Whenever you have emotions, they don’t just leave your body once you are finished with them. Because of this, deep emotions can cause mental illness and illness in your body. Robert Augustus master’s termed the idea of spiritual bypassing as, “the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”
Spiritual bypassing is something that isn’t always talked about, but it is something that people that know about it can celebrate the idea behind it which is why there are so many books about it. This is something that goes against teaching people to temporarily feel their emotions but instead it teaches people to understand where emotions go and how they are trapped in the body.
The world teaches people to feel the emotions so that they can feel better for a while which can lead to mental illness, suicide, eating disorders and more. Spiritual bypassing is a relief that people can get for a moment, but it doesn’t bring healing to their life. It can help to stop the pain for a while, but it doesn’t fix things.
Healing is something that needs to be done when you have emotions that are hurtful. This can cause you to not have peace and to act out of emotions instead of being your true self. As you look at y our sufferings, you have to get past the pain and not just have temporary relief of it. There has to be unconditional love which can come from deep meditation and healing techniques.
By using spiritual bypassing, there are emotions that can lead you to have no self-care and to not be protected from sicknesses.
Emptiness of Spiritual Bypassing
Another person, John Welwood, feels that spiritual bypassing is, “Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment and detachment over feeling.” He also stated that, “When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence. Trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it.”
Using absolute over relative is one of the problems. The truth is that you are not your body, and you are not your emotions, and these are just part of your personality. This is something that comes to you, but it is not relative truth.
Spiritual by passers are risking getting hooked on the absolute view of the spirituality and this isn’t the absolute truth or the only truth. This truth can be hard and messy, and it can cause people to never get healed from their wounds.
People that use this often are kind and peace keepers. They are people pleasers and are gentle, but they are also the people that have mental illness or chronic illnesses. They aren’t able to find healing in regular medicine.
Spiritual Bypassing Signs
Here are some of the signs of spiritual bypassing:
- Hiding emotions that aren’t spiritual.
- Being afraid of being angry and hurting someone.
- Having a hard time saying no to people.
- Being fake.
- Forgiving prematurely instead of making people be accountable for their actions.
- Tolerating abusive people and actions.
- Having no boundaries.
- Seeing things as spiritual that aren’t.
- Not being grounded.
- Not judging and not being able to discern abuse.
- Unable to not have empathy when other people have strong emotions.
- Numbing their emotions.
- Putting transcendence over presence.
- Putting yourself in spiritual practices instead of seeing justice as being needed.
Oh, so now if I suppress my emotions through meditation, I’m just one step away from developing a chronic illness? Fantastic, just what I needed—another thing to meditate on while avoiding my ‘unresolved wounds.’
The exploration of spiritual bypassing is indeed a profound subject. It’s fascinating how emotions can manifest in physical illnesses and how the act of bypassing these emotions with spiritual practices can be detrimental. While the concepts are compelling, it would benefit from more empirical evidence to validate these claims.
The idea that emotions linger and can cause physical illness is quite enlightening. Spiritual bypassing as described seems like a double-edged sword—offering temporary relief but potentially causing long-term harm. It’s certainly something to ponder and research further.
Isn’t it ironic that people engage in spiritual bypassing to avoid pain, only to find themselves trapped in another form of suffering? It’s like running away from a shadow only to end up in complete darkness. The irony is almost poetic.
This article perpetuates the harmful notion that spirituality can replace mental health treatment. Suggesting that spiritual bypassing leads to conditions like mental illness or eating disorders without substantial evidence is irresponsible. People need real therapy, not pseudoscientific solutions.