How to avoid spiritual bypassing.
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For starters, if you know what spiritual bypassing is, you’ll know that title of this blog post is a solid oxymoron. (Pretty proud of myself on that one 🙂 ).
Spiritual bypassing is avoidance. Plain and simple.
So you’re really asking yourself, “how do I avoid avoiding?”
Right. Let’s break that down further.
What Is Spiritual Bypassing?
Spiritual bypassing is using spiritual practices or beliefs as a scapegoat for avoiding one’s difficult emotions.
A spiritual bypasser could believe that they are doing their “spiritual work” by practicing yoga every morning. Of course, a daily yoga practice can be spiritual if the practitioner uses the exercise as a tool for working out unresolved internal issues. If the yoga is used mainly as a physical exercise, then the practice is not inherently spiritual.
Alas, there is no such thing as “inherently spiritual”. (Except the fact that we are all inherently spiritual as we all inherently have spirit/are spirit. But I digress…)
“Inherently spiritual” implies that a state of spirituality is a given. Yet, the magnitude of one’s spirituality is in direct proportion to the amount of attention that it’s given.
Ok. So how to stop spiritually bypassing? Stop avoiding.
Avoiding. What are we avoiding? What do we need to pay attention to?
Emotions. Emotions are very important. Read this post to learn more about the energetics of emotions.
Of course, difficult emotions can be hard to face and engage with. One of the main reasons I started this blog is to make coping with emotions easier for all of us. I strongly believe that emotions are the most powerful tool we have. Yet, I also believe they are the most misunderstood tool we have.
Ways to Work Through Emotions:
1. Write it down.
Everyday, make a practice of writing down your current emotion and putting it on display. Consider this emotion through the day. Give it your attention. As the day unfolds, you’ll be able to pick apart why you are feeling that way. Once you acknowledge why the feelings are there, be sure to thank them for bringing whatever it is to your attention. Continue to feel through the emotion, and when you’re ready, let it go. Feel the flow.
2. Use a subconscious reprogramming practice.
Pick up a subconscious reprogramming practice.
There’s a lot of people and practices out there speaking on manifestation. If you find someone with a manifestation program, just make sure that part of the practice includes digging into the not-so-great feelings. It is critical to uncover and understand the low vibes we’ve got going on before we work at reprogramming our mind for positivity. If you skip right to the positivity, you are spiritually bypassing.
Here’s 2 people whose practices I have had personal helpful experience with:
- Lacy Phillips (manifestation intuit) and her company To Be Magnetic. You can subscribe for less than $1/day to gain access to archives of workshops and daily hypnotic meditation recordings. With each recording comes journaling work and practices to get at the core of your issues.
- Marisa Peer (speaker, author, hypnotherapist, creator of RTT). Marisa Peer provides plenty of free content on her YouTube channel concerning breaking free from any internal constraints. She also has written several books to help reprogram your subconscious. The first book I read of hers is Ultimate Confidence, and it helped kick me back up into my authentic, confident self.
3. Feel it through.
This has already been said, but it’s important enough to say again. This deserves it’s own headline.
Emotions need to be felt through. Feeling is how we allow circulating energy to discharge from our bodies. Emotions are meant to be transient messages, not trauma keepers trapped within the depths of our veins. Emotions are waves, so ride the waves.
A tip to make the feeling process easier: when you acknowledge the emotion you’re feeling, observe it as if it’s not yours. This makes it easier to understand, respect, and allow the process of letting it go.
