Spiritual Bypassing

August 12, 2018
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
AUDIO
Part 1:

Part 2:


This summer while we were in Ruidoso, New Mexico for my study leave, my 4-year-old daughter Cora loved going to the local public library. Mostly, she loved reading books and playing with the toys in their little cardboard castle. They also had a summer reading program where kids can get prizes for how much they read. While I’m not crazy about a prize-driven approach to instilling a love for reading, we did take home a reading log. Mostly she forgot about it, but one day we went in with a completed log and she picked out some prizes for the books we’d read to her. The librarian said we could read more books and come back for more prizes. Most of the time, Cora didn’t mention the reading logs.
But one day toward the end of our stay, she asked to go to the library again for more prizes. I told her, “That sounds fun, sweetie, but I think the summer reading program might be over. Just a minute and let me check.” I looked at their website and sure enough it was over. I knew she might be disappointed. I gently told her, “I’m sorry, honey, it is over.”
What happened next kind of broke my heart. First, I saw the briefest, subtlest flash of sadness on her face. If I’d blinked I might have missed it: just a quick, barely down-turned mouth, swiftly erased. And then, in a sweet, positive voice, she said: “That’s okay.”
I paused and asked her, “Are you sad it’s over…?” Immediately, her face transformed into a huge frown, and a well of tears began to fall. I nodded sympathetically and gave her a hug. I cuddled her on my lap and she cried. Neither of us said anything, but after a bit the crying died down and we gradually moved on to the next thing. Later on, we told her Papa about how disappointing it was.
We’ve tried to raise Cora to know that all of her feelings are okay. …That she need not repress or exaggerate any of them.
“THAT’S OKAY”
That moment when she hid her sadness and covered it up with a positive, “That’s okay” reminded me how strong our culture’s need is to avoid and repress “negative” emotions and pretend it’s all good.
This story may seem like a minor example, but especially when we are young, each message we receive that our feelings are not okay…each time we push them down for the sake of “niceness,” “positivity,” or “harmony”…we cut ourselves off from the fullness of living, the source of our truth and growth.
Unfortunately, spirituality, which is supposed to help us find truth and growth, can often become a tool for the opposite: for deceiving ourselves and stunting our growth.
SPIRITUAL BYPASSING
This is called “spiritual bypassing” –

Using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. ((http://www.johnwelwood.com/articles/TRIC_interview_uncut.pdf))

The term was coined in the 80s by John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist. He saw people using the goal of awakening as an excuse to [quote] “rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness [without] fully facing it and making peace with it.” ((http://www.johnwelwood.com/articles/TRIC_interview_uncut.pdf))
Even a decade before Welwood coined the term, the popular Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa called it “spiritual materialism.” Chogyam Trungpa gave a series of talks in the 70s focused on the ways he saw his students believing they were advancing spiritually when they were in fact using distorted spiritual techniques to strengthen their egocentricity:

Depression and ignorance, the emotions, whatever we experience, are all real and contain tremendous truth. If we really want to learn and see the experience of truth, we have to be where we are.((Chogyam Trungpa, Spiritual Materialism.))

I’ve only mentioned Buddhism so far, but no form of religion or spirituality is immune to this risk. We are all embedded in the human experience. So we are all vulnerable to the tendency – like we talked about last week – to denigrate the lower, the dark, the bodily, the negative, the emotional — and venerate the upper, the light, the intellectual, the positive.
As a minister, this means that many times when I’m preaching I feel the need to give many qualifiers to what I’m saying – that is, IF I remember that, as psychotherapist Ingrid Mathieu says:

Every tool for spiritual and psychological development has a purpose, and conversely, a place where it’s of no help whatsoever. ((Ingrid Mathieu in Psychology Today))

Even beautiful concepts like unity and oneness can be abused if they are used to avoid or erase important differences among us. Even the concept of gratitude, imposed – for example – on someone who has just been diagnosed with cancer, can be misused.
So I’m going to talk this morning about three examples of things we say to ourselves or others that reveal this tendency of spiritual bypassing.
DON’T SHAME THE SPIRITUAL BYPASSER IN YOU
But, first: remember that we’d again be engaged in spiritual bypassing if we shamed the part of ourselves that tends toward spiritual bypassing. We need not scold the spiritual bypasser in us but consciously and caringly develop our awareness of them so they don’t run the show as often.
#1 AN OVEREMPHASIS ON THE POSITIVE (“LOVE & LIGHT”)
Our first example: – An overemphasis on the positive. Going around always happy and light – or similarly: overly detached and removed. It’s the equivalent of erasing that frown and saying, “That’s okay.”
An overemphasis on the positive often leads to numbing the “negative” emotions. In some spiritual circles, always being happy, sweet, and light is seen as a sign of your awakening or your closeness to God. But I think Carl Jung had it right when he said:

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Going into the dark gives us the capacity to bear it. “What gives light must endure burning,” as Victor Frankl said. Like my daughter having a good cry and then going on to her play. Not only can we learn how to bear the anger, depression, and anxiety that inevitably arise in life, but we can learn from their wisdom.
So, next time you’re going through a difficult time and you find yourself saying, “I just need to be positive” – perhaps be curious about developing instead a both/and approach. There may be deep sadness, pain, or anger in what you’re going through. Feeling all of that doesn’t mean we can’t also be open to the lighter moments that may come, too – the hope and the possibility.
In some spiritual circles, this emotional numbing comes out of a misunderstanding of the Buddhist concept of non-attachment. Chogyam Trungpa told of an interview he read from one Western Zen teacher in the New York Times who said one of his teachers advised him: “What you need to do is put aside all human feelings.”
It’s true that most of Buddhism teaches us not to get ensnared in our feelings, but students often turn this teaching into an absolutist, either/or approach. Instead, a both/and approach says: “Feelings are part of the illusion of the world, AND sometimes we need to pay attention to them.”
Our second example of spiritual bypassing:
#2 WEAK BOUNDARIES
Robert Masters calls this being a “harmony junkie.” Unitarian Universalist churches can be quite susceptible to this one. We have these great values of love and tolerance – of a wide welcome. But sometimes UU churches can distort those values into showing blind compassion & “neurotic tolerance”((Robert Masters – see below)) for behavior that is actually very damaging.
I’m so proud of the work this church has done in this area. We have learned in recent years that we cannot live out our value of welcome if we allow unwelcoming people to degrade that spirit of welcome. When someone’s behavior is offensive and disruptive, it is spiritual bypassing to say, “Let’s just not take it personally” or “They’re just doing the best they can” or “We just need to love them more” (which in this case means letting them hurt us). It is actually more loving to set boundaries than to avoid or be “nice.” (I wrote a whole sermon on this topic here.)
Many times, this kind of spiritual bypassing is strengthened by difficult childhoods, where we may have learned that saying “No” to someone – someone who inevitably had more power than us – resulted in shaming at best and violence at worst. So keeping things harmonious was a survival technique. But now that we are older, and unless we truly are in a life-or-death situation, we can develop other ways of relating.
We can see that true harmony comes instead from setting boundaries, from saying no when needed, from holding each other accountable to our values.
On the other side of this same coin can be the steamrolling of boundaries – avoiding taking responsibility for our actions. We can try to avoid blame by saying, “They just shouldn’t take it personally” or “That boundary doesn’t apply to me.” Unfortunately, this can happen with spiritual leaders who deny the inherent power dynamics their profession brings, and think it is alright to cross boundaries – sexual or relational – with people whom they serve.
The third and final example of spiritual bypassing:
#3a THE LAW OF ATTRACTION (believed absolutely)
This is the absolute belief that our thoughts create our world – that everything in our lives happens because of our attitudes.
Again, spiritual bypassing is about the misuse or distortion of spiritual tools.
So, yes, it’s fine and good to believe that our outlook can affect our experience. But when we use that absolute belief to legitimize others’ suffering or our own, it’s harmful. I remember hearing from someone very close to me that the Jews brought the holocaust on themselves because they believed they were a set-apart, chosen people. Talk about letting the Nazis off the hook! A similar belief is at work in the judgment that all poor people bring poverty upon themselves. The prosperity gospel – unfortunately preached in many churches – says that it’s within your power (regardless of the circumstances you were born into) to attract as much wealth as you want.
If we believe that everything is everyone’s own fault, there is no accountability in the world for hurting one another – personally or systemically.
A related form of spiritual bypassing in this area is the worship of coincidence. Yes, when I see a cardinal I like to think that my grandmother – who loved cardinals – is with me. This kind of thinking can help us embrace the interdependence in the world, the mystery and the connection. But taken to its extreme, it becomes the belief that everything that happens is about us.
Yes, we can make meaning from everything that happens, and synchronicity exists, but let’s keep it in perspective.
#3b “EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON”
Also related is the belief that everything happens for a reason or that God controls everything. I tread lightly here because I know that to some these beliefs are quite sustaining.
But, again, it’s about whether these beliefs are used to sidestep real life, to repress pain and discomfort.
So, I especially cringe when I hear these beliefs used in the presence of others’ pain – for example, when someone whose child has just died hears the words: “God needed another angel” or “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” or “This must be in your karma.” This is spiritual bypassing because it usually keeps us from being truly present to the person in their grief (which is what I think God would rather us do). Others’ pain often brings up our own past pains, and so we find ways to sugarcoat it.
But if, after being present with their own pain, the grieving person decides that such a belief in God’s will gives them true comfort, that is fine.
The journey there needs to include being present with the inevitable rawness of the process.
THERE ARE MORE
So there are just 3 examples of spiritual bypassing. Here’s a few more I’ll mention just in name.
Robert Masters, who wrote the recent book on Spiritual Bypassing, adds these to those I’ve already listed
cognitive intelligence 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.((Robert Masters, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters Also see his summary here.))
I’d add even two more: a worship of the individual at the expense of the community, and the belief that we’ve transcended our personal histories (instead, let’s cultivate an ongoing understanding of our personal histories).
ACCEPT AND GROW
Our third principle in this church is “Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth”
So let us accept with compassion that the spiritual bypasser lives in all of us – as we all sometimes shy away from the pains of life. But let us also encourage ourselves and one another to spiritual growth. As Robert Masters says:
Our times call for [a spirituality] far more real, grounded, and responsible; something radically alive and naturally integral; something that shakes us to our very core.((see above))
So, when you are like Cora and feel the tendency to cover over that well of sadness with a quick “That’s ok,” may you know that what the Sacred instead calls you to do is just to sit in her lap and have a good cry. Afterwards, you might find yourself much more able to get up and play.
May it be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon