In his 2010 book, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters, psychotherapist Robert Masters explores the surprisingly common use of “spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”

This is surprising because we often turn to spirituality and religion in times of difficulty and strife. When we lose someone we love, the rituals and traditions of religious communities can help ground and move us through the pain and grief. We might also turn to practices like meditation or prayer as ways to cope with struggles in our lives. How often have we heard the advice that when we are stressed or lost, we should bring our attention to our breath or body and develop our capacity for mindfulness? That if we can connect with something bigger than ourselves or cultivate compassion for ourselves and others, we can find a sense of calm?

Spiritual practices such as these can be quite useful. But too often, we use them as tools of suppression and avoidance. Instead of helping us be present with and work through our pain, we often end up using them to push that very pain away. We focus exclusively on the breath in meditation or the body in yoga, but then never go more deeply and sit with the core wounds and trauma that live within us. We might talk a good game, using terms that we read in a book about equanimity, but we really just trick ourselves into thinking that we are more spiritually advanced than we really are. That is because, in the words of Masters, “we tend not to have very much tolerance, either personally or collectively, for facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring pain-numbing ‘solutions,’ regardless of how much suffering such ‘remedies’ catalyze.” 

Instead of engaging with our pain, when we take up these practices, we often end up engaging in “spiritual bypassing,” numbing ourselves to our suffering, overemphasizing the positive, avoiding anger, being overly tolerant of harmful behavior, withholding judgment about negative or shadow sides of ourselves and others, and deluding ourselves that we have arrived at a higher state of development. So we make ourselves believe that we look good to ourselves and to others, and we might even convince ourselves that we feel good. 

But in truth, we are just hiding from our pain. The pain of feeling excluded because of who we are or because of the bodies that we inhabit, of feeling misunderstood by our parents or by our peers, of not getting the love and support that we needed from our caregivers, or of any of the many other wounds and pains that each of us holds within us. We get caught in spiritual bypassing when we use techniques and ideas from the world of spirituality and religion to avoid dealing with what is most real and vital in our lives.

Bypassing is not something that takes place in the realm of spirituality alone. We can bypass using all sorts of techniques. There can be academic bypassing, where we bury ourselves in study as a way to distract ourselves. There can be work bypassing, where we focus exclusively on our activities and commitments. There can be political bypassing, where we jump reactively and hastily to organize a protest, sign a letter, or start a new organization. On their own, academics, work, and politics are not inherently bad. But they become bypassing when we convince ourselves that we are doing important work when we are really avoiding the inner work which is most crucial for our lives. We end up acting from a place of shadow and unresolved trauma that necessarily impacts and even damages the outcomes that we hope to achieve. When this occurs, even the most diligent studying, the most committed work, or the most well-planned protest or action replicates or amplifies harm and does not have the intended outcome.

A number of years ago, I remember learning a striking teaching from the late Zen teacher John Daido Loori Roshi. In response to a question about the relationship between meditation practice and protesting, he said that both were important. Protest and action are vital and necessary. But when our work in the world is disconnected from our spiritual practice, when we go out to march without pairing it with the inner work of becoming intimate with our inner world and our inner wounds, then it will never be effective. I take that to mean that before we act — and indeed, throughout the process of acting — we need to get in touch with the pain and core wounds that are always with us. 

We need to recognize that pain is not something that we alone experience, but rather that it is something that all beings feel, each in their own way. If we can tie our ways of being in the world with an ongoing commitment to exploring and becoming intimate with our own brokenness, and that of others, perhaps our work in the world will bring about the healing that we all so desperately need.

Rabbi Seth Wax is the College’s Jewish Chaplain.