Spiritual Bypassing: When Practice Becomes a Way of Avoiding
Spiritual practice can be deeply supportive of a balance and fulfilling life. Meditation, mindfulness, devotion and non-dual teachings often bring more calm, perspective and compassion into our lives. At their best, they help us meet life with openness and acceptance.
But sometimes, without realising it, spiritual ideas can be used to sidestep parts of our experience that feel uncomfortable, painful or messy. This is often referred to as spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypassing isn’t about doing spirituality or meditation ‘wrong’. It’s usually just a well-intentioned attempt to find relief from suffering. The tricky thing is that bypassing can create a subtle split: some parts of our experience are welcomed, while others are quietly pushed away.
What Spiritual Bypassing Can Look Like
Spiritual bypassing can take many forms, including:
Using meditation to suppress or numb emotions rather than just feeling them
Reframing pain too quickly (’It’s all an illusion anyway’)
Avoiding difficult conversations or boundaries in the name of compassion
Avoiding responsibility (’It’s all just spontaneously arising’)
Believing that feeling upset or angry means you’ve failed spiritually
Often, the intention is peace or freedom. But the result can be unresolved emotional material that continues to influence our lives beneath the surface and that sometimes bubbles up and spills over.
Why the Body Matters
One of the clearest ways to notice bypassing is through the body.
The body registers what the mind would prefer to move past. Tension, tightness, uncomfortable feelings, shallow breathing or a sense of disconnection can all be signs that something within hasn’t yet been met with curiosity and acceptance.
Bodily awareness helps bring spirituality back into contact with lived experience. When attention includes sensations—pressure, warmth, heaviness, movement—we’re less likely to float above what’s actually happening. The body anchors awareness in the present moment and gently insists on honesty because it is incapable of anything else.
Rather than asking, “How do I rise above this?” the body invites a different question:
“Can this be allowed, just as it is, right now?”
Acceptance Is Not Resignation
Accepting experience doesn’t mean liking it, agreeing with it or staying stuck. It means acknowledging what is already here before trying to change it.
The funny thing is that this kind of acceptance often creates more ease and contentment in the long run. When emotions are allowed to be felt—sadness as sadness, anger as anger, fear as fear—they tend to soften, shift or clarify on their own.
This also applies to meditation. A grounded practice isn’t about maintaining a particular state, but about making room for whatever arises within awareness.
Integrating Inner Work and Spiritual Practice
For many people, spiritual practice and psychological healing unfold best together.
Working with a therapist who understands meditation and spiritual practice can help bridge the gap between insight and integration. It creates a space where emotional patterns, nervous system responses and relational wounds can be explored and processed without negating spirituality or using it to avoid what needs care.
In this kind of work, meditation becomes less about escaping experience and more about meeting it with groundedness, curiosity and acceptance.
Over time, this integration supports a spirituality that is embodied, authentic and grounded in everyday life—not just something that happens on the cushion.