For all those whose longing to be truly free is becoming stronger than their desire to distract themselves from suffering
1 AVOIDANCE IN HOLY DRAG An Introduction to Spiritual Bypassing
Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984, is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is much more common than we might think and, in fact, is so pervasive as to go largely unnoticed, except in its more obvious extremes.
Part of the reason for this is that we tend not to have very much tolerance, either personally or collectively, for facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring pain-numbing “solutions,” regardless of how much suffering such “remedies” may catalyze.
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 side, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.
especially in the fast-food spirituality epitomized by faddish phenomena like The Secret. Some of the more glaringly facile features, such as drive-through servings of reheated wisdom like “Don’t take it personally” or “Whatever bothers you about someone is really only about you” or “It’s all just an illusion,” are available for consumption and parroting by just about anyone.
True spirituality is not a high, not a rush, not an altered state.
And when we’re caught up in the grosser forms of spiritual bypassing, we’d usually much rather theorize about the frontiers of consciousness than actually go there, suppressing the fire rather than breathing it even more alive, espousing the ideal of unconditional love but not permitting love to show up in its more challenging, personal dimensions.
“What gives light must endure burning.” And being with the fire’s heat doesn’t just mean sitting with the difficult stuff in meditation, but also going into it, trekking to its core, facing and entering and getting intimate with whatever is there, however scary or traumatic or sad or raw.
Psychotherapy is often viewed as an inferior undertaking relative to spiritual practice, perhaps even something we shouldn’t have to do. When our spiritual bypassing is more subtle, the idea of psychotherapy may be considered more acceptable, but we will still shy away from a full-blooded investigation of our core wounds.
but actually generates and reinforces fragmentation by separating out from and rejecting what is painful, distressed, and unhealed; all the far-from-flattering aspects of being human.
Our neglect of these aspects of ourselves, however gently framed, is akin to that of otherwise caring parents who leave their children without sufficient food, clothing, or care. The trappings of spiritual bypassing can look good, particularly when they seem to promise freedom from life’s fuss and fury, but this supposed serenity and detachment is often little more than metaphysical valium, especially for those who have made too much of a virtue out of being and looking positive.
We also may fall into premature forgiveness and emotional dissociation, and confuse anger with aggression and ill will, which leaves us disempowered, riddled with weak boundaries. The overdone niceness that often characterizes spiritual bypassing strands it from emotional depth and authenticity; and its underlying grief—mostly unspoken, untouched, unacknowledged—keeps it marooned from the very caring that would unwrap and undo it, like a baby being readied for a bath by a loving parent.
stranding us in a metaphysical limbo, a zone of exaggerated gentleness, niceness, and superficiality.
To truly outgrow spiritual bypassing—which in part means releasing spirituality (and everything else!) from the obligation to make us feel better or more secure or more whole—we must not only see it for what it is and cease engaging in it but also view it with genuine compassion, however fiery that might be or need to be. The spiritual bypasser in us needs not censure nor shaming but rather to be consciously and caringly included in our awareness without being allowed to run the show.
the “I” that wants to be a somebody who has attained or realized freedom (the very same “I” that doesn’t realize there are no Oscars for awakening).
Subtler traps-in-waiting, less densely populated with metaphysical lullabies and ascension metaphors, and cloaked in the appearance of discernment, teach non-aversion through cultivating a capacity for dispassionate witnessing and/or various devotional rituals. Subtler still are those that emphasize meeting everything with acceptance and compassion.
especially when we are still hoping, whatever our depth of spiritual practice, to reach a state of immunity to suffering (both personally and collectively).
coming to recognize more deeply that everything—everything!—can serve their healing and awakening.
2 Cutting Through Spiritual Bypassing
The first step in working with spiritual bypassing is to see it for what it is—employing spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing in any significant depth with our pain and developmental needs—and then to name it, so that we might begin relating to it rather than from it. This is relatively easy when spiritual bypassing manifests in its grosser forms, but not so easy when it gets more subtle, especially when it coexists with truly beneficial spiritual undertakings.
Uncovering and openly acknowledging our tendencies to spiritually bypass may trigger some shame in us at being “caught,” but this is a healthy shame that we can readily work with as long as we don’t allow it to fuel our inner critic. It helps to remember that spiritual bypassing isn’t just something others do; it’s something that we all have done. The freedom found in admitting its presence is akin to the freedom felt when we admit without any defensiveness that up until a moment ago we had been defensive in a heated exchange with a significant other.
Other behaviors include taking global or impersonal stands on clearly personal concerns, as when we might talk about the “fact” that everything is perfect, all unfolding exactly as it must, while we are talking to another in a demeaning way.
Spiritual bypassing is especially common in spiritual paths that treat ego as something to eradicate, something in the way of spiritual realization, rather than an activity to illuminate and integrate with the rest of our being.
Unpleasant though their spiritual shortfalls may be, such a focus keeps them distracted from having to face and deal with the bigger issue: their core pain.
Spiritual bypassing keeps us stuck at a “higher” level that is really only higher in a conceptual sense.
When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable. To not be intimate with our past—to not be deeply and thoroughly acquainted with our conditioning and its originating factors—keeps it undigested and unintegrated and therefore very much present, regardless of our apparent capacity for rising above it.
avoiding dealing directly and relevantly with his students’ personal and interpersonal pain, and probably his own as well.
Cutting through spiritual bypassing means turning toward the painful, disfigured, ostracized, unwanted, or otherwise disowned aspects of ourselves and cultivating as much intimacy as possible with them.
If doing so seems to break our heart, we are on the right path, even if we are on our hands and knees. For when our heart breaks, it doesn’t shatter; it breaks open, expanding to include more and more. As we denumb, letting our heart remain raw, becoming more and more comfortable with our discomfort, we can see and feel what first drove us into spiritual bypassing. It would be an understatement to say that this is a challenging journey, for it asks of us a very deep vulnerability, a bareness of being to which we may not be at all accustomed.
Our unwillingness or inability to enter such vulnerability, to authentically connect with our childlike aspects (our innocence, wonder, prerational openness, et cetera), to feel genuine compassion for and connection with the child in us, especially when that child is hurt or traumatized, makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for us to truly touch and heartfully connect with the child in others. For that reason, we tend to keep our distance from those who are actively working with and through old childhood wounds, even when such work is clearly healing and potently integrative.
To this end, it is crucial that we see through whatever practices we have, spiritual or otherwise, that tranquilize rather than illuminate and awaken us.
Tranquilizers, meditative or otherwise, simply numb us, and if we have any investment in being numb, we may be drawn to meditative practices that keep us distant from our pain.
3 Let’S Stop Being Negative About Our Negativity
There isn’t any such thing as a negative emotion. There are negative things that we do with our emotions, but our emotions themselves are neither negative nor positive. They simply are.
Yes, we are angry, but we are filtering—and forcing—it through a darkly twisted lens, so that it is expressed not as clean anger (that is, anger free of aggression, blaming, and shaming) but as hostility. That is, we are doing something with our anger, something that holds and channels it in a negative context.
Anger itself can be a positive force: Getting angry that you have just lost your job may give you the energy and sheer drive to pursue more fitting work, which is obviously a positive thing. Likewise, getting angry about the abuse you are suffering in a relationship will help fuel you to form healthy boundaries, providing much of the motivation and strength needed to either improve the relationship or leave it.
Take hatred.
There is a lot of energy in hate; it can be very passionate. And it also can be very consuming (especially in its uglier or more obsessive forms), eating away at us, taking us so far down that it becomes our state of being, not just an occasional reaction to difficult circumstances.
So the road to genuine forgiveness is often paved with hatred. But go to the heart of hate and you won’t find hate but rather great heart-wrenching grief, a broken-open depth of being that is both agonizingly and exquisitely painful, soberingly spacious, and eventually liberating.
that expansion is “higher,” contraction “lower;” that expansion frees us while contraction entraps us; and so on. But there is nothing inherently virtuous about expansion—think of imperialism and colonization, as well as of metastasizing cancer cells—nor anything inherently unvirtuous about contraction. Expansion and contraction are more intertwined than we might think; when we inhale, for example, it may seem as if all that is happening is an expansion
discovering—and not just intellectually—that it is but darkly contracted energy, a knotted-up vitality that can be freed when we become intimate with it. Being negative about our negativity fragments us, stranding us from our unresolved wounds. Hurt, rage, grief, shame, fear, terror, loneliness, despair, and so on—all of these tend to get lumped together as “negativity,” as something far from spiritual. It’s as if we have abandoned the child in us, fleeing that little one’s pain, helplessness, and longing for safety and love in the name of a supposedly more mature or spiritual approach.
Our lack of intimacy with our anger, fear, shame, doubt, terror, loneliness, grief, and other painful states keeps our experience superficial, emotionally anemic, and addicted to whatever helps numb us to our negativity.
So turn toward your negativity. Stop pathologizing it, stop relegating it to a lower status, stop keeping it in the dark. Go to it, open its doors and windows, take it by the hand. Meet its gaze. Feel its woundedness, feel into it, feel for it, feel it without any buffers. Soon you will start to sense that its gaze is none other than your own, perhaps from an earlier time, but yours nonetheless, containing so much of you. Humanize it fully. Keep something in the dark long enough and it will probably behave badly.
4 BLIND COMPASSION Neurotic Tolerance in Caring’s Robes
Blind compassion is rooted in the belief that we are all doing the best that we can. When we are driven by blind compassion, we cut everyone far too much slack, making excuses for others’ behavior and making nice in situations that require a forceful “no,” an unmistakable voicing of displeasure, or a firm setting and maintaining of boundaries.
This is not the kindness of the Dalai Lama, which is rooted in courage, but rather a kindness rooted in fear, and not just the fear of confrontation, but also the fear of not coming across as a good or spiritual person.
Blind compassion confuses anger with aggression, forcefulness with violence, judgment with condemnation, caring with exaggerated tolerance, and moral maturity with spiritual correctness.
Even clearly abusive behavior on the part of a spiritual teacher may be excused as an opportunity for students to grow in their practice. We are so afraid of our darker aspects that we keep trying to paint them over with our best qualities, not realizing that our narrow ideas of proper “spiritual” expression limit our ability to respond appropriately and robustly to life.
Practicing blind compassion keeps us “safely” removed both from having to say a strong and unequivocal “no” and from the consequences of doing so. The belief that everyone is doing the best they can lets everyone off the hook, including us—this way, we don’t have to ruffle any feathers, raise any hackles, kick up a storm, make a fuss, or otherwise confront anybody.
Thus we forget that “down” is not “up” having a bad day, but rather where seeds flourish and roots grow deep.
We may even conceive of our body as just a container for our soul or spirit, forgetting that what we actually are is not in a body but rather is making an appearance as a body.
Those who have embraced spiritual bypassing fail to realize that healthy transcendence is neither a flight nor a severing or disconnection from “lower” things and qualities but rather a going beyond them that does not exclude them. With this radical inclusion, we expand both horizontally and vertically, expanding ourselves to include a particular quality while at the same time not identifying with it. There is separation in this, and there is also connection; in fact, both co-arise, both coexist, both function in mutual resonance. For example, if we are reactively angry, right at the edge of hostility, we can step back from it just state, almost as if engaging in dialogue with that angry aspect of ourself. We do not exclude that angry “I” but are sufficiently expansive now to include it without letting it overcome us. We are both apart from that angry “I” and connected to it. We have not fled it, but have rooted ourselves in a perspective that allows us to see our anger clearly and to work with it more cleanly.
Trying to get away from such qualities, thereby refusing to develop any sort of in-depth relationship with them, keeps us fragmented, stranded from embodying genuine wholeness. Such is the price we pay when we let ourselves be taken over by spiritual bypassing.
The very “I”—or apparent self—behind our spiritual bypassing tendencies must itself be exposed and transcended if we are to spiritually awaken. When we do this, we open ourselves to the pain, the sense of lack, and the raw hurt that originally animated that “I,” that broken aspect of self. Through this opening, we enter the heart of our core wounding until it no longer so compellingly generates “solutions” (like over-intellectualization, spiritual bypassing, workaholism, substance abuse, eroticism, and so on) to itself. In the genesis of such transcendence, our pathway is not necessarily straightforward—we don’t just ascend, we also descend, moving from ascending to descending to here-ing (moving from here to here, from now to now), excluding nothing from our being without letting any of it get in the driver’s seat. There is no turning away, not even from our turning away. Difficult qualities are divested of their viewpoint without robbing them of their essential energy, so that they shift from unwanted things or “its” to reclaimed us.
All of our attempts to dodge the messy world of difficult relationships, unpleasant emotions, and whatever else we would rather avoid only sidetrack and obstruct us, eventually generating enough suffering to draw us back to the steps we skipped or only partially took—of honoring, digesting, embodying, and integrating the essential lessons in our lives. Not surprisingly, those of us enmeshed in spiritual bypassing do not view ourselves as cutting corners but rather as cutting through whatever is extraneous, not wasting time in activities that drag us down or pull us into the past. The trouble with this view is that many of the activities we consider irrelevant are in fact necessary for our evolution.
Our helicoptered self has found a shortcut, but in doing so has lost out on the grounding and embodiment and participatory knowingness that can be gained only through the climb itself.
There may be an abundance of Everests in spiritual bypassing’s trophy case, but they are as lifeless as the glassy-eyed heads decorating the walls of big-game hunters—nice to look at and to reminisce about, but little more. Smaller peaks are not usually very interesting to those of us caught up in spiritual bypassing; the idea of big steps, big leaps, big changes is much more tantalizing.
Spirituality ultimately means no escape, no need for escape, and utter freedom through limitation and every sort of difficulty.
Gotta run. Busy day ahead. A pain in the neck, but still kind of intoxicating, keeping us so busy and so occupied that the mysteries of the obvious go all but unnoticed. But still something gets through the cracks in our sped-up, shortcut-craving days, undressing our spiritual ambition, asking only for our undivided attention and time. Awakening to a different mode of being, no longer desperate to have a shortcut because we are so grateful to be on our way, we smile with easy compassion at what we have done with our time, including our various detours into spiritual bypassing.
And what exactly are shadow elements? They are the qualities and traits that we typically keep in the dark and project onto others, both at the personal and collective level, creating the very convincing illusion that such elements don’t belong to us. Exposing this illusion and reclaiming the rejected elements of our being is the essence of shadow work.
Real shadow work not only breaks us down but also breaks us open, turning frozen yesterday into fluid now.
I haven’t cried deeply, what kind of environment can I provide for your deeper tears? If I haven’t gone to the core of my fear, how can I really be with you as you go to the core of yours? If I haven’t yet broken through to the root of my wounds, how can I expect you to do so in my presence?
The more deeply we dive, the less we mind upsetting waves.
Identifying and giving voice to various aspects of ourselves is useful, but to stop here keeps us stranded in a limited relationship with our depths. Going deeper means, in part, fully encountering and fully feeling our pain, entering and moving through it with open eyes and heart, becoming more and more intimate with it. Once we are well on our way to doing this, giving voice to a particular shadow element will no longer be from a “safe” or emotionally removed distance, and will therefore carry much more authenticity. Its cries will be our cries, its reaching will be our reaching, its rejection by us now just a piece of history, a souvenir of a more fragmented time.
WHAT GENERATES SPIRITUAL BYPASSING?
Pain. Or, more precisely, the avoidance of pain.
conquered. The dragon, however, cannot be so easily pushed aside! It is so easy to get negative about negativity, turning away from our pain and whatever else reminds us that all is not well, regardless of our beliefs to the contrary. Turning toward our pain is an act of radical
a meditative technique is primarily used to avoid pain, spiritual bypassing is occurring.
Part of the trouble with this is its opaque egocentrism—the assumption that this happened in order to teach me a lesson of some sort, which of course does not take into account all of the other waiting passengers and their needs, nor the state of the bus driver, nor the traffic delays or weather. No, it’s all about me. Maybe the bus is just plain late.
Synchronicity is not randomness in order’s clothing or a misreading of coincidence, but rather a manifestation of the innate interconnectedness of life, occurring not just in prerational realms but also in rational and transrational realms. Magical thinking cheapens synchronicity by elevating it to star status in New Age circles, using it to validate everything else that constitutes magical thinking—which makes the concept of synchronicity an even easier target for those who are already skeptical of
These teachers tend to view psychotherapy as simply a reinforcer of egoity (and personal concerns) and therefore a distraction from more important things like spiritual practice. Not surprisingly, they see egoity as a hindrance to spiritual realization, an obstacle to be overcome, when in fact, the problem is not egoity but what we do with
Yes, honor the transpersonal, embrace and abide in it, but not at the expense of the personal and the interpersonal! Everything exists through relationship, so why avoid any of it? Why avoid getting intimate with all that is? Why relegate the personal and interpersonal to a lower status than the transpersonal or transcendent impersonal? To avoid any of it is to remain incomplete, regardless of our spiritual achievements. Authentic spirituality is radically non-avoidant, recognizing that if we flee anything in ourselves, it will multiply and fester, enlarging itself to seize our attention, seeding its outcast will throughout us, eventually exposing and deflating our spiritual ambition.
After all, real freedom is found not in escaping limitation (one of spiritual bypassing’s favorite fantasies!) but rather through limitation.
As we become more intimate with the anatomy and history of our anger, and as we learn to express it cleanly—that is, without blaming or shaming or aggression—its fieriness serves rather than hinders all involved by potently addressing behaviors and issues that are obstructing not just our well-being but that of others.
It is, however, not so easy to cultivate intimacy with our anger. Getting close to its heat, its flames, its engorged intensity, without losing touch with our basic sanity, asks much of us.
Real freedom, however, is not about having no limitations; rather it is about finding liberation within—and also through—limitation (as when the apparent constraints of committed monogamous relationship actually enrich and deepen the relationship). Real freedom does not mind limitations and in fact is not limited by them. Boundaries make freedom possible by clarifying what must be worked with, not just personally and transpersonally, but also interpersonally. Since everything—everything!—exists through relationship, it is crucial that we learn to work well within relationship, both with others and with our own needs, states, and identity.
Whether our boundaries are collapsed, blurred, abandoned, trampled, disregarded, nurtured, overpoliced, cemented, or honored, they determine our edges, limits, borders. Boundaries may be overdefined, underdefined, or ambiguously defined. What really matters is what we do with our boundaries: Do we use them to fortify our ego or to illuminate it?
Abandoning our boundaries is not indicative of a higher or more noble state—however much we might spiritually rationalize this—but is just escapism and aversion, an avoidance of facing, entering, and moving through our pain. Dissociation in spiritual robes is still dissociation!
What is arguably the opposite of dissociation? Intimacy. And intimacy requires healthy boundaries. Healthy boundaries protect but do not overprotect; they stand guard but do not jail.
Having healthy boundaries doesn’t mean a lack of receptivity; instead, it is a discerning receptivity, an openness that can just as easily say a full-blooded “no” as a “yes.” The undiscriminating openness and too easy “yes” (and possible show of equanimity) of those who are underboundaried is especially difficult to cut through when it’s taken to be a sign of spiritual attainment.
For example, we may open our sexual boundaries in the name of universal love, reframing our multi-partnered sexual encounters as tantric practice, thinking we are being more openhearted than those “stuck” in monogamous relationships, since they, unlike us, are limited to just one partner. While our true nature is indeed limitless, the way in which it manifests in this world, in individual form, is necessarily equipped with boundaries.
Imagine a place with no pain, no judgment, no nasty moral dilemmas, a place where whatever happens is just karma, just the perfection of Being unfolding as it must. Imagine not just visiting there or dreaming of being there, but actually dwelling there. Such is the narcotic promise of spiritual bypassing. This is a dream not to fulfill but to awaken from. Of course we yearn for freedom, for real transcendence, but we need to have something from which to take flight. Healthy boundaries provide the ground for stable footing.
Relational intimacy can be a very potent path to awakening, equally honoring the one and the many, but those of us whose spiritual bypassing manifests through estrangement from intimacy have cut ourselves off from this path, having made ourselves all but invulnerable to its demands. We are not here
But no matter how mature this “I” appears, it may still be viewed as an obstacle to spiritual realization by those overly enamored with the concept of oneness, resulting in a devaluing of the personal relative to the spiritual. Spiritual paths that overvalue and cling to the notion of transcendence tend to pathologize ego, seeing it as no more than something that has to be overcome or eradicated if we are to spiritually awaken—and so “I” is treated as no more than an incarnational tagalong of a decidedly lower vibration, at best adding a bit of color and flair to the proceedings.
Depersonalized spirituality is an anemic undertaking in which hollowness is confused with transparency, ungroundedness with altitude, flimsy boundaries with openness, and emotional flatness with equanimity. When we’re in its grip, we usually don’t bother differentiating between egoity and individuality, keeping ourselves busy fueling and marketing the Oneness Express and the Transcendence Monorail, preaching the gospel of nonseparation even as we advocate separating from or getting rid of ego. We may, if we are caught up in spiritual bypassing, be psyched about the notion that everything is all One, but when it comes down to being one with our “lower” qualities like our anger or greed, we much prefer cutting ourselves off from them, even as we pay lip service to their being one with everything else.
Yes, our sense of self or personality can itself be observed, demonstrating that our true identity lies beyond it, but such observation is not of much use if we employ it to withdraw from or marginalize the personal.
Once we are on our way to cutting through our spiritual ambition, we realize that although there is no need to transform our personality, there is a need to learn to relate to it rather than just to identify with it. This does not mean, however, that we have to distance ourselves from our personality and its quirks but rather that we need to cultivate just enough separation to bring it into clear focus, at which point we can develop an intimacy with it. In this way we become consciously close to our individuality, holding it with lucid compassion without fusing with it.
We are advised by many spiritual authorities not to take things personally, and many of us have bought into this admonition without really looking into it. It is an attractive notion, simple and seemingly commonsensical, implying a certain detachment, even immunity, which allows us to keep our cool and not spin off into reactivity. Reminding ourselves that whatever is coming our way from others is not really about us, but rather about them, helps us not to get knocked off center but has the unfortunate side-effect of distancing us from the fact that sometimes what is coming our way from others is about us to some degree—and therefore needs to be taken personally with, of course, as much consciousness as possible. Spiritual bypassing is often characterized by an insistent emphasis on not taking things personally. It is, after all, usually easier to take things impersonally, if only because we are so detached that we don’t have to get emotionally involved.
Once we have become intimate with our fear, however, knowing it from deep inside, we can legitimately relate to it not just as “my” fear but also as “the” fear. There is no dissociation in this—just a capacity to see and work with fear primarily as a psychoenergetic phenomenon, level upon level, along with an expansion of our boundaries to include collective fear. If our beloved suddenly dies, and well-meaning friends or family advise us not to take it personally, what does this do to us? We’re far better off not listening to their advice and taking our beloved’s demise personally—very personally—letting the bare reality of it go right to our heart, feeling our way into and through our shock and denial, allowing our hurt to stream as wildly and deeply as it needs to, with no apology for how profoundly and painfully personal the situation feels.
She has eroticized her charge of being with a man who is not emotionally available to her, distancing herself from her capacity to reject such an unhealthy involvement. Just because we don’t say “no” to a particular opportunity, sexual or otherwise, does not necessarily mean that we actually want to go ahead with it.
Those with firm sexual boundaries may sometimes be shamed by others for not being “freer,” as if such boundaries are only signs of sexual repression, uptightness, moral rigidity, or simply barriers to sexual freedom. But those who advocate the free exchange of sexual energy with others, including in supposedly spiritual contexts, may actually be more entrapped than their more boundaried counterparts, caught up as they are in sexually acting out old needs to be unconstrained and to have more control over their interactions with others. In the undiscerning openness of much of spiritualized sexuality, the eroticizing of unresolved issues (like craving being wanted or craving being in control) becomes confused with real sexual freedom.
The deepest sex—sex that requires no fantasies (inner or outer), turn-on strategies, or rituals of arousal, but needs only the love, openness, transparency, and integrity of awakened intimacy—cannot be experienced without a corresponding depth in our relationship with our partner.
High up on the list is the eroticizing of our needs, which means both to sexually frame them and to seek their fulfillment—or at least something resembling their fulfillment—through sexual activity. We can eroticize just about anything from our past that we still have a charge with, plugging our original excitation (however negative) around the experience into sexual channels, thereby simultaneously reliving it—however indirectly—and finding some temporary release from it.
Real sex does not promise joy, it begins with joy, with ease, with love, and with uncensored intimacy, needing no spiritual trappings for its unfolding.
When we’re entrenched in spiritual bypassing, we tend to like our relationships sunnyside-up: No confrontation, no anger, no messy feelings, nothing that leaves any egg on our face. Smiles and relentless gentleness often dominate the relational menu, with everyone doing their best to make nice. There is not just denial here; there is also considerable dissociation, perhaps masquerading as spiritualized detachment and equanimity. Such relational disengagement maroons us from the vulnerability and depth needed for real intimacy, leaving us in psychoemotional flatlands.
Personal boundaries may become sufficiently weakened or marginalized to the point of dissolving differences between partners. Such fusion, whatever its romantic trappings, does not demonstrate true union or intimacy; instead it demonstrates a kind of interpersonal homogenization.
When fantasy-centered excitation grips us emotionally and when we confuse fusion with communion and intimacy, we may find ourselves in a romance packed with swooning idealism and runaway hope, enthusing about union and true love. Although many of us recognize the folly of such a romantic union, plenty of us still wish for it, believing it to be a lovely thing, an essential part of love, when in fact it is not love at all but an intoxicating cocktail of eroticized idealism and hope.
Romance turns away from the more challenging aspects of life, but love turns toward them. This is not the idealized love of spiritual bypassing but the love that is the animating force of true intimacy.
When that distance can no longer be denied, we may feel as if we have been booted out of paradise, but in fact we are being given an opportunity rich with potentially liberating disillusionment, an opportunity to do the work that makes possible a deeper, romance-transcending, love-rooted life.
making a virtue out of overemphasizing one’s own responsibility for problems that arise, in the spirit of believing “I create my reality.” In this paradigm we are encouraged to consider what any difficulty we are having in a relationship says about us, and us alone, as though what our partner has said or done does not need to be addressed at all. While we may believe that casting a critical eye on another’s behavior is simply a way to avoid looking at ourselves, not allowing ourselves to be critical is in fact an avoidance of relational interplay and depth, if only because of our spiritually correct resolution to not make any upsetting waves.
We must beware the tendency of disembodied spirituality that views the body as a karmic burden, a price to be paid for incarnating rather than as something to value, an essential aspect of our nature through which we can truly awaken.
As consciously as possible, bring awareness—compassionately wakeful attentiveness—into sensation, into emotion, and into the energetic patternings and psychological holdings of the body. Moving toward and into emotion, feeling it in the raw and giving it room for expression while understanding its connection to events in our life, is an especially effective way to reconnect with the body. We may be resistant to doing this, given that there might be considerable pain and perhaps also trauma embedded in the deeper layers of emotion, but in contacting and freeing up such zones of feeling, we become more integrated, more intimate, with our body.
Because of its lack of somatic anchoring and attunement, this “I” is poorly informed about our basic needs. And given its estrangement from feeling, it tends to be dry and overly abstract, typically favoring the intellectual over the experiential, the dispassionate over the passionate, the objective over the subjective. Regardless of its smarts, disembodied rationality is too committed to mental inquiry to have a genuinely beneficial impact on any significant scale. It is too busy dissecting and categorizing to have any intimacy with the messy, raw feelings and emotions that might taint its sterilized sanctums.
The first step is to name this pain, to openly acknowledge the reality of it. The second step is to turn toward it, however counterintuitive this might seem to us, so that we are directly facing it, and the third step is to enter it, getting beneath its surface and encountering its originating dynamics.