Spirituality is not about transcending pain. It’s about transforming through it.

(everything stated in this blog is based upon my own research, personal practice, and opinion)

In an era increasingly hungry for healing, mindfulness, and meaning, the rise of spiritual practice in everyday life has brought profound gifts. Yoga studios populate our neighborhoods. Meditation apps are installed on millions of phones. Astrology, breathwork, and plant medicine are discussed with ease over coffee. There’s a collective movement, however uneven, toward reconnecting with the sacred. Yet with this golden tide of awakening comes a quieter shadow… spiritual bypassing.

Coined by psychologist John Welwood in the early 1980s, spiritual bypassing refers to the use of spiritual ideas, beliefs, and practices to avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, or painful truths. It’s the tendency to use spirituality as a way to “rise above” or “transcend” the messiness of being human, especially the raw, uncomfortable parts. Rather than confronting grief, trauma, shame, rage, or injustice, we leapfrog into love and light, chanting affirmations and invoking higher vibrations while that thing we are actively ignoring festers beneath the surface.

Spiritual bypassing can be subtle. It often wears the mask of wisdom, calm, or enlightenment. In reality, over time, it stagnates growth, erodes authenticity, and reinforces systemic harm. Let’s look at how it plays out both personally and collectively, and how we might walk a more integrated path.

Positivity as Denial

One of the most common forms of spiritual bypassing is toxic positivity: the insistence on being “high vibe only,” regardless of circumstances.

We’ve all met the person who responds to hardship with an automatic “Everything happens for a reason,” or “Just focus on the good.” Maybe we’ve even been that person. While optimism has value, compulsive positivity often reflects a discomfort with pain, especially our own. It rejects the full emotional spectrum of human life in favor of curated bliss. Resist throwing that rose tinted spiritual filter over suffering. It is not strength, it’s repression.

Misuse of Non-Attachment

Non-attachment is a beautiful concept in many traditions, from Buddhism to the Bhagavad Gita. Unfortunately it can also be misapplied to justify emotional detachment, avoid accountability, or withdraw from relationships that require vulnerability. Resist using spiritual language to avoid real-world emotional presence, it isn’t wisdom. It’s emotional avoidance dressed in spiritual drag.

Premature Forgiveness

Forgiveness is often framed as a hallmark of spiritual maturity. But forgiveness before the wound is fully acknowledged is a form of self-abandonment. Take the time to process trauma. Rage, set boundaries and don’t skip the messy middle: grief, anger, mourning. Real forgiveness is not a bypass. It’s a culmination, a release that comes after truth has been fully felt.

Escaping Responsibility via Fate or Karma

Relying too heavily on beliefs like “everything is as it should be,” or “they must’ve attracted that experience,” can lead to a quiet erasure of empathy and personal responsibility. Human experience, and emotional reactions to that experience are natural. Don’t confuse spiritual gaslighting for spiritual insight.

The Community-Level Impact of Spiritual Bypassing

While personal bypassing erodes individual authenticity, collective spiritual bypassing becomes a kind of systemic denial: a refusal to engage with uncomfortable truths at the societal level. This shows up in New Age, yoga, and wellness communities in ways that quietly reinforce privilege, apathy, and injustice.

“We Are All One” as a Silencing Tool

Unity is a core spiritual truth. But when used to dismiss difference, it becomes a weapon. Addressing the very real lived experience of inequality is important. Don’t silence the critique with spiritual platitudes: “We are all one. There is no race or gender in spirit.”.  This is not unity. This is erasure.

Spiritual Meritocracy and Class Blindness

Much of contemporary spirituality centers around ideas of “manifestation,” “abundance,” and “creating your reality.” While these concepts can be empowering, they often ignore systemic barriers like poverty, racism, and ableism. Don’t ignore the material realities of people born into generational trauma, displacement, or chronic illness. To imply that spiritual success = moral worth = wealth is prosperity gospel in New Age cosplay, not enlightenment. Spirituality should include compassion for human struggle, not just vision boards and six-figure income goals.

Ignoring Injustice in the Name of “Higher Consciousness”

A spiritual community that avoids talking about racism, climate collapse, or inequality is not neutral. It’s complicit. “Focusing on the negative lowers our vibration.” Is a cop-out, and we all know it. Refusing to name injustice doesn’t make it go away. It just reveals the limits of a spirituality that values personal comfort over collective liberation.

A More Integrated Spirituality

What’s the alternative to bypassing? It’s not abandoning spirituality but deepening it. Making it honest. Embodied. Engaged.

Here are some ways we can move beyond bypassing:

Honor the Full Emotional Spectrum

Spiritual growth includes grief, anger, confusion, despair, not just joy and peace. These “negative” emotions are not failures of consciousness. They are part of what makes us whole. Practices like shadow work, somatic therapy, and trauma-informed mindfulness can help us stay present to our pain without being consumed by it.

Make Space for Complexity

Spirituality is not an escape from contradiction. It’s the capacity to hold paradox. We can believe in oneness while acknowledging injustice. We can practice non-attachment and still care deeply. We can value love without skipping anger.

Listen to the Margins

Instead of retreating into spiritual echo chambers, seek out teachers, practitioners, and voices from historically excluded groups. Read Black feminists. Support Indigenous-led ceremonies. Uplift disabled mystics. The divine speaks through diversity, not just enlightenment influencers.

Practice Real Accountability

When we harm others, the most spiritual thing we can do is not forgive ourselves prematurely or cite our “vibration.” It’s to take responsibility. To apologize. To change. Accountability is a sacred act (read that again).

Anchor the Sacred in the World

Spirituality that’s disconnected from the material world becomes fantasy. Spirituality that meets the world as it is, raw, unjust, beautiful, imperfect, is transformative. This means showing up: for protests. For community. For the Earth. For the friend in grief. For the parts of ourselves we’d rather avoid.

Light That Embraces Shadow

Spiritual bypassing is not just a flaw in individual character. It’s a byproduct of a culture that fears pain and worships image. But true healing, true liberation, is never found in avoidance. It’s found in descent: into the wound, into the shadow, into the real. The goal of spiritual life is not to feel good all the time. It’s to become real. To feel fully. To integrate. Let’s build communities that don’t flinch from truth. Communities that honor the wholeness of being. Communities that see the divine not only in the stars, but in the dirt beneath our fingernails, the tears on our cheeks, and the tangled, glorious mess of our shared humanity.

Because that is where the sacred lives too.