Is it spirituality or is it spiritual bypassing?

I am reading a book about the psychology of far-right evangelical Christians so I can better understand how to have a meaningful conversation with them as I encounter people with faith in my daily walks. I ran across a term in the book that I have never heard before but have seen a lot -- spiritual bypassing.

Spiritual bypassing is a term first attributed to John Welwood (a psychologist and Buddhist practitioner) who observed the tendency of using spiritual practices, beliefs, or experiences to avoid dealing with unresolved psychological issues or emotional challenges while neglecting the very hard work of understanding what needs to be healed, integrating and then letting go.

Additionally, in doing the research for this post I ran across content at Big Think that introduced the concepts of conspirituality, disaster capitalism and disaster spirituality (Walker, 2023), of which I have seen a lot of content created over the last 30 years. There are a couple of common themes with far-right evangelical Christians and adherents of disaster spirituality: the world is possessed by evil forces and those who see this clearly are called to foster, in themselves and others, a new spiritual or religious paradigm (Walker, 2023).

Before I go deeper, I want to clarify some things about me and what we’re trying to do on this platform. I do believe that I am a multidimensional being and I believe that I work with a spiritual team that helps me become fully myself and helps illuminate my path. However, they don’t tell me what to do, what to believe or what to think. My team is more like trusted advisors or friends but at the end of the day, the buck stops with me and I own the decisions I make. Some of this team is not incarnate on earth. And although I believe in the possibility that I may be working with entities like Mary Magdalene, Pleiadeans, Buddha, Tara, etc. I really only use these names to express more archetypal or multidimensional energies that others have used to provide guideposts. I do this because I am trying to free myself from knowing through others and by directly working with energies available so that I become more fully me. Finally, I believe my soul came here to learn and I’m not interested in trying to escape what I know I came here to learn. I know this paragraph is long winded, but it is necessary.

So what are examples of spiritual bypassing? I believe there are two main ways of spiritual bypassing and I have been guilty of doing both:

• Using spiritual practices like praying and meditation to avoid confronting and processing emotions.

• All your problems will magically go away because you are following a spiritual path, i.e. can you just take the pain away from me, please?

To me, a big part of being human is for emotional experiences. And yes, that is one of the hard parts of being alive. However, there are so many people actively ignoring their traumas and pain, and they become easier to manipulate, they will suspend logic, they have a tendency to go into disaster thinking and a whole host of mental dis-ease and physical issues. I can tell that people are dealing with more cortisol and more amygdala hijacking which exposes the human system to all kinds of problems like anxiety, panic attacks, fantasy thinking, gut biome disruptions, heart problems and more.

It is no wonder that people are looking for messiahs to save themselves, blaming what is happening to outside sources, resorting to violence because they believe they have no other choice, or buying into conspiracy theories to help make sense of a senseless world. It is much easier to blame something outside of you than to look at yourself honestly and take the steps to start healing your mental health.

Finally, please don’t get me wrong. I believe that having a strong spiritual practice is essential to the health and well-being of a human being. The problems arise when you are thinking that your spirituality will solve everything when the reality is that if you are not grounded physically, mentally and emotionally, it can actually cause severe problems.