Spiritual Bypassing:
Spiritual bypassing is avoidance of facing the healing that our soul is crying out for. Healing is a messy business and can be very isolating and lonely at times. No one relishes difficult feelings, sifting through pain or facing past actions, but there is no avoiding the work, once the soul is set on the ascension pathway.
It's easy to be seduced by romantic imagery of yogis in meditative bliss, or lithe bodies perfecting Asana, but that is an illusion, a pretend version of spirituality. The true self doesn't care about being seen, belonging or appearance. Our inner aspect is yearning to be healed, to be unhindered from trauma, pretence, core wounding and the gunk that clogs up our signal and prevents us from being actualised.
Spiritual Bypassing sidesteps the real work of healing
Spirituality is an inside job, the external fluff and imagery are a distraction from doing the hard work. Spiritual bypassing is a form of escapism that creeps in when we choose to remain in ego or dissociate, instead of going within and facing ourselves. Our mind fragments and creates illusions when it feels uncomfortable, suppressing reality through avoidance or fabricating stories to compartmentalise difficult emotions.
Bypassing can become a dependency that leaves us in spiritual limbo, wearing a false mask of happiness projected onto the world, instead of getting real. It can gaslight us into false security by projecting spiritual perfectionism, playing a role in suppressing unspiritual feelings of anger, guilt or shame, instead of facing them and taking accountability.
Bypassing isolates our true selves and sabotages growth and healing. Doing the work is not all love and light. Bypassing manifests as false positivity, virtue-signalling, jumping on causes, and having a holier-than-thou attitude, all of which are ego inflation and spiritual narcissism.
We can waste years pretending to be spiritual but deny the darkness and pain within. This may delay our healing, but it won’t make it go away. Healing is about getting real with self, growth, doing the work and taking a disciplined approach. It's about accountability, finding acceptance, forgiveness, dropping judgment and artifice.
It's easy to wind up getting lost as there are so many distractions and traps on the spiritual path. Get out of the bypassing trap by facing yourself, honouring difficult emotions, releasing your blocks and working through any psychological wounding or feeling into trapped pain. We don’t have to identify our pain to heal it, we only need to acknowledge it and release it. It's far harder to sustain ego pretence than it is to surrender to the soul. We are on a soul journey, not an ego journey, let the soul lead the way
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