It was supposed to be an educational week in a coastal city down South. My colleague and I were taking students from the bone-chilling winter of New England down to warmer shores to learn about local issues of social justice. The year before, we had led a winter trip that had been deeply moving, rooted in the work of transformative justice, and that moved many of us to connect our own struggles with the struggles of the communities in which we lived. The students on the trip had been thoughtful, engaged, mature, and deeply caring. I was ready for another inspiring week.
The unraveling began, however, when our flight was delayed 11 hours, and our group was forced to split at the airport; friend groups immediately pooled together, and chaperones ended up on a separate flight. When we arrived in town and went on a toiletry run, several students didn’t report back in time, and when I worriedly went looking for them, found them nonchalantly buying swimsuits. The rest of the week, students continued to show up late, engage half-heartedly in morning and evening reflections, and give me major attitude; by then, they could smell the disapproval and annoyance-induced drill-sergeant demeanor seeping off of me. We had epically failed as trip leaders, to the point that I was actively trying to escape my students any chance I got.
After one particularly frustrating night, I walked with my colleague back to the dorms and shared my anger and disappointment with myself, the behavior we had allowed, and our joint decisionmaking process on the trip thus far. My colleague listened, nodded meditatively, and said with a small smile, “I hear you, but I believe in the spiritual path of speaking truth with love.”
Anger leapt up inside me. I sensed that what my colleague was essentially saying was: “You being upset and angry makes you unloving and makes me uncomfortable. And that is un-spiritual of you. Can you be less frustrated? That is the more spiritual, and better, thing to do.” My anger was heightened by the fact that this colleague was someone with considerable social power — an older white cis-gendered heterosexual Christian man who was using spiritual language to silence me.
The thing is, I too believe in speaking truth with love. And while anger is often utilized as a force of destruction rather than transformation and creation (and I, too have engaged in the toxic kind of anger), I don’t believe that being loving means not being angry. To love does not mean to be “nice” and affectionate all the time. Yet phrases like “nonviolence” or “revolutionary love” or Dr. King quotes (“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that”) often get co-opted by those who 1) have power and 2) are uncomfortable with confrontation/accountability. The result is the silencing of dissent and critique (especially by women, folks of color, and other groups who have been historically marginalized). This silencing is often dressed in the language of “enlightenment” or “spiritual wisdom.”
There is a term for this kind of insidious behavior: spiritual bypassing.
What is spiritual bypassing?
In Robert Masters’ 2010 book, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters, he explains that spiritual bypassing is marked by emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, overly tolerant compassion, deep judgment about one’s negative or shadow side, and, among other things, delusions of being at a higher level of being.
In other words, someone who is spiritually bypassing uses their ‘Spiritual Person’ persona to sugarcoat/circumvent the aspects of themselves and others that they see as ‘unspiritual.’
These aspects include: anger, grief, jealousy, fear, disappointment, despair, and more. This repression often comes from our deep discomfort with these emotions in ourselves and our own inability to tolerate anger, frustration, and sadness.
In order to make these feelings go away, we push them away under the guise of spiritual language — we say, sometimes with a certain holier-than-thou-ness, that we prefer to practice connection, love, forgiveness, and endless compassion, when really we are just avoiding disconnection, dislike, resentment, and the parts of ourselves that bring up shame and self-judgment.
People who are spiritually bypassing may:
- Seem to focus only on the positive (E.g.: Make endlessly positive and cheery posts on social media)
- Change the subject when anything “negative” or “uncomfortable” comes up.
- Respond to others’ painful experiences by dressing them up in positive language: “Without pain, there is no joy,” etc. (While this is true, the way it is said often doesn’t affirm someone’s experience but does help the bypasser avoid the discomfort of their own or someone else’s experience.)
- See spirituality as a way of rising “above” human emotions, especially the ones we don’t like.
- Deem those who exhibit anger/grief/jealousy/resentment as “unenlightened,” “less spiritual,” “less wise,” “not on the spiritual path.”
- Label those who make them uncomfortable as “angry,” “intense,” or other loaded/coded language.
- Let one’s boundaries get repeatedly crossed because not doing so would be “unloving” or “unkind.”
- Have a hard time standing up for themselves or being assertive.
- Feel immense guilt/shame when they do feel “negative” emotions or set a boundary.
When we are spiritually bypassing, instead of reflecting on what we are not willing to face in that moment, we are projecting what we don’t like about ourselves onto the other.
Faced with what we haven’t excavated in ourselves, we put on our ‘spiritual cloaks’ and hide behind them, saying we don’t approve because something isn’t the ‘spiritual’ or ‘enlightened’ way, when really we don’t approve because that which it unearths in ourselves scares us.
Instead, we end up shutting uncomfortable emotions down and push away anyone who is experiencing them.
The problem with this is that in shutting down our own and others’ “negative” experiences, we miss out on the opportunity to become more whole. The word “healing” has the same root as the words “whole” and “holy.” To follow a spiritual path — to seek holiness or that which is sacred — means to seek wholeness and healing. Wholeness cannot come from splitting ourselves off from ourselves. The parts of ourselves which we do not love, which we judge in others, need to be integrated into our identities in order for us to be more loving with ourselves and with others. The irony is that by facing those sides of ourselves that we see as unloving, we end up bringing more love and compassion into the world, for when we are better able to show compassion to the dark sides of ourselves, we are also better able to love the “unlovable” parts of one another.
What do we do if we find ourselves spiritually bypassing?
Here’s my step-by-step guide. Feel free to adapt it to what works for you.
- Notice that you are feeling uncomfortable with an emotion. This might mean you feel tightness in your chest, a pit in your stomach, your heart beating faster, etc.
- Compassionately ask yourself, or your inner kid, “Hey there — what’s going on? Are you feeling scared? Worried? Uncomfortable? What just happened that made you feel that way?”
- Be curious about the feeling. Where is it coming from? Was there messaging when you were growing up about anger or sadness or other “negative” emotions? How did that messaging make you feel? How did you react to it?
- What would your wise self — your inner wisdom — say about that? What does it tell you about those feelings? Can you extend that wisdom towards whoever it is you are in interaction with and respond to them from that place?
This takes time, and few of us get it right on our first (or second, or third!) tries. The baby step is pausing before we react and noticing what’s going on in our bodies. If we have more time in the moment, we can delve deeper into why those feelings make us uncomfortable and discern how best to respond. Otherwise, we come back to the deeper questions when we have more space to process them. This means that sometimes we might just have to sit with the discomfort we feel in the moment without immediately responding; a wiser response may emerge later from engaging in those deeper questions.
Say you’re reading this post and realize that you have shut someone else down in the past by engaging in spiritual bypassing. What do you do now? If it feels right and appropriate, find a way to go back to the person you wronged or dismissed, and acknowledge what was going on for you in the moment. (It is countercultural to do this, especially if you are the one with power, privilege or authority in the relationship. But that is also what can make it so profoundly healing.)
Have any of y’all read bell hooks’ writing? I am reminded of the way she, a black feminist and activist, defines love in All About Love. Love, she writes, is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Love, therefore, is hard work. It does not bypass what is uncomfortable. It doesn’t focus solely on the positive and sweep everything else under the rug or out of the Instagram frame. It tells the truth in service of liberation, and the truth is multidimensional, as are we. Healing and wholeness mean leaning into those dimensions of ourselves, for by leaning into them, we come to better understand ourselves and others and are more able to bring love, peace, and compassion into the world.