the 1980s by researcher John Welwood who spent his life studying the convergence of Eastern and Western spiritualities. It refers to an unhealthy utilization of spirituality to avoid ”facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks” and I think it is something that we all can be on the lookout for.
There are many forms of spiritual bypassing, and it is important to note that spiritual bypassing is difficult to discern from healthy expressions of spirituality. In fact, it may be near impossible to identify them in others because much of the issue is the intent to avoid discomfort, and we can’t see from the outside what someone’s intentions are.
I think the easiest way to explain spiritual bypassing is by giving a few examples…
Avoiding Responsibility
One common form of spiritual bypassing is to use our beliefs about a high power as a way to not take responsibility for our own actions. Afterall, if Mars is in retrograde, maybe that’s the reason why you had a short temper today. A more subtle form of this is when we are faced with difficult times, it is easy to just say “It’s in God’s hands” or “Everything happens for a reason.” and move on. While there is evidence to show that belief in a higher power is protective to your mental health, this can be spiritual bypassing if you are using these cliches to avoid sitting with your fear and grief.. It is okay to feel those scary emotions, and to recognize that sometimes life is just hard. A phrase I think is more healthy than the above cliches is “God does not waste our pain.” Especially if you are tempted to use one of these cliches to comfort a friend, this new phrase is a much better replacement. Remember that some people do not see the hand of God in their tragedies and are offended by the idea of a God that would allow suffering, let alone cause it for any “reason.”
Cliches
Cliches are the spiritual bypassing that I see most often in the culture I grew up in, but a close second is turning to sainthood to avoid hard emotions. We as humans have all the emotions: anger and frustration and fear and doubt and even despair in addition to love and joy and peace. When we tell ourselves that “godly people” don’t have some of those, we are using our spirituality to glorify unhealthy avoiding or bottling up of uncomfortable emotions. We get to tell ourselves that we aren’t doing anything wrong by forcing ourselves to always be happy and content, in fact we are saintly. We are enlightened. We are so at one with the universe or with God that we never feel those negative emotions anymore. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but that is not how any of this works. My suggestion is to look to people in your life, in your spiritual tradition, or in the wider world who you can look up to but who still model a wide range of emotions. My favorite example is Jesus. He was known to flip a few moneychangers’ tables when he got angry. He cried when his friend died. He got impatient with his disciples. He felt despair, crying out on the cross “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”. He felt fear in the garden of Gethsemane, asking God to “let this cup pass from me”. If the being that two and a half billion people in the world call divine can feel all of those emotions, we should never hear another eulogy about a mother of eight who never was cross or complained because that’s not sainthood.
Avoiding Hard Work
Another that I think our community can be on the look out for is using prayer or “holding in the light” as spiritual bypassing. When my two year old niece fell out of a third story window onto concrete and we didn’t know if she would survive to walk again, or speak again, or if she would be blind or cognitively impaired, having her name on the hold in the light list was so comforting to me. I didn’t believe that it would be the thing that persuaded God to heal my loved one, but it gave me a place to speak my pain and have my community be with me in that place of fear and uncertainty. I think it also acted as a reminder for people of what our family was going through and encouraged them to ask how she was when they saw us. Where I think it can be spiritual bypassing is when it is used as an excuse to not actually provide support or comfort. If we can say, “I listed it in my prayers last night, so my job is done. I’m a good person who no longer has to feel empathy or guilt or take any meaningful action.” That is the issue. If we pray for “the natural world” but don’t try to reduce our impact on the environment, if we hold “everywhere there is violence and strife” in the light, but don’t donate our time or resources to peace work, if we meditate on “those who are lonely”’ but don’t asses our own relationships, we are engaged in spiritual bypassing. That is not to say that we have to take on the world and all its problems. It is important to realize the extent of the light we have to give and not to overexert ourselves or to take on unnecessary burdens, but we can’t stop at reading a list on Sunday and calling it good.
Escaping Life
I recently attended my first in person Quarterly meeting up at Sierra Friends Center and it was lovely. I can see how going on spiritual retreats can also be a way of spiritual bypassing. When life gets hard, It would be so easy to literally retreat into the mountains and call it spirituality. I don’t have the budget for that (or the babysitters) but I see in myself something similar with spiritual books and podcasts. If I am overwhelmed, it is easy to pop in my ear buds and listen to the latest guru as a form of numbing or escape. I don’t plan to actually do the work to improve my life, but I can tell myself I am better and more spiritual because look at this list of books I’ve read. (self aggrandizement is another powerful form of spiritual bypassing too by the way) Others may spend excessive time praying, meditating, or studying scripture as a way to avoid the hard things in life. I find that, oftentimes, when I am engaged in this sort of spiritual bypassing, I know exactly what I ought to be doing. My advice is to go do that. If you don’t know where to start, but you do think that you are using spiritual bypassing in this way, try just stopping and checking in with what you are feeling when you feel tempted to retreat. Name that feeling and see if you can sit with it. If it is too painful to sit with it alone, share it. A huge part of healthy spirituality is connection: to yourself, to others, to nature, and to a higher power. Can you sit with that feeling if you have a friend to share it with? Or a spiritual care provider? Or can you share it with nature: your cat, or that majestic tree at the park, or the sun? You can always open yourself up to the Light and share it with your higher power. Say a short prayer and invite God to sit with you in this difficult emotion and then sit. Resist the urge to use prayer or anything else to distract yourself, but just to be able to face the thing without feeling alone in the thing.
Conclusion
These are just a few examples, but I hope you are starting to see what spiritual bypassing is, and how it might show up in your life. My intention is not to force you to experience difficult emotions and cause unnecessary pain. It is my hope that as we see spiritual bypassing in ourselves, we can turn to healthier alternatives and together build a healthier spiritual community that can be there for one another in the hard times. I feel so thankful to find Reno Friends Meeting. We are creating something truly beautiful here and I hope that this is a reminder to make sure we are getting the best of what spirituality has to offer.