More favourite lines from RAM's Spiritual Bypassing

In many ways, spiritual bypassing is just another strategy to avoid fear, using the anesthetizing capacity of emotional disconnection as its primary tool.

The first step in working with spiritual bypassing is to see it for what it is—employing spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing in any significant depth with our pain and developmental needs—and then to name it, so that we might begin relating to it rather than from it.

The most obvious potential traps-in-waiting include the belief that we should rise above our difficulties and simply embrace Oneness, even as the tendency to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower, spiritual and nonspiritual, runs wild in us.

Other behaviors include taking global or impersonal stands on clearly personal concerns, as when we might talk about the "fact" that everything is perfect, all unfolding exactly as it must, while we are talking to another in a demeaning way. Or in response to someone's ...suffering we may say, "It's all an illusion, including your suffering" or "It's just your ego," delivering one-liners with minimal feeling,

In spiritual bypassing's realm, conceptual spirituality more often than not masquerades as real spirituality. Conceptual or emotionally disconnected spirituality can be very comforting and safe, very easy to trot out, and very easy to use to rationalize our removal, esp...ecially emotionally, from the more difficult aspects of life.

Spiritual bypassing keeps us stuck at a "higher" level that is really only higher in a conceptual sense. It's as if we are taking up residence on Floor 5 without having passed through Floors 2, 3, or 4.

Those of us caught up in spiritual bypassing tend to slap the labels of "positive" and "negative" onto emotions as if such qualities were absolute givens. But the more we investigate the reality of our lives, the clearer it becomes that ascribing qualities like "negative" and "positive" to emotions is inevitably a context-bound undertaking.

Anger itself can be a positive force: Getting angry that you have just lost your job may give you the energy and sheer drive to pursue more fitting work, which is obviously a positive thing. Likewise, getting angry about the abuse you are suffering in a relationship wil...l help fuel you to form healthy boundaries, providing much of the motivation and strength needed to either improve the relationship or leave it.

- Robert Augustus Masters