Lots of people start a meditation practice because they’re looking for relief from stress, anxiety, and existential dissatisfaction. And regular meditation practice can certainly deliver some relief. But too often, meditation can become like a drug, helping us to numb, escape or suppress painful, troubling, or overwhelming emotions. This phenomenon is called a spiritual bypass.
In Effortless Mindfulness (EM), I teach about the pitfalls of the spiritual bypass right from the start, to ensure that you avoid this trap when meditating. Indeed, in EM, I introduce you to an entire map of awakening, which illuminates the many ways that we can go off course.
And to really make sure that you stay on track, I’ve added some complimentary concepts to this idea of spiritual bypass, including the Cognitive Overpass and the Psychological Underpass.
But first, what is spiritual bypassing and why is it an issue? The author, psychotherapist, and long-time meditation practitioner John Welwood, PHD, coined the term in the 1970s. He was a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s, and he noticed an interesting phenomenon in his spiritual community. Welwood describes it this way in an interview with Tricycle magazine.
Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks… trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. -John Welwood
So what does spiritual bypassing actually look like and what does it mean in practice? In the context of Effortless Mindfulness and Internal Family Systems (IFS), all our parts—whether hurt, protective, angry, or defensive—work toward making everything feel okay. It’s important not to minimize, reject, or try to get rid of our strong emotional parts.
However, when we spiritually bypass, we do the opposite. For example, if we use concentration practices like one-pointed attention to calm our minds, we can end up comfortably numb in what one of my teachers, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, calls “stupid meditation.”
And here’s another example. By trying to meditate our negative feelings away, we end up in a spiritual bypass—only focusing on the transcendent dimension or pure consciousness. We may confuse this for the goal, calling this dimension “real” and everything else “an illusion.” When we lose our way like this, we experience ourselves as awake awareness, but we’re detached from our body and from the parts of us that are still unintegrated.
It can be important to step out of the contraction of our limited mind, but then we want to transcend and include—to wake up and grow up—and discover the unity of the infinite and the intimate.
Here are some other spiritual bypass examples that can help you recognize and identify when you or someone you know might be caught in this form of self defense.
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And in my experience, I’ve noticed that there are some additional moves we make to avoid our parts. These moves are different ways of bypassing our wholeness. I call them the Cognitive Overpass and Psychological Underpass.
For example, when our identity remains in “I think, therefore I am,” and we try to deal with our parts by intellectualizing or rationalizing them away, I call this a Cognitive Overpass. We can’t both remain in a spiritual ego or smart part that’s read many books and gives wise quotes and also discover a different way of knowing that isn’t thought based yet includes thoughts, feeling, and sensations.
If we have a psychology that doesn’t yet include this larger dimension of Self (awake awareness), we can end up in what I call a Psychological Underpass. Many people do very good work in therapy but they end up with a calmer, insightful, and kinder ego manager.
But that ego manager is still smaller than the power of our emotional life. It also means that we reduce our primary identity and tools of healing to biology, ego managers, emotions, cognition, and personality. We try to tend to our parts from a helpful manager part that can be skilled, yes, but it’s not our true Self.
This is why it is so important to practice effortless mindfulness: so that we can get to know and act from our true Self.
The spiritual bypass, cognitive overpass, and psychological underpass are attempts to heal parts from other parts! This doesn’t work. We can’t experience full integration because our parts don’t have the capacity for healing love.
Only our true Self is bigger than and beyond all of our conditioning. So the important thing is to find the Self that has the capacity to bear what seems unbearable—the Self that can be with these parts and love them.
Sometimes, though, it’s hard to tell if we’re meeting parts from a Self-like part, especially when we make a cognitive overpass and we are not used to experiencing ourselves outside of the small mind. It’s common to want to escape the small mind—and everything else—so badly that we end up in the spiritual bypass!
The key is to be gentle with ourselves and with all of our parts, including the parts of us that are worried if we’re doing this work incorrectly or judging ourselves for “not getting it.”
When you check to see where Self is, who is looking? Only the interconnected Self all around and within all parts can know itself. Self is not a state that appears to you. This is because Self is the most authentic version of you!
As a way of un-blending your Self from Self-like parts, you can ask, Is this part aware of me? which will shift you to locate your Self beyond the part, creating an amazing opportunity to know Self directly from the Self.
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