The spiritual path promises us mental, emotional and physical healing, plus ways to view the world in new ways that ultimately lead to peace and happiness. The trouble is, these concepts can lead to a state of avoidance in our lives, excuses for bypassing important matters, unhelpful thoughts and emotions. It's important to avoid this states of avoidance or 'bypassing'. One who considers themselves to be 'spiritual', might worry that if they don't appear at peace, happy and balanced, then they might be perceived by others as: - Not spiritual enough. - Not practicing properly. - Unbalanced and ungrounded. - Not a good healer, teacher etc. Spiritual bypassing is a way of avoiding unpleasant emotions. We might prevent ourselves from experiencing and facing past traumas and psychological wounds that desperately need healing, in favor of maintaining a state of artificial positivity all the time. Even when we are dealing with upsetting events as they happen in our lives, we still may try to force a positive attitude on ourselves rather than facing and processing the experiences head-on. This is a good book on connecting with your emotions rather than bypassing them: Emotional Intimacy: A Comprehensive Guide for Connecting with the Power of Your Emotions. This is different from practicing detachment from outcomes of circumstances and events, where we try not to pin our happiness and emotional well-being on outcomes in our lives. If we do experience sadness or upset in the present moment however, we must be present in those emotions and work them through. Bottling them up and repressing them in the subconscious mind is a ticket to emotional problems later on. Examples Of Spiritual Bypassing: 1. Rather than detaching from outcomes, we put on a happy face and repress sadness. We must face sadness if we have it.
2. Repeating affirmations to feel better rather than diving into repressed trauma and pain and healing it. 3. Over focusing on being positive all the time. 4. Finding negative emotions disgraceful or even being fearful of them. Which is obviously going to create more negative emotion.
5. Brushing off others misfortunes as 'they manifested that'. Sometimes it's possible to associate others' misfortunes with their own poor manifesting abilities; but this is unfair. We all go through periods of negativity, which ultimately result in manifesting some unhappy circumstances. We all have these experiences in our lives in order for our consciousness to expand and to learn and grow. But we mustn't be put off assisting others in their time of need as if they deserve what's happening to them. 6. Ignore health conditions by blaming them solely on 'the energies'. Yes the geomagnetic frequencies and the Schumann Resonance clearly have an effect on emotional and physical well-being, but we give our power away when we blame all our maladies on the energies. We must take our power back to manifest better, and perform inner work on emotional repression that could be leading to physical illnesses. 7. Not upholding your own boundaries in order to appear like a nice person, tolerant or accepting. On the spiritual path, it's tempting to feel like we need to appear like a saint. This can result in us dropping our boundaries and people walking all over us. It's important to have good strong boundaries, as examples, it's not acceptable if someone is talking down to us, and it's not acceptable if someone is stealing from us. We have understanding, but we do not let others take us for a ride. 8. Trying to appear perfect and balanced when we really need to talk to someone. Sometimes we feel like we must bottle things up because we might appear unbalanced if we share how we feel with others. It is important however that we talk about our problems if we need to. 9. Upon realizing we are infinite beings, adopting a mild 'Messiah complex' or putting oneself above others. This can sometimes happen during a spiritual awakening, it is common to experience a mild Messiah complex because we are learning new information that we feel others may not know. We go can through delusions and psychosis at the same time, it's a natural process. However if we experience ourselves as being above others ongoing, due to us being here to save the world or something like that, then this could be seen as spiritual bypassing as we are avoiding normal social relationships and our true self. 10. Complaining that others are spiritually underdeveloped, avoiding them and feeling like they are beneath you. 11. Feeling like you must always be in the right because you are 'awakened' and others are not. 12. Practising avoidance of all negative thoughts and emotions rather than healing repressed trauma and memories that caused them. I already mentioned this, but it is a particularly important one. So to sum up, if we are aware of these methods of spiritual bypassing, then we can avoid them. We can bypass the bypassing! Most people don't tend to fall into these traps anyway, but the forced positivity is most common, and being highly unsustainable and repressive, it should avoided. Much love.