So,
Today,
The session is on spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypassing is something that I've had so much experience with.
I started getting interested in spirituality when I was pretty young,
Like a teenager.
And I didn't,
At that time,
Have a lot of mentors,
And I was kind of just exploring a lot of it on my own.
And what I started noticing was that I began to,
I guess you could say,
Misinterpret the teachings or use them in a way that was a bit harmful towards myself,
And I wasn't aware that I was doing that.
For example,
I had created this ideal spiritual image of what I should be,
And whenever I fell short of that,
Which was basically every five minutes,
I had a hard time accepting that.
And so I was turning the spiritual teachings into this ammunition,
Thinking I should always be compassionate and patient and forgiving and loving and all of this stuff,
But not really understanding even what those words meant to me and what that even looked like in action.
So it became a spirituality of shoulds,
If that makes sense.
And over time,
It really wore me down to the point that,
You know,
I completely collapsed.
The spiritual well that I had been drinking from had dried up,
And I didn't know where to go to find that sustenance anymore,
And the ways in which I was using spirituality against myself,
Trying to push away my humanity,
I couldn't maintain it anymore.
It was almost like being in a constant fight-or-flight state,
Because I was trying to live up to this ideal person that seemed so out of reach.
And I think that's an interesting thing,
Because oftentimes on the journey,
There is a gap between this person that we are and this person that we would like to be,
That we see over there somewhere.
I might like to see myself as this perfectly equanimous person who's always patient and forgiving,
Who never gets stressed out,
Who always turns the other cheek,
Is always compassionate and whatever I might have in my mind.
But yet,
Here I am in my imperfect humanity with all of my stuff that's coming up.
And there's that gap there.
So not knowing how to work with that gap can lead to this experience of bypassing,
Which takes many different forms,
Because this gap between who we are and who we want to be creates this split inside of us,
Where I have this human self and then I have the spiritual self and somehow they're not united.
And if we have a divide in our being like that,
Something's going to be awry,
Because there's no harmony,
There's no integrity.
There's just this split.
And really,
Our spirituality is and should be woven into our humanity.
It's just part and parcel of who we are,
Of our life.
And so that was a very difficult lesson that I had to go through.
And I think one of the reasons why this term spiritual bypassing is so relevant and so important is because it's really,
I think,
A reflection of the culture that we live in.
We live in a culture of avoidance in many ways.
On a very simple level,
You could almost say that spiritual bypassing is a fancy way of talking about avoidance and repression.
And we do live in an avoidance culture.
Everything here in our world is meant to distract us from the things that make us uncomfortable,
To distract us from sitting with ourselves.
We don't ever have to sit with ourselves.
We can always have phones.
I mean,
Just in this room,
I have so many gadgets.
There's always something to do to keep our mind occupied and to keep us from feeling that human stuff that we often don't want to feel.
And sometimes,
Of course,
It's important and valuable to just take some space from all of that stuff that's coming up within us.
But if we constantly are avoiding our humanity,
Then this can create a problem.
There was this quote I wanted to share from John Wellwood from an interview about this idea of an idealized person.
I thought this was so powerful.
He said,
One Indian teacher,
Swami Prajnapada,
Whose work I admire,
Said that idealism is an act of violence.
Trying to live up to an ideal instead of being authentically where you are can become a form of inner violence if it splits you in two and pits one side against the other.
When we use spiritual practice to be good and to ward off an underlying sense of deficiency or unworthiness,
Then it turns into a sort of crusade.
And that is basically what John Wellwood was saying about how this term spiritual bypassing came to be,
Because he was witnessing people who had these deep spiritual experiences and could talk about the spiritual path and use all of the language and the lingo and everything,
But yet within them there was this sense of deficiency.
And so instead of being able to address that sense of deficiency or unworthiness,
The people that he worked with,
He noticed how they were using spirituality to try to cover that over or to create another identity.
He calls it a compensatory identity that they created,
Like a spiritual identity to try to mask or push away that other one.
This is really something that we all do.
Because we are living in this culture,
Like I said,
Of avoidance,
Where we're just taught to seek our happiness outside,
We're taught that we don't have what we need and we need to go elsewhere to find it,
That can very easily be applied to the spiritual path.
We can easily take that way of being and just put it into our spiritual journey and feel like,
Okay,
I can't deal with this,
So I'm going to just escape into my spiritual path instead of actually using it to meet what is.
So there's a lot there.
And I guess in some ways we could say that spiritual bypassing is almost like the shadow of spirituality.
And what is our shadow?
There's many different ways to talk about what the shadow is.
When we're young,
We're very sensitive,
Right?
Our nervous systems are so sensitive.
We're very open and free with who we are,
And often certain parts of ourselves are not seen or chastised or judged by our caretakers.
And so we may get the message,
You know,
That these parts of us are bad or wrong,
Being too sensitive,
Being angry,
Being whatever it may be.
And so knowingly or unknowingly,
Most of the time,
If we're young,
We put those parts away into a shadow.
And then we try to contort ourselves into what other people want us to be,
So that we can be approved of,
So that we can be liked,
So that we can be good girl or good boy,
Right?
I mean,
We all do this in different ways.
So then the time comes that if we don't actually go back and look at those parts of ourselves that we placed into the shadow,
Then they can kind of pull us from behind.
They can create a lot of challenges in our life.
When we don't acknowledge those parts of ourselves,
Then we can use spirituality as a way to justify certain behaviours or certain feeling of deficiency or lack within us.
So I'm going to share with you some different ways that spiritual bypassing can manifest,
Because I think it's really interesting to just become aware of it.
And the main thing I want to say is that I've noticed in the conversation around spiritual bypassing,
There's a lot of a shaming type of attitude.
But I don't really think that inquiring into these things with any type of attitude of shame and blame is really helpful at all.
I don't think we grow and learn very well in that type of environment.
When you point fingers at someone and say,
Oh,
You're doing this,
You're bad,
That's wrong,
It shuts us down and it freezes us and it harkens back to a younger time when we probably experienced that type of shaming.
I think it's best to look at these things with love and with curiosity to try to learn and not with the attitude that we've done anything wrong.
Because the truth is,
Whatever you want to say about spiritual bypassing,
It's a kind of defence mechanism.
And there are reasons why we have defence mechanisms.
There are reasons for everything in life.
And so it's important,
I think,
To look through the eyes of compassion and understanding and recognize that if we ourselves are engaging in the practice of spiritual bypassing or the way of thinking of spiritual bypassing,
Or we're experiencing the effects of it from another person,
To recognize that it's coming from a place of hurt,
Usually.
It's coming from a place of woundedness or a place of feeling a lack.
And so what's needed is understanding and love and compassion for oneself,
Not berating or shaming.
So here are some examples of how spiritual bypassing can manifest so that we can all become aware of whether we're doing this or whether we're observing this happening.
So one of the ways it often manifests is through what's sometimes called toxic positivity.
Everything is always shrouded in positivity and light and everything is always love and light.
And when we don't really want to look at the difficulty in things or the pain or grief around something,
We might just say,
It's all good,
Man,
Because that's the culture we're living in.
But where do you go with that?
When you just are constantly focusing on good vibes,
Then not only is that insincere some of the time,
But it also shuts the door for real intimacy and connection.
If I just sit here and I just say,
I have nothing going on,
I'm just going to tell you about spiritual bypassing,
But I'm detached,
It doesn't affect me.
You're not going to feel connected to me.
What connects us is the honesty and transparency about the human journey and the shared human experience with all of its shadow and light.
And so when that toxic positivity comes through,
When all we see is these images in our news feeds or social media feeds or whatever of people who have seemed to have gone beyond whatever the human struggles are,
No more anxiety,
No more depression.
Everything is just beautiful and pure.
It's unrelatable,
Really.
And I think it can create challenges because it's hard to grow and connect when we're only given the message that one side of life matters or is superior to the other.
The idea is that there's the absolute truth,
Which is like the unchanging,
Transcendent reality,
So to speak.
And then we have our relative truth,
Our relative existence,
Which is this person,
This woman,
With her history,
With her challenges,
With my stories about everything,
And it's constantly changing and that is my relative reality.
And when there's that spiritual bypassing that happens,
Often we favor the absolute and we think the absolute is superior.
My human needs,
My human longings,
My human emotions and wounds are inferior and they're blocking me on the path,
So I should only focus on the absolute,
The pure,
Transcendent reality and that's it.
But even if we think that,
Even if we are committed to that absolute truth,
If we actually look at our life,
We can see that the realization of that is not happening.
I could give you a beautiful talk about everything I've read or experienced about these high pollutant concepts,
But if you actually look at my life,
You'll see that I am not living day to day as an embodiment of that.
I'm working through all my stuff.
If we only parrot these things and we're not living them,
Then again,
It creates that gap.
Another way it shows up,
As I mentioned about the blaming and shaming,
Is basically telling people that they're at fault for what they're experiencing.
When I went through three years of being ill,
Nobody could understand why I was sick.
I went to so many doctors and nothing helped me.
And I felt like such a failure because I felt like I have all of these spiritual tools at my disposal.
I have all of this and yet I can't seem to get better.
What's wrong with me?
And I remember a number of times some people that were in my world saying to me,
Have you thought about why you drew this into your life?
You manifested this,
You know that,
Right?
Now,
While there may be truth that the way I was living and the way I was thinking may have contributed to my experience,
That attitude was really not helpful for me.
And it also shut me down more and it just contributed more to whatever feelings of insecurity or low self-worth may already have been there.
But the truth is,
The reason that people say that is because they have a sense in their mind of what is good and what is bad.
So if you're saying to someone,
Why do you think you manifested this sickness?
It's sort of like saying this sickness is bad and you're at fault for creating that.
But the truth is,
Through that experience of being ill,
I discovered music.
If I hadn't gone through that experience,
I probably would not have found my voice or found songs.
So when you just set up that kind of dichotomy and you just say,
You manifested this,
Something's wrong with you,
You should really check yourself and see what you're doing to bring that into your life.
It's actually negating a whole swath of reality,
Which is the truth that sometimes difficult times have immense treasures for us.
And if we only say everything should be happy and joyful and light and pretty,
Then first of all,
That's not reality.
Second of all,
It blames people and makes them feel bad for what they're going through.
And third of all,
It discounts the incredible wisdom and awakening that can come through the friction and chaos of human experience,
If that makes sense.
So I think that's something to really look out for.
If you're going through something,
And we all are in different ways,
To be mindful about the way that we all talk to ourselves about that.
I've had many different challenges and times and I haven't been able to work through something or I've been struggling with something for what feels like a long time.
And that thought often creeps in,
Like,
What am I doing wrong?
Or why isn't this getting better?
But I think we need to zoom out and realize that there's a much bigger context.
There's something so much more going on than we can understand.
And it's not just as simple as that.
To just always come back to that idea that you're manifesting your reality is incredibly insensitive to people who are really going through deep,
Deep suffering.
Somebody would say to a refugee who's fleeing a country,
Why don't you just manifest a better experience for yourself?
I don't even like saying that out loud.
But I think you can get what I'm saying.
Another way that spiritual bypassing can show up is through almost a kind of spiritual elitism,
Or like a spiritual superiority.
Because what often happens is,
As John Wellwood was saying,
We create this so-called spiritual identity to mask this sense of deficiency.
And so there can be that attitude or that feeling like,
You don't know about this?
You don't meditate?
Oh,
You'll find out about it one day.
That kind of attitude,
That our spirituality makes us feel like we're better than others,
Or makes us feel like we figured out something and other people haven't.
That type of spiritual arrogance is also not that pleasant to experience on the receiving end or the giving end.
And I think it's very connected to a teaching from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche,
Who was a Tibetan teacher.
He wrote a book called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,
Which is how we can often use the trappings of spirituality to try to create the so-called spiritual identity.
But the problem comes,
Again,
With that gap when we can't live up to that image.
I remember in the early years,
The first many years of my path,
I was so into learning about spirituality and I wanted everyone to know that I was involved in this stuff.
I just felt like I needed to somehow have it known and seen because I wanted to have that as part of my identity.
It wasn't like I was consciously thinking that,
But I think some part of me wanted to feel a sense of worthiness or a sense of,
I don't know.
I just wanted people to see that.
And I remember doing different things that didn't come from a deep,
True place,
But came from a place of like,
Okay,
Well,
I'm wearing these beads now.
Do you see my beads?
Do you know what that means that I have these beads on?
In the first five or six years that I had met my spiritual teacher,
Amma,
At her programs,
A lot of the times the people who were on the tour staff would wear white clothes.
In a lot of spiritual traditions,
You know,
The monastics,
The swamis or renunciates or the monks and nuns will wear robes of different colors,
Brown or white or orange,
And they signify different things.
And white is of course a color of purity and beautiful.
I am always like spilling food on myself,
So white is not the greatest color for me.
Anyway,
The people on the tour staff were always wearing white and a lot of my friends would wear white.
And I had a really big resistance to it because I just felt like,
I don't know,
I feel like if I'm just wearing only white,
I'm not really being myself,
I'm like conforming and somehow I don't want to do that.
That's what I was thinking to myself,
Like,
I'm not going to do that wearing all white thing.
And then one time I was at a program and a friend of mine said,
Have you thought about the fact that your ego is resisting like wearing white because you don't want to do it,
You're just resisting it?
And it struck me and I thought,
You know,
Maybe it's true.
Maybe I'm really resisting it and maybe my ego is getting in the way and I should just become a holy woman who wears all white clothes.
So I made a decision that at the next program retreat that Amma did,
I was going to only wear white,
Which I never did before.
I got all these white clothes.
I went to the program.
It was a couple of days and I just wore only white the whole time.
And I felt so uncomfortable because it was completely not natural to me and it wasn't coming from a true place.
It was coming from a place of like,
I should do this and I think this means something and I want to be seen that I'm doing this thing.
So I wore these white clothes and every time I went up to have a blessing or something from Amma,
She completely ignored me.
The entire retreat,
Even if I was right in her face,
It was like there was nobody there.
And I remember thinking like,
Hey,
Do you see,
I'm like,
I'm doing the thing like wearing the white clothes and I'm like,
I'm spiritual now.
Don't you see that?
I remember thinking unconsciously like,
I can't believe you're ignoring me when I did this whole thing.
Nothing.
And I was so bummed out because I just thought,
I can't believe it.
I finally surrendered.
I surrendered,
Right?
And I'm wearing these white clothes and she doesn't care.
I went home and I was going through this whole thing.
And when the plane landed and I got my bag from the baggage claim,
I had this black suitcase that had some little suede patches on it and the bag had been left out in the rain for some reason.
When I got it,
It was wet.
And when I got home to wash my clothes and I opened the bag,
All of the white clothes were stained black.
They all had huge black patches all over them,
Every piece of white clothing.
And at first I was upset about it and then I just started laughing because it was such a perfect message.
And the message that I got from that,
That I still remember to this day,
It was a long time ago,
Was that it's not necessary to posture,
To pretend to be something you're not and actually no real spiritual master is going to pander to that and doesn't want that.
Amma says,
It's not about whether you wear ochre robes or whether you wear white.
You should dip your mind in the color of ochre,
Which represents renunciation.
It's not about the external show.
It's about the truth of whether we're actually embodying that,
Living that in our mind.
And so that message that came through for me was so humbling and so important.
I was probably 23,
24 or something.
And I remember just thinking,
Okay,
I'm not going to try to be somebody that I'm not.
I'm just going to be myself.
I have to learn how to be myself and not try to project the spiritual image,
So to speak.
Other ways that spiritual bypassing can manifest.
Maybe being overly detached.
Yeah,
Man,
No,
I'm fine.
I'm good.
Somebody really hurts us.
We don't really want to feel it or we feel like it's the higher path to take to just not feel anything about it.
We may say,
Yeah,
I mean,
That person was horrible to me,
But it's cool.
I mean,
I'm fine with it.
I'm detached.
But are we really?
It's just a good question to contemplate.
And why is it somehow better to just be detached?
Well,
Sometimes it may be,
But I don't know that we can say always across the board that it is.
So when we bypass our true feelings,
Sometimes we end up hurting ourselves.
I remember also many,
Many years ago when I was in my 20s,
I was involved with this guy.
He was so deep in the spiritual path and we had this connection between us,
But it was not a healthy situation at all because he was coming and going all the time,
Pushing and pulling.
And I didn't know where I stood or what it meant and what was going on.
And every time I would try to talk to him about it,
He would just say,
I'm like a cloud.
I'm detached.
And I'd be like,
OK,
OK,
You're detached.
I should be detached too.
I shouldn't have any feelings about this.
I get it.
It's only me.
I'm being needy or something if I actually want to have a conversation with this person.
And so I went into another expression of spiritual bypassing,
Which is being sort of overly compassionate,
But not compassionate in a healthy way.
Shogyam Trungpa sometimes refers to it as idiot compassion,
Where basically saying,
I understand your wounds or your trauma,
And I know you're doing the best you can,
And so it's OK.
However you want to treat me is fine.
I'm always going to be forgiving.
I'm going to be compassionate.
I'm going to say it's OK.
Whatever happens,
Many times we do this,
Thinking like,
I want to be a good person.
I want to be a spiritual person.
I don't want to hurt anybody.
And so if I assert my needs or if I speak up,
If somebody does something that I don't like,
Then maybe it's disrespectful,
Or maybe it means that somehow I'm not spiritual anymore.
Maybe it means that I'm not a good person anymore.
But that's a trap as well,
Because it doesn't really help us or anyone to just become a doormat.
I mean,
Being compassionate doesn't mean just allowing anybody to treat us any which way.
There has to be some self-respect involved.
There has to be an awareness of a boundary,
Like when somebody crosses that boundary,
That doesn't feel good.
We have to be able to know that and to articulate it.
But that's another interesting way that I think spiritual bypassing can manifest itself,
Or it has for me,
Thinking,
OK,
I see what these spiritual teachings are.
I know how I'm supposed to behave.
But yet,
If I feel like someone is really hurting me or disrespecting me,
Am I just supposed to just be quiet and not have a response at all?
Or is it compassionate to say,
No,
This doesn't feel good to me.
This isn't OK.
I don't like when you do this.
We can trust in the divine,
As the metaphor goes,
But we still need to tie up our camel,
Right?
We can know that everything is an illusion or everything is God or everything is one,
But we're not going to stand on a train track as the train comes.
We have to get out of the way.
We have to take care of ourselves.
So I think that's something really important to be mindful of as well.
Often John Wellwood spoke about the idea of premature transcendence,
You know,
Trying to go beyond the self before we've actually fully developed it and fully allowed it to be.
And I think there's something so profound about that.
And if you look at realized masters or spiritual masters,
They have a very strong sense of self.
They have a very strong personality,
But yet it's like full of space.
There's like an emptiness.
There's no one there,
But there's somebody there.
It's really fascinating.
So the last thing I want to mention around spiritual bypassing that I think is really important is the social realm,
Because spiritual bypassing can often be used to justify a lot of social issues and social problems when we think we're coming from the perspective of oneness,
But actually that attitude may in fact be causing harm.
For example,
Saying,
You know,
I don't see color or all lives matter.
Of course all lives matter,
A caterpillar matters,
A bird matters,
Horses matter.
All human beings matter.
But the fact is,
The way our society is set up is that all lives are not treated like they matter the same.
This is just the reality.
There is major disparity going on.
People who look like me are benefited so much more by the structures of society.
And it's important to know that.
It's important to look at that,
Because if we don't acknowledge it and take responsibility for it,
How will we ever help to bring change?
If we pretend that there's no such thing as racism,
Then it's impossible to do anything to change it.
And so,
No,
All lives are not treated like they matter.
So if we just say that thinking that it's a beautiful rainbow vision,
We're not actually looking at the reality of what's going on.
And so I think when using sweeping comments about it's all one and all lives matter,
That actually doesn't help and it's not true.
Of course,
Everything has the same consciousness in it.
Everything has the same awareness in it.
But in the relative plane,
That is not what's playing out.
And so I think to look at that,
How we may be using spiritual platitudes to justify things that actually need attention and need a light shined on them.
That's the other thing that I think is fascinating is that I've seen a lot of posts on social media and stuff of people saying it's not all love and light rolling their eyes.
People always talk about love and light as if they're kind of like these cheap throwaway terms.
But actually,
If you really look at love and light,
There's nothing cheap and throwaway about those two words.
Love and light are powerful illuminators and revealers.
Light shines in and reveals everything.
It illuminates everything.
And love does the same thing.
That's why if you fall in love with someone at first,
It's like,
Oh,
Everything is a honeymoon.
It's so beautiful.
But then love shines in and starts to illuminate the places that haven't had light on them.
The love starts to illuminate those places in us that are hurt or that are shut down or wounded or whatever.
Love is an illuminator.
It's a revealer.
So when we say love and light,
I think it's important to think about what we mean by that,
Because those are the two most powerful forces in existence.
I think in the context of all of this,
As I said in the beginning,
What is most important is compassion,
Because we do the best we can where we are at that time.
The way of thinking or the way I acted when I was in my early 20s is different from now.
And I'm sure in 20 years,
It will be different from even now,
Because there's constantly evolution happening.
And I think it's important to just look within ourselves in a loving way,
To try to bring light and understanding about why we may have these defense patterns or why we may want to avoid certain aspects of ourself.
It's painful sometimes to see and feel these things within ourselves.
But those are the places within us that need love and they need attention.
Anyone can say it's all one,
One heart,
One love.
But when someone says that,
Chances are that they may not be living that statement in their everyday reality.
It's better to be honest and have these conversations and be real about what we're bumping up against or what's causing us to struggle.
So I think deep understanding and acceptance is really important for where we are and not trying to be somewhere that we're not.
I've shared a quote once from Anais Nin who said,
When one is pretending,
The entire body revolts.
And so true,
It's been my experience.
When we pretend to be someone we're not,
There is a revolt that's happening inside of us.
Even if we're not aware of it,
There is that sense of a split or of something not being in alignment.
And that's uncomfortable.
That creates disharmony within us.
So I think awareness is a great transformer.
Awareness begins the process of healing.
There's nothing that we actually necessarily need to do,
But just to become more aware of like that tendency of our mind to push something away or to defend against it and just notice it,
To see it.
So there's just so much more that can be shared about this.
The idea is just to,
Like I said,
Distill it to the essence of that.
It's just something to be mindful of because we have these pitfalls on the path.
We just do.
There are pitfalls that happen.
Our ego is able to dress up in any which way.
It can dress up as this or that.
And we just need to see that and recognize that that's its nature.
That's what it's trying to do.
It's trying to prove its existence.
It's trying to show how important it is.
But there's something within us that's much deeper than that.
That's much more profound and much more real than that.
That's our true nature,
Right?
It's our true self.
It's that part of us that we contact in meditation or through music.
That part that is not doing those trips,
You know,
That part of us is there.
What I think is a really good antidote to all of this spiritual bypassing stuff is actually to clarify our motivation.
Why am I doing what I'm doing?
Why am I meditating?
Why am I listening to mantras?
Why am I listening to live sessions?
And what's the point?
There is a longing.
There's a longing to be free from suffering.
There's a longing for compassion,
For love,
For healing.
And when we connect to that true motivation,
That true,
True aspiration,
Then all of that other stuff falls away.
Because honestly,
It's not really important.
And it is important at the same time,
Right?
That's the duality.
That's the dance of this human life,
The relative and the absolute.
But when we connect to our aspiration about what we're really wanting here,
What really matters,
That is like a chiropractic adjustment,
A cosmic chiropractic adjustment.
It just puts us back into alignment with what we're really doing here.
I'd like to end with this passage,
A short quote from Thich Nhat Hanh.
I think it's really beautiful.
And I think it sums up my takeaway from this subject.
To be beautiful means to be yourself.
You don't need to be accepted by others.
You need to accept yourself.
When you were born a lotus flower,
Be a beautiful lotus flower.
Don't try to be a magnolia flower.
If you crave acceptance and recognition,
And try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be,
You will suffer all your life.
True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself,
Accepting yourself,
Having confidence in yourself.
Such a beautiful message,
That we don't have to try to adopt another identity,
Some kind of spiritual identity,
Whatever that means.
Let's just be as we are.
Be honest and true.
And somehow we have to learn how to do that by unlearning all of the patterns and things we've done that keep us from that.
But that's the beauty of gathering together in satsang,
Sharing a space of truth,
You know,
Talking honestly about the human experience.
Thank you.
