Spiritual Bypassing: A Road to Nowhere
How "skipping the hard stuff" leaves us stuck in the same void.
Read time: Approx 5-7 min
*Disclaimer: I use the word “spiritual” frequently. I am not “religious” and struggle to support the ideals of most structured religions these days (no judgment to those that do). I tend to identify with spirituality as the interconnectedness between our physical bodies, our psychology, nature, and mystical parts of the universe we may never be able to explain. These musings are from my own “not-always-so-pretty” journey, and my hope is that sharing them may make yours feel a little more real and a little less lonely. Progress is non-linear and it's often unpleasant. But it’s progress.
You know that friend…the one who hears you talk about your grief, your breakup, your spiral into depression and replies with, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” or “God’s timing is perfect” or “You're just not meditating enough…” Yeah. This one’s for them.
And if that friend is you? Buckle in :).
While it might feel comforting…”spiritual” even…to float above pain on a fluffy cloud of affirmations and mantras, the truth is, you’re not healing. You’re dodging.
Psychologist John Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing” in the 1980s to describe a defense mechanism. A kind of psychological fast-food response to suffering. It’s what happens when people reach for spiritual tools to avoid dealing with hard emotions or psychological wounds.
It’s not about spirituality being bad. Far from it. The issue is using spirituality to escape the real work. You’re not meditating through your trauma…you’re using meditation to pretend it doesn’t exist. And eventually, it bites back.
The Many Faces of the Bypass
Spiritual bypassing doesn’t just look like a smelly dude with dreadlocks lighting sage and saying “Namaste” instead of “I’m sorry.” It’s sneakier than that:
Toxic Positivity: “Just stay positive!” becomes a muzzle for grief, rage, or despair. Gratitude journaling, while it has its positives, tends to show up in this way.
Premature Forgiveness: You forgive the person who hurt you because your pastor said “bitterness poisons the soul.” But inside, you’re still burning.
Disembodiment: You live in your head or in some imagined “higher self” and forget you even have a body that needs tending.
Judgment Masquerading as Enlightenment: You don’t feel anger anymore. Just a vague sense that everyone else is spiritually asleep. Cynicism is a good sign you’re still “in the thick of it.”
Self-Abandonment Dressed as Surrender: You hand over your boundaries to the Universe because “everything is unfolding as it should.”
Sounds familiar? That’s because spiritual bypassing has infiltrated everything from New Age Instagram to old-school evangelical circles.
The Neuroscience of Avoidance
When you suppress emotion, especially repeatedly, your body doesn’t just forget. Studies from the University of Texas show that suppressing emotions actually makes them more intense. The amygdala, the brain’s emotion center, ramps up when emotions are denied. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex tries to rationalize or spiritualize everything into oblivion. It’s the infamous battle of left vs. right.
This disconnect between feeling and thinking creates physiological tension: raised cortisol, disrupted sleep, anxiety. You might smile during church or chant during yoga, but your body knows you’re lying and that, deep down, you feel like sh*t.
And over time, this dissonance isn’t just unhealthy. It becomes unsustainable.
The Cost of Skipping the Work
What happens when you bypass grief? It festers. When you “let go” of betrayal too quickly? You internalize shame. The bypassed emotions don’t vanish; they morph. Into depression, panic attacks, autoimmune flares, or sudden, irrational rage at someone who cuts you off in traffic (You know that one all too well, don’t you?).
Feelings demand to be felt. If you won’t feel them with intention, they’ll find another way.
Spiritual bypassing is like building a house on sand. It looks pretty, maybe even peaceful. But it will collapse under the weight…often at the worst possible moment.
Healing Isn’t Clean. And That’s the Point.
True healing doesn’t look like a neatly filtered quote on Instagram. It looks like crying on the floor of your therapist’s office, saying things you’re ashamed to admit even to yourself. It looks like shaking during somatic work, revisiting childhood wounds, confronting the fact that your father never said “I love you” and that maybe, deep down, you still carry that ache.
And yes…there may still exist some form of prayer. Sometimes there’s poetry. But those come after the wreckage, not instead of it.
Healing is messy. Incomplete. Often unsexy. But it’s real. It’s what our body’s were designed to do.
The Real Deal…What Does It Look Like?
Real spirituality doesn’t bypass the human condition. It meets it. It sits with the dying. It doesn’t preach to the grieving; it grieves with them (#HealthcareWorkers). It doesn’t say, “Everything’s fine,” when it clearly isn’t. It says, “I see your pain. I’ll sit here with you.”
The most spiritual people I’ve ever met weren’t the ones reciting mantras or quoting scripture. They were the ones who knew how to hold silence, who could be present without fixing, who had scars and let you see them, completely, and with vulnerability.
The Psychedelic Bypass: “One More Journey” Syndrome
Let’s get honest about another kind of bypass—one that’s becoming way too common in modern psychedelic healing spaces.
You know the drill. Someone has a ketamine session or munches on some mushrooms, feels their childhood trauma unravel in vines of fractal light, sobs into a blanket, and declares they’ve finally healed. A week later, they’re scheduling another trip. And another. And another.
Psychedelics don’t heal you. They just show you what needs healing.
They crack open the door to your unconscious—but they don’t walk you through it. And if every insight gets buried under a rush to “go deeper,” you’re not integrating. You’re avoiding.
The desire for just one more journey becomes its own kind of addiction—an endless search for clarity, meaning, or wholeness that was never missing in the first place. The answers aren’t out there in the next retreat, the next ceremony, or the next heroic dose. They’re already inside you. Always have been.
And that’s the rub…when the medicine wears off, you’re still the one who has to do the work. The shadow stuff. The boundaries. The tears. The trauma that doesn’t unravel in one night but needs months—sometimes years—of attention. Psychedelics may accelerate awareness, but awareness isn’t healing. Integration is.
So if you’ve been tripping balls and chasing transcendence but still ghosting your therapist, dodging hard conversations, or refusing to feel the damn feelings…you’re not healing. You’re bypassing. Albeit with more vibrant colors and melting walls…
The medicine isn’t broken. You’re just not listening.
This isn’t judgment. It’s a confession. I’ve been that guy—escalating the dose, chasing catharsis, believing that if I just broke apart hard enough, the pieces would finally rearrange themselves into something whole. But here’s the truth psychedelics eventually showed me, one I kept trying to outpace:
“You cannot buy or dose your way to enlightenment.”
The compound isn’t the teacher. Life is. The heartbreak. The loneliness. The awkward conversation you’ve been avoiding for six months. The mirror. The 3 a.m. dread. That’s the curriculum. The medicine just shows you the classroom.
And without integration? Awareness becomes a curse. You see your patterns more clearly—but still live them. You recognize your wounds—but still bleed them onto others. You’ve torn open the veil, but you’re still trapped in the same emotional loop, just more conscious of it. And that awareness without action? It’s a fast-track to suffering and despair.
More Stillness, Less Seeking
The real trip is staying. Staying when it's boring. When it’s hard. When you’re not getting fireworks. When you’re just...here. Integration is uncomfortable because it asks you to trade cosmic insight for earthly discipline. It asks for your mundane attention. And that’s a much harder sell.
But that’s where change actually happens.
Meditation, too, can be a bypass when used to “transcend” the human mess rather than metabolize it. Stillness isn't about escaping the self. It's about learning how to sit with it, even when it won’t shut up. Even when it stinks.
Western Culture Is Speeding Nowhere
While I am passionate about the psychedelic movement currently unfolding, I'm also, deep down, skeptical and cautious. Not because they do not hold immense value, but because our society will destroy its value, like everything else good and pure, in the presence of money, greed, power, control, and the lack of patience.
In a culture allergic to discomfort, psychedelics are being swallowed into the same capitalist algorithm that sells everything else…quicker, higher, more, NOW. Transformation on demand. Enlightenment in a capsule. A curated trip in Costa Rica with Wi-Fi and organic bone broth.
But no one tells you what comes after the retreat. No one holds your hand when the big realizations get tested in the mundane—when your nervous system says “no” even though your mind screams “growth.” There is no Instagram quote or matcha smoothie that makes integration less gritty.
But…there are people. There’s community. There’s silence. There’s sweat. There’s grief work. There’s therapy. There’s embodiment. And most of all—there’s time.
Stop Floating. Start Feeling.
If any part of this hits a nerve, good. That nerve’s trying to tell you something.
You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be “high vibration.” You don’t need to fake peace when your insides are on fire. You just need to be honest.
Next time you feel yourself reaching for a spiritual quote when someone is falling apart, or when you are, pause. Ask, “What’s here that I don’t want to feel? And can I sit with it, listen to it, for just a minute longer?”
Healing is a war won in the trenches, not on the mountaintop. Let it be messy. Let it be real.
Let it be yours.
"Self improvement should never pull you away from life—it should root you deeper, through authenticity.”
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