Concepts: Loving Spiritual Bypassing 🎠

A client recently asked me to define Spiritual Bypassing. I’ve written about this before (pretending somethings wrong & universal bypassing) but I love getting insight from redefining stuff freshly. Here’s what came out: 

Spiritual bypassing is declaring something unlovable in the name of spirituality.

Eg: 

• We justify avoiding an uncomfortable conversation because we have to go pray / meditate.
• We ignore feeling our desires because wanting things isn’t enlightened.
• We declare spiritual bypassing unspiritual and make it wrong and something to get rid of.
  
  

It doesn’t matter if the something is interior: A discomfort, a shameful feeling, an unclaimed identity—or exterior: A politician, an ideology, a practice. Because there’s no real difference, when it comes to personal experience.

Bypass becomes projection: We see ‘out there’ what we won’t accept ‘in here’. If we make bypassing wrong, for example, we start judging all the ‘spiritual bypassers’ for being immature, shadowy, less alive. But as it’s said, wherever I point, three fingers point back at me.

In other words, spiritual bypassing is not bad, it’s simply a defense mechanism (which gives what it protects against). It’s useful until it’s not. For any given bypass, if we’re lucky, we eventually become aware of it and claim it. Claiming it doesn’t mean getting rid of it, it means we’re actually free to choose it—yay or nay. We’re totally free to say yes forever. Experience is infinite so we’ll simply experience something else.

Plus there’s Jordan’s Litany of Gendlin applied to Faith: If we really need to deal with it, we won’t be able to avoid it forever. Things that need to be known by us will find a way into our experience until they’re unavoidable.

With love, Jordan