Mini-Synopsis of “Spiritual Bypassing — When Spirituality Disconnects us from What Really Matters.”

Despite it’s growing prevalence, there are surprisingly few books about Spiritual Bypassing. While I’ve only found one that is solely dedicated to the phenomenon — “Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects us from what Really Matters” by Robert Augustus Masters, it’s comprehensive enough to be the only one you’ll need.

What is spiritual bypassing?

“A term first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984, it is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”

Masters offers several reasons why spiritual bypassing has become so common, and most of us will be able to relate to this one:

“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. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely subtle.”

At the outset, Masters shares a thorough list of the major signs and symptoms of spiritual bypassing:

• 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
• Delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being

He then deep-dives into many different aspects of spiritual bypassing, and I’ll present each of these including the most valuable excerpts. Think of this as a mini crash-course for anyone seeking a foundational understanding of this topic without reading an entire book on it.

Blind Compassion

“Those of us who practice blind compassion generally spiritualize our misguided tolerance and aversion to confrontation, confusing being loving with putting up with whatever anyone does and never judging them, no matter what.”

“Blind compassion confuses anger with aggression, forcefulness with violence, judgment with condemnation, caring with exaggerated tolerance, and moral maturity with spiritual correctness.”

With blind compassion, we don’t know how to — or won’t learn how to — say “no” with any real power, avoiding confrontation at all costs and, as a result, enabling unhealthy patterns to continue.”

Dettachment, Numbing, and Repression

“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.”

“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. But all we’ve really done is escape from the very pain that, if fully felt and skillfully approached, would free us to live more deeply and more fully and, yes, more spiritually.

Those who ardently believe in Oneness and nonseparation tend to divide rather than unify, separate rather than integrate, detaching themselves from whatever they deem to be lower or less evolved or negative.

In spiritual bypassing’s domain, we are mostly marooned from the raw reality of our pain, numbing ourselves both to our deeper feelings and to the pain of others, disengaging to such a degree that our heart responds only superficially to even the worst sorts of pain. This is detachment, but not healthy detachment! In healthy detachment, we stand apart from what we are experiencing without disconnecting from it. But when we anesthetize ourselves to our pain, whether fully or in part, we are not in a position to really.”

Unhealthy Transcendence (as opposed to healthy transcendence)

Where healthy transcendence embraces what’s been transcended, unhealthy transcendence avoids it, making a spiritual virtue out of rising above whatever is deemed “lower” or “darker” elements of our nature. This is dissociation disguised in holy drag.

“Instead of letting ourselves really feel, we instead rise up, floating above our hurt, disconnecting from it to the point of barely feeling it, while conceiving of our flight as a spiritual and legitimate going-beyond.

Having to stay “up” cuts us off from our roots, our history, our ground. Having to stay “up” dilutes and impoverishes us, leaving us to feed mostly on recycled spiritual clichés and other heady souvenirs of secondhand living.

Up, up, and away we float to avoid our pain and developmental challenges, stuffing ourselves with spiritual knowledge — confusing information with transformation — while our body pays the price of being only superficially lived at best.

When transcendence is unhealthy, what has been transcended is excluded from our being, resulting in escapism and disconnection.

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.”

Via types of Mindfulness & Meditation

“If a meditative technique is primarily used to avoid pain, spiritual bypassing is occurring.”

“Not all spiritual bypassing so blatantly avoids pain; the dance of avoidance can be done with great subtlety. Consider, for example, spiritual practices that advocate observing whatever arises with mindful attentiveness: these are not in and of themselves indicative of spiritual bypassing, but in the teaching to simply be an impartial witness to whatever is arising, there is a danger of becoming an overly passive or impersonal observer, thereby generating an excessive kind of detachment. We might find a sense of reassuring comfort in doing such practices, which make a spiritual virtue out of standing apart from what is occurring, safely removed from any significantly close contact.

Using meditation to ease pain or reduce its intensity does not necessarily signal spiritual bypassing but rather a kind of relaxation that allows us to enter more deeply into our life. Expanding our boundaries and softening around our area of pain gives it more room to breathe and stretch, more space to show itself in its various dimensions. Once our pain is a little less sharp, we can direct our attention into it, getting to know it from deep inside. The healing of pain is found in pain itself.

Contrary to what we tend to believe, the more intimate we are with our pain, the less we suffer. By consciously and compassionately entering into our pain and cultivating intimacy with it, we begin to find some real freedom from our suffering. Our hurt may remain, but our relationship to it will have changed to the point where it’s no longer such a problem to us, and in fact may even become a doorway into What Really Matters.”

Magical Thinking

“If we don’t feel in control of our lives, magical thinking puts us back in control — or so it seems.”

“This mindset is especially common among spiritual practitioners who believe that if they concentrate their spiritual energies on what they want, they will have it. Of course, if they don’t get what they want, this failure simply means that they didn’t apply themselves sufficiently to the issue at hand. As childish as such thinking is, it is nonetheless astonishingly prevalent, particularly among those excessively attached to positive thinking, so-called prosperity consciousness, and spiritualized greed.

Magical thinking can be dangerous, such as when it is used to assert that those who are in dire circumstances have brought it on themselves. Those who feel they are responsible for their difficulties are less likely to seek the help they need because of the shame they feel, or the shaming they are receiving, for failing to visualize their way into a better situation.

Anyone who has practiced lucid dreaming or highly intentional thinking knows how powerful and immediately impactful a single thought can be. But to attribute to a waking-state thought the power to physically alter our world in accord with what we’re asking for is wishful thinking gone grandiose.

Yes, the observer is inextricably connected with the observed (and is not and cannot be in a position to be truly “objective”) but he or she is not creating the observed — except perhaps in fantasies of omnipotence!

Magical thinking can be very appealing to us — especially to the child in us — when we are deeply distressed, shocked, wounded, knocked flat by circumstances, or otherwise left feeling powerless. At such times, magical thinking presents an appealing direct promise of a pick-me-up of often epic proportions, intoxicating and distracting us with reassuring possibility, seducing us with nostalgia for the future. If this promise feels dreamy, it’s because it literally is. A single thought in a dream can radically alter a dream’s environment. Such is the seductive power of magical thinking.

The irony is that as we leave magical thinking in the sandboxes of our mind, we don’t have to become drearily serious grownups bereft of magic, but rather we can find a deeper magic, the magic of awakening beyond what we think ourselves to be. There is a remarkable innocence in this, not a naive or gullible innocence but a second innocence, a deeply awakened innocence through which our intimacy with the Mystery of Being ripens ever further, leaving us not longing for Home but sitting at the hearth, resting in the magic of the everyday, grateful to be here one more day.”

Via Dis-Embodiment

“When we are in spiritual bypassing’s grasp, we usually tend — like James Joyce’s character, Mr. Duffy — to live a short distance from our body.”

“For many of us on a spiritual path, our body tends to be “down there,” relegated to the status of an “it.” Whether we take care of it or not, we tend not to live in a truly embodied way (that is, in intimate, well-grounded contact with our physicality and emotions) unless we’ve freed ourselves from spiritual bypassing’s grip.

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.

*We cannot, however, go out of the body because we are not actually “in” a body. Who we are makes its appearance not in a body but as a body. This does not necessarily mean that we literally are our body, but that our body expresses rather than contains us.*?

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.

Getting more embodied, and not just physically, means making deeper and deeper contact with what we are feeling, and this is sometimes far from pleasant. It’s easier to float near it, to dissociate from it, and to make such distancing — such emotional disconnection — into a spiritual virtue.

To really feel our body is an art in which compassion, patience, and the spirit of exploration all coexist. Here we meet spirit in the flesh, spirit-as-flesh, and discover the profound mystery and functioning of the soul incarnate. In this, our physicality is but an expression, a unique shaping of the source of the body, resonating with What Really Matters, giving us a means through which to relate to all that is. As such, embodiment is the ultimate participatory act.”

The body is not just matter! (And for that matter, matter is not just matter.) The body is not a burden with which we’ve been saddled, nor is it an obstruction to realizing our true nature. Whatever its wrapping, our body is a gift. We need to shift from having a body to being a body, and from being a body to Being. In permitting a fuller, saner embodiment of our essential nature, we make possible a deeper life for ourselves, a life in which we cannot help but breathe integrity into our stride, and develop a deep intimacy with all that we are.

We must not only love what outlives this body but this body also, for it is a unique flowering whose rise and beauty and singularity ache to be known before its demise.”

Spiritual Gullibility and Cultism

“Because those of us prone to spiritual gullibility tend to confuse skepticism with cynicism, believing that trust in the world is a more ideal spiritual state, we may fail to exercise the necessary discernment in vetting those whose income or self-worth largely depends upon our spiritual gullibility.”

“Spiritual gullibility is big business in our consumer-driven economy. We want it fast — whatever “it” is. Those who want our business know this well and advertise accordingly, counting on our credulity (which typically gets framed as openness or receptivity). Their promises are often so outrageous (as exemplified by the “you can manifest whatever you want” selling points of positive-thinking purveyors) that our unquestioned, even enthusiastic reception speaks of deep naiveté infused with an understandable longing to have a better tomorrow with as little fuss or pain as possible.”

“People will often give (and give up) anything to be part of something that delivers, or that convincingly promises to deliver, a stable sense of belonging. Like lovers who abandon their boundaries, confusing fusion with intimacy until the rude awakening of their differences begins to dawn, followers of any cult, however benign it may seem, tend to dissolve too much of their identity into group-think without maintaining a robust sense of discerning individuality.

Cultism over-separates: It is a tightly encapsulated, self-obsessed us, with the rest of existence becoming a rather distant them. Whatever caring exists within cultism — and it can be a very deep, however misguided, caring — is eventually impoverished by its isolation from the rest of life. At best, cults protect what is inside their walls, but sooner or later they become guards rather than guardians. If the alienation, painful sense of separateness, or estrangement that so often drives us to seek membership with a group is not properly addressed so that our yearning for togetherness is not just an escape from our sense of alienation, we’ll remain highly susceptible to the pull of various parental or “we have the answer” institutions and movements.”

Weak Boundaries

“We cannot hope to mature and find true integration without first being clearly differentiated, vividly, and unmistakably outlined. Good boundaries provide and support this essential differentiation in our lives, but being under-boundaried is especially difficult to cut through when it’s taken to be a sign of spiritual attainment.

Boundaries allow differences to play their essential role by preserving our autonomy and making healthy interrelatedness possible — a fact clearly illustrated in mature relationships, in which there is deep communion without any dilution of one’s sense of self. In such relationships, we don’t discard our boundaries to make meaningful connections; we expand our boundaries to include the other without short-changing ourselves. Such inclusion has room not only for shared love and joy but also for shared pain; both partners are able to hold compassionate space for the pain of each. When we are caught up in spiritual bypassing, our aversion to all that is painful and uncomfortable tends to keep our relationships superficial. It is so easy to allow our misguided embrace of our intrinsic oneness to separate us from our differences!

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. Spiritual bypassing, however, uproots us before we’ve established such ground, mostly through its devaluing of the personal and interpersonal in favor of “higher” realities, and it's accompanying neglect of boundaries. Along the way, relational intimacy is left mostly by the wayside, as if it were little more than some vestigial practice for those misguided souls still trying to have a worldly relationship free from spiritual ambition.

Boundaries make intimacy possible in a number of ways. Yes, relational intimacy is really just Being meeting Being through the medium of form, but at the same time, it is also individuated being meeting individuated being, mixing and sharing differences, generating a kind of hybrid vigor and evolutionary richness through doing so. 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 to shed or abandon our boundaries, but to breathe integrity and strength into them, to fully illuminate them, and to make sure that they take a form that serves not only our highest good but also the highest good of all. We are not here to override or devalue our boundaries but to use them as wisely as possible, valuing the personal and impersonal as much as the transpersonal and discovering the freedom in fully engaging our experience. Our boundaries stand as guardians on this path, with an authority that supports our growth and awakening.”

Via Romance

“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 we’re entrenched in spiritual bypassing we tend to like our relationships sunny-side up: no confrontation, no anger, no messy feelings. There is not just denial here but considerable dissociation, perhaps masquerading as spiritualized detachment and equanimity. Such relational disengagement maroons us from the vulnerability and depth needed for real intimacy.

But the opposite can also happen in spiritual bypassing — instead of a flight to dissociation, there may be a flight to fusion. Such fusion, whatever its romantic trappings does not demonstrate true union or intimacy. Such fusion signals that our boundaries have not expanded but collapsed and the distance between us has not been crossed but rather just skipped over and denied.

So our relationships may be dominated by dissociation (unhealthy separation) or by fusion (unhealthy connectedness) — two sides of the same dysfunctional-boundaries coin, with the former passed of as nonattachment and the latter as communion or intimacy or “oneness.”