Spiritual Bypassing

I just finished a very challenging and insightful book. Spiritual Bypassing : When Spirituality Disconnects us from what Really Matters by Robert Augustus Masters I had purchased the book after a retreat I attended with my sweetie. At one point in this retreat all the participants engaged in a very powerful exercise. For the exercise each person wrote down the facts of a situation in which they had had a strong emotional response. For example, someone shared that she had just had to tell her 20 year old son that she would not pay for his car loan. Next each person partnered with someone and told them the facts of the situation. The partner then responded by saying, “ I imagine you would feel . . . “ it was a powerful exercise because it unearthed feelings people didn’t even know they had, and because just the simple act of someone listening and trying to place themselves in the shoes of another changes both. We then exchanged partners and interactions several times.

The situations I chose were happy. I chose the fact that my sweetie and little one had treated me royally during my birthday week. I also shared with partners that I had gotten a wonderful card from my parents that had made me cry. After the group as a whole debriefed it was clear that very few people chose happy situations. I talked with my sweetie and told her what I chose, and how I found it difficult to come up with something that had evoked a strong emotional response that had been negative. Her insightful response was “ interesting – I am surprised you did not raise – and then she proceeded to name two things that evoke in me a low-grade but very deep disappointment and sadness. In fact I do not think that I am generally aware of the pain.

It was then that I knew that I had some interesting material to work with. Somehow I was failing to look at some important things in the interest of appearing “together” or “spiritual” or to simply avoid pain.
That’s when I began to revisit the idea of Spiritual Bypassing. According to Robert Augustus Masters

Spiritual bypassing 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.
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.

Essentially spiritual bypassing is a run around of life. Because pain is, well, painful, we seek to avoid it or numb it or falsely transcend it. This is not much different than how most people operate most of the time. From thrill seekers to drug addicts, to anorexics, to workaholics we know there are numerous ways to cover or get away from pain. In fact the Buddha identified similar challenges over 2,500 years ago when he pointed out grasping and aversion at the root of our problems. However with spiritual bypassing our false refuge is spirituality itself.
Interestingly, one of my sweetie’s biggest challenges around my burgeoning spirituality of the last several years was her perception of a certain flatness in me. She would frequently remark that where she might get too angry and loud – I was not angry enough or loud enough. When we would need to discipline our little one we often struggled because to her I seemed so incredibly non-reactive. From my perspective it was hard earned and cultivated non-reactivity.

What if she had been right though? What if there was truth in what she said? To what extent might I use my spirituality to avoid conflict? What if the flatness she experienced was really a false detachment – a way of stepping over my connection to a situation or issue or person rather than a way to go more deeply into the conflict and discover who I truly am and who others are. Goodness knows I had always avoided conflict during many other years. What if this had just given me another excuse but with a more acceptable mechanism?

I knew it was true at least to some degree. I had been invested in improving some me that had made gains and was now in a different place. I had so quietly created a new narrative for myself. Knowing that “I “ did not quite have it altogether was painful. I struggled. It was also however, incredibly instructive, since it allowed me to see a blindspot where my ego existed powerfully and strongly and before then, unnoticed. It showed me how incredibly subtle my ego could be. I had crafted a new “me,” a “more spiritual me”, even while touting notions of “no – self” Evidence that I had identified with this new me existed in the fact that when I realized that I used spiritual bypassing, I felt defensive, resistant, and like at some level I had failed. I even felt defensive of authors I loved who may or may not have bypassed spiritually. All that ,is the ego in operation. Does your true self care? Your true self is able to hold with compassion that which is driven to get it right while at the same time knowing in advance that it already is. What cared was this movement of mind that wanted a story that said” I used to act this way but now that I have found spirituality I am improved this way”. And it wanted that story because it believed it would help predict the future. It wanted that story because it wanted to prove to the world that is healthy, sane and safe. It wanted that story to cover the pain of not being enough.

One’s true self is not interested in the future. One’s true self is not invested in whether it gets anywhere else. One’s true self can look at the way spiritual bypassing happens and rather than feel let down because one has failed – feels compassion for that which needs to behave in these ways to seemingly protect itself. As I have said before, love claims all, our true self does not worry if “we got it right” and knows that only an ego worries about that. It then embraces that very ego in a blanket of compassion that recognizes the ego’s, (in this case gentle , but ultimately misguided) attempt to protect, defend, and safeguard. We put up our guards but does truth need to be defended? Does love need defenses?

At first when I realized that I had been spiritually bypassing I felt upset and paralyzed. I did not know what to do. But really the key to working with spiritual bypassing is similar to much of our other spiritual practice. Deepening our awareness is key. We are already more than halfway there if we can realize when it is happening. We might then ask ourselves why? – not in an accusatory way but gently, in a curious and attentive way. The answer need not be intellectual in fact perhaps it should not be. The question is to get you to inhabit the feeling of what it is that you are afraid of or in pain about. The question is to bring you closer to what is at the heart of that contraction or knot. What is it in me that could use some tenderness? What is it that feels like it needs to be protected? What does it need to be protected from? How did it come to those beliefs? The point is not to cast blame , or say so and so acted this way and now I need to act this way to be vindicated but to probe the origin of the conditioning that is generating the painful belief. The point isn’t even to get rid of the pain or problem (for that could be the very spiritual bypassing about which we are speaking ) but to understand how that pain or problem takes place within the much larger truth of who you are. Your pain is real but it is only a small part of you.

Spiritual Bypassing makes avoiding your pain a fixation and thus seem more solid and monolithic. By avoiding pain it is given more substance and weight than if the pain is acknowledged and explored and ultimately seen as happening within something infinitely more vast. Engaging in spiritual bypassing is like saying that your fingernail is you. Your fingernail is part of you but it’s not the whole thing.

Why then might we continue to do it even when we recognize that it may not be helpful? Because some part of us still holds out for a time or state that is pain free. We believe we might get “there” - some place without pain. But here is an interesting question to think about deeply for a moment - in truth would you really even want that? What of life would be missing if there were no pain? Why is pain synonymous with “bad. Isn’t pain a part of the unfathomable beauty of existence, at once personal and universal? This is not to embrace masochism but to point out the degree to which pain (whatever it is) is a part of life’s palette of colors with which we are painted. Furthermore that pain frequently is the catalyst for great compassion. When seen and acknowledged it can link us to the recognition that each of us experiences different flavors of a basic and primordial yearning for wholeness. Pain unifies us in the recognition that we will all face sickness, sorrow and death. That is not meant morbidly, it is meant to help us realize how incredibly precious we are and life is. Feeling pain is a deep sign of caring for this life.

I am working on moving towards my pain, knowing it embracing it, cradling it, letting it exist within compassionate space. I suspect by knowing my own pain I will be more open and loving to others who are in pain – which is just about all of us. The key however will be to know that pain AND to know the vastness within which that pain is taking place. That is essentially to walk on earth and be in the kingdom of heaven at the same time.

Even though I am not a psychologist, I suspect that there is an acute rawness underneath the hidden places where we spiritually bypass to survive. I wonder if we believe that we cannot tolerate the pain? Again, without being a psychotherapist, I believe we can. If those hurt places are approached gingerly and with love they can be healed and made whole. We are all in this together. Ultimately your pain is my pain and your freedom is my freedom.

Eventually you realize that even so called spirituality (whatever that is) is itself a means, a means toward an end which you already have within you.

Negativity

Negativity comes in many forms. The varieties and permutations of negativity are as numerous as there are people. Sometimes it is a miniscule irritation at something that happened or should not have happened. Sometimes it’s a burning hot flame of rage. Sometimes it’s a more like a pervasive grime that coats one’s life. It is not necessarily deeply troubling, but life feels like a daily grind. One’s perspective is tinted by a sheen of muck. Sometimes fear is the negativity that manifests. It could be a fear of failure, a fear of being misperceived, a fear of not getting what we want. The various shades of negativity are as endless as the stories that create them.

Every form of negativity is a form of resistance. Every form of negativity is based in a story that has a central character struggling. But what happens when you remove the person in the story? What happens when there is no more narrative? Lets look at fear for a moment. What is it? From a biological standpoint, it is probably the secretion of certain chemicals in the body in response to some external stimuli. Our adrenaline starts pumping, our hearts start racing. The fight or flight response has been triggered. This is very useful when a disgruntled sabre tooth tiger is staring you down, but is perhaps less so when that trigger never subsides and you respond to every psychological challenge by running or fleeing. There is room for a more liberated approach. Without the story about the fear it is just a set of facts and sensations that are happening; a heart racing, blood pumping, adrenaline rushing. It is the negative story which gives those facts and sensations a "negative" connotation. We could use those same facts and tell a story about a running race and it would have a completely different meaning.

So are we to blame stories? Not quite so. That would just be another story. Stories are simply our ways of parcing out reality. They are quite helpful as long as we do not mistake them as the full truth. Stories are never completely true so it is delusive to search for our ultimate meaning in them. It is more useful to look to stories as a guide to how the outer world is being reflected by our inner world at that moment. We are held hostage by our stories when we cannot see that there are many perspectives and that the ultimate truth, in fact, stands even outside of all of those perpsectives.

Our negative emotions can teach us valuable lessons if we let them. Anytime there is negativity it is an opportunity to look into how we have been hooked into believing something false about ourselves and the world. What are we defending? What are we trying to hold up? What is beneath the fear? What are we afraid of? What are we believing that enables this negativity?

Experiment: Identify something that you are a little bit afraid to do. It should not be something that terrifies you or that you know you "cannot" do. And it should of course be safe. It should, on the other hand, be something that produces a certain degree of anxiety or fear. One beautiful example I am going to borrow from someone who writes on the ET TV Forums. As he was about to leap off a cliff into deep waters below, he kept approaching the cliff and then backing away. Each time he would get close to the cliff edge, he would try to be aware of the feelings, and sensations in his body at that moment. He became keenly attuned to what that experience of fear/anxiety felt like in his body and experience. You can do the same thing, even if it does not involve literally jumping off a cliff. Find something that causes you anxiety and just before you are about to undertake the activity become deeply present and witness the sensations in your body. What are you feeling? Where are you feeling it? What is happening to your body? Are there any thoughts that are accompanying your fears? What are they saying? Feel the difference between almost undertaking the fearful activity and moving back to what is comfortable.

In actuality, for this, it matters not whether you carry out the activity. The purpose of this experiment was to witness and truly understand what your own fear feels like rather than just react as your fear. I would be interested in hearing from you about how the experiment went. Please do write a comment.

Its nice to talk abstractly about negativity and all but don't terrible things happen? Isn't there pain and suffering and misery? These things are negative. How can you say that when there is negativity we have been hooked into a falsehood about the world?

It is a paradox that is difficult to articulate. Let me give you an example from my own life that begins to illuminate what I mean. In my last blog, I wrote about my struggle with mental illness. It has been difficult and painful at times. Yet despite this pain, or more aptly perhaps because of this pain, I sought an end to my suffering which led me to eventually "awaken" Sometimes its as if suffering enables us to see beyond the one who seems to be suffering. In my life, my mental illness has at one level been "negative", at another level it is simply a part of my experience and I am grateful, for what it has taught me and brought me in contact with. If something bad helps you to understand your true purpose and essence - can it be called negative so easily? If it expands your ability to be compassionate is it "bad". Now of course I am "lucky", and the pain in my story is not as deep as many other people experience, but the mechanics are the same. Once you feel your essence, you understand that no matter what someone else does to you or what you experience that may be "negative" there is an untouchable sacredness that has always been with you, will not ever leave you, and cannot be taken away, and you are never the same. This sacredness is unaffected by anything that could ever happen to you. This essence is the real you and it is connected to and part of everything else for lack of better words. When that essence is fully grasped through and through it becomes clearer that the "negative" does not really touch the essence of us. And if it does not touch "us" then isn't it a falsehood? This does not mean that something will never feel "negative" at the time, its just to say that the panoramic perspective is available to us if we can access it. Similarly, please don't take this to mean not to alleviate suffering. I am now going to blatantly and knowingly contradict myself and say suffering is real. Language can be so limiting. At a relative level, suffering does happen and we should do our utmost to relieve it when we see it in the world but at an absolute level, things are simply as they are. True compassion enables us to see that on the one hand there is real pain and misery. In fact, if we look closely enough and do not turn from it -- it is heartbreaking. At the same time, the quivering heart is able to see the essence of all things; that which is beyond the misery it is also able to hold the suffering.


So what should you do when you encounter negativity? What should you do when the flames of anger begin to rise and writhe? What should you do when you are afraid?


If you are able, watch the negativity. Become curious about it. Give it compassionate space and treat it with tenderness. Look deeply into it. Let it be as big as it needs to be. Many people have learned to count to ten when they get angry. It gives them a chance to cool off before they do or say something they regret. It can be a good practice. But often times people continue to tell themselves the story of why this person or that situation made them angry, so instead of cooling off they are feeding the fire of anger. See if you can feel the anger without the story. Concentrate on how the actual feeling of anger lives in the body. See how angry you can get for a moment. Not with some righteous indignation over what happened to you, but to experience the raw and simple energy of anger. What does it feel like? What color is it? What shape is it? What is it doing to your muscles? What is happening in your throat? What is going on in your belly or your heart? Give the anger some compassionate space to exist.

Usually another feeling lurks beneath the anger. Usually we are protecting or defending something. Often we are masking fear or hurt - other "negative" emotions. For me, I know I have reached the bottom of any "difficult" emotions when I begin a particular kind of cry. It is a cathartic cry. It is a cry of reaching and understanding truth. It is accompanied by a sweet tenderness towards the whole situation.



Hastily, we are so apt to write off our "negative" emotions and reach for something "better" but true reality, true love recognizes that these so called negative experiences are just other colors in the rainbow of life. They make the picture vivid and vibrant. True reality embraces them simply because they are. We do not need to fear them. We do not need to run from them. We do not even need to change them. Nothing that is real can ever be harmed so we do not need to worry. That which we perceive as "negative" is just another tool to awaken us from slumber and show us our divinity. So rest in peace the next time something "negative" appears. It is another chance to see yourself and escape the dream.

Connections

Someone a few years back made a picture frame for me that said "Ambassador of Goodwill". What a wonderful sentiment. I say that not because I am special but because I want everyone who comes in contact with "me" to come away a little richer. We can all be ambassadors of goodwill. We can all be instruments of peace and love. If we are not here to love and enrich each others lives, then what are we here for?

For me, going to run errands has taken on new meaning. The grocery store is filled with opportunities to connect with the world's wonderful denizen. The connection does not have to be much, most of the time its just a beaming smile, but I look to feel the essence of each individual I meet. I look to meet them as a field of compassionate space that says we are all notes in this this wonderful symphony called life. We are all so precious. We are all here so briefly. Consciousness has chosen us to express itself and it is beautiful each and every time. Why not discover that someone masquerading as a person next to you. The funny thing about it is that I come away with so much energy from these encounters. There is synergy when souls connect by playing together in the world of form.

I have been spending a lot of time looking for employment. It can be dim. There are hours in front of the computer pouring over job sites and writing applications. Sometimes I schedule some of these errands and I watch my whole energy system change. The other day at the grocery store, I struck up a wonderful conversation with an "elderly" gentleman. I was standing not quite clearly in line and he entered the line not really seeing me. I let him go ahead and a little while later he asked if he had cut ahead. I said not at all. He then noticed a display of eggs on sale and we wondered together whether they would be cheaper than the one's he had in his cart. I remember being filled with so much joy just standing there next to this man and chatting. He paid for his things and thanked me in front of the cashier for letting him go ahead in the line. The cashier responded we have such nice people in our store.

Well, we are all like that. We all want happiness. We all want connection and love. Several days later the fates were reversed when a woman went out of her way to help me figure out how to negotiate the computerized parking attendant.

It is easy to think that because we read about so much hurt and pain, that people are hateful or evil but that is just the easy way out. We want to write people off because then we don't have to face the depth of the grief that is before us when people commit horrible acts. Our hearts want to close down in the face of such pain. We can pretend that "those" people just are in another category that is not like us. In reality they are like us but for which seeds have been watered. They are just unconscious. When someone is so constricted internally that they believe they will acheive happiness by inflicting pain on someone else, it is deeply sad. It is sad for both the "victim" and the "perpetrator". I call your attention to an absolutely beautiful poem by Thich Nhat Hanh that gracefully captures that tension of our interconnectedness called "Please Call Me By My True Names"

There is only one. Its like all of life is one breathing, pulsing organism, with different parts making up one body. One person is a leg, another an liver, another still a lung, but we all are part of the same oneness. Without each other we would not thrive. We are all looking to connect with each other. Can you sense your connectedness to "other" manifestations of that oneness? Breathe deeply and tell me what your heart says? Tell me a story about when and where you felt connected. It will probably make you feel good.