Spiritual Bypassing: Avoid This Common Mistake in Spiritual Growth

Are you unknowingly using spirituality to avoid doing the hard inner work? In this episode of Leaving the Church to Find God, Melissa Whittington dives deep into the concept of spiritual bypassing—what it is, why it's harmful, and how it prevents us from truly healing and growing. Melissa explores the subtle ways religion and the spiritual guru world encourage bypassing through magical thinking, avoidance of pain, and reliance on external solutions.

This episode uncovers the importance of shadow work, processing unresolved trauma, and developing a strong sense of self to build authentic relationships with your inner truth. Melissa shares personal insights on bypassing tools like prayer, meditation, and plant medicine and highlights the dangers of surface-level solutions that keep us stuck.

Topics Covered:

• What is spiritual bypassing?
• How magical thinking stems from trauma
• The role of religion in avoiding inner work
• Tools for authentic shadow work and healing
• Building discernment and a strong sense of self
• How to integrate spirituality with deep emotional healing

Join Melissa for this transformative conversation that encourages you to stop avoiding the hard work and embrace your path to authentic freedom.

Connect with Melissa:

• Website: https://livealau.com
• Podcast: https://leavingthechurchtofindgod.com
• Instagram: @authenticallymeli

Transcript

1:14

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Aloha kapai, welcome back. So today's episode I'm really excited to get into. It is something I've been teasing at it for a while. We're going to talk about spiritual bypassing. What is it? Why it's dangerous? You know, the difference between that and true like surrender and inner work. So spiritual bypassing by definition, it's referring to the spiritual practices that we use to avoid addressing emotional pain, unresolved trauma, or personal growth. And this is really common in the church and in the like spiritual realm for a lot of reasons. You know, at the core of it, when we start doing the real work and resolving these traumas and doing our shadow work, which we talked about, you know, a couple of episodes ago, it was the last episode of season one. When we start doing this inner work, then the indoctrination starts to unravel on its own. We find our own inner power, and we're not reliant on these outside sources for that. So of course, the outside sources that want you reliant on them are going to keep you bypassing, you know, your real work to keep you reliant on what they have to offer, right? And it can look a lot of different ways. I know that when you know, things would come up in the church, it was like, oh, just pray on it. You know, God's got everything under control. Everything happens for a reason. There's a lot of that. And especially if someone is like reaching out wanting to go to therapy, I know in my own family and relationships within the church, that's a big thing. If somebody's thinking about going to therapy, then they've pretty much given up on God, right? And if you have real faith, then you just take it to God, take it to God and let God take care of it. And while there is some truth to this, like state of surrender, it is meant to be more of a deepening of the work that you're already doing, not a way to bypass the work that you're doing. The same with like meditation or, you know, breath work, like breath work really does help you go deep and, you know, I'm such a big fan of it. But if you are using these things or ayahuasca, psilocybin, cannabis, like all of these tools that can be used to deepen your spiritual work, if you're using them to bypass doing the actual like trauma work, the deep work, the shadow work, then that's all it is. You're bypassing. And no matter how spiritual or how deep you get into that, that base is still going to be there. It's still going to be there in your subconscious, operate, like ruling the way that you operate, controlling your life. And so it is important like to have spiritual practices in place that help you deepen your relationship with yourself and your relationship with the divine and whatever that looks like for you. But it is not a substitute for facing your shadows, man. The truth is in your shadows. I won't stop saying it. So that's, you know, in a nutshell, what spiritual bypassing is about. And so we're going to go a little deeper into this and what you can do to actually get in and do the work. Again, I'm going to keep referring you to season one, episode 25 about spiritual bypass. I mean about shadow work because that's where it's at, right? It's all in the shadow work. And there's so many different ways to do shadow work, you know, internal, internal family systems and do journaling and working with a therapist, you know, there's the EMDR, there's all of these different tools to actually do the work. But we're going to talk about now like what spiritual bypassing is so you know how to recognize it and how to kind of get in and do the work yourself, the real work, not just the bypassing work. And so we've done, you know, I did the three episodes on body, mind, spirit, the embodiment, the soul of living and the mindfulness. And if you haven't listened to those, I do like what I'm talking about today is going to build on a lot of what's already been discussed in season one. So yes, you can still get a lot out of this if you haven't been through season one, but I also encourage you to go back and listen because there's a lot of foundation that I've been building up to, to get to this conversation. And first we're going to talk about magical thinking. Magical thinking is a common term used in psychology and it refers to how unresolved trauma can lead us to just waiting for someone to rescue us, whether that be God or our higher self, whatever you believe in, whether it be another person, an institution, money, that this one thing is going to happen and it's going to come and save us. And believing that like positive thinking or spiritual rituals, prayer alone is going to fix everything. And the reality of that is that our higher self is always leading us to where we want to be. But we came here and developed all this baggage because it's giving us the tools that we need. Working through those things gives us the tools that we need to live the life that we came here to live. It's all part of the process, the lessons, the breakdowns, the breakthroughs, the growth, the going backwards. It's all part of what we came here to experience as human. It's all part of the evolution of our soul, which is the evolution of consciousness, right? It's all one. We're all connected. So to, you know, we get these lessons and then to just skip those things and be like, oh, this was ugly and this was painful, so I'm not going to go there. I'm going to go to the thing that makes me feel better, which is believing that there is something outside of myself that can rescue me from these awful feelings, memories, this stuckness in my life, these repeated patterns. That's when you're bypassing. And this magical thinking leaves us thinking, oh, if I just get in alignment, oh, if I just pray enough, if I just meditate enough, if I just keep it positive and love and light and all of that, then it's going to magically be okay. And the thing about this that's so dangerous is it does make us feel better temporarily, but the problems will keep coming back. I've been in deep relationship with people who have been on, you know, deep plant medicine journeys with ayahuasca and such, and they'll swear by it. Oh, you need, all you need to do is go do some ayahuasca and it'll fix everything. And my response is always, I'm not something to be fixed. I am experiencing life and I'm processing what has happened so that I can grow from it and continue to move forward and expand in my consciousness, in my life to be the best human that I can be. And by best, I don't mean by somebody else's standards. I mean by my own standards, by what my soul wants to be, what I came here to be, what my soul wanted to experience in this life. But we get stuck from experiencing these things because we just keep bypassing. And the ayahuasca journey or these plant medicine journeys can be really powerful. I'm sure I have not done ayahuasca. I have not ever felt called to do it. Actually quite the opposite. I don't know if it's just the idea of vomiting for hours because I just, there's nothing I hate more than vomiting. But if it's that, or if it's just because my soul doesn't want it is also, you know, there's a lot of appropriation in it. We don't have to go into that right now, but I've never felt called to ayahuasca, but I have been on other plant medicine journeys with psilocybin, with LSD, with cannabis, and I found them to be very helpful. But there's a difference when you're using them to try to like reach this state of consciousness without working through the human parts first, or when you've worked through the human parts and you're using these tools to deepen that work. That's a very big distinction. Am I bypassing or am I deepening? And I can say from experience, like for years and years, I bypassed. I used cannabis as a tool. I also used it to self-medicate with my neurodivergence and anxiety and stress and depression and so many things. And I love cannabis. I think it's a beautiful, amazing, wonderful plant. I love everything about it. And for many years, decades, I used it to bypass, to get myself in this enlightened state without actually doing the deep work. And there was a point in my therapy in this, like dealing with these unresolved traumas where I had to take a break or step away from it because it wasn't allowing me to reach the depths that I was trying to go to. And I knew that as long as it kept making everything feel okay, that I wouldn't face these deep, deep shadows that I needed to face. And I do still use it recreationally like for fun, or if I really need to, if I'm socially or whatever, sometimes, sometimes it just makes me like a total hermit. It overthinks everything. It doesn't want to be around anybody. So I really just kind of listened to my intuition on that. But I also use it to deepen. If I have something that I'm working through and I've worked through it and I feel like I've done the shadow work on it, but I want to deepen my understanding that I can use cannabis for that. And it really opens for me. It really opens my third eye, connects me to my higher self. And I get a lot of like intuitive downloads as long as I'm not overusing it. It only works for me like that. If it's used occasionally, if I use it every day, then it just, I kind of get numbed out to it. But that, so those are ways that, you know, that's kind of the difference between using these things in to bypass or to deepen. And it's the same with prayer or meditation or breath work. If I'm just using it to soothe, it's like putting a band-aid on something or treating the symptom of something without getting to the root cause. And that's essentially what bypassing is. It's treating the symptoms, right? It's like the pharmaceutical industry of our soul. Yeah. So there is, you know, I'm not discouraging any of these tools that I will talk about and mention. Many of them I actually encourage in the right situations and situations feels right for you. I'm not the one that gets to determine that, but I am just bringing them right now in the context of today's conversation. It's about how they're used to bypass. So please don't take any of this as me saying this is bad, or I don't believe we should do it. Not that what I think you should do should matter anyway, but that's not what this is about. This is just about pointing out how these tools can be used to bypass instead of doing your shadow work, doing the actual work. And I'm going to keep talking about shadow work. If you don't know what I'm talking about there, go back to season one, episode 25. It was the last episode of the first season, just like three episodes ago, I believe. And we go, I go deeper into shadow work, but and there's so many ways to do that. But without doing that inner work, it's not going to, you're just going to be putting your life on hold. Your growth, your expansion is just going to be putting on hold because you're literally skipping the part that your soul wants to do by numbing it out or by reaching these spiritual states as a temporary relief. And again, like magical thinking is this belief that something's going to come and save you something out of your, outside of yourself. It's the same with again, meditation, with plant medicine, with prayer, with, you know, prayer requests and all of this. It's, it's inviting something outside of yourself to do something that is inner work and nothing but you can do your inner work. It's just not possible. I mean, it's your job. That's your kuleana. That's what you're here for. It's your responsibility as a human to do your inner work. And we build up these traumas and we have these experiences in our life. It's not because something happened to us. I truly do believe everything happens for a reason, but if we don't get to the root of what that reason is, then we're not learning anything from it. Just saying everything happens for a reason or everything is happening for my highest and greatest good. Yes, those things are true, but if you're just saying that because you don't want to look at the ugly, you're bypassing. Figure out why, you know, ask, ask your soul, why is this happening? What am I meant to learn from this? Show me the lesson. Because until we learn the lessons, we're just going to keep repeating them over and over again. And it's not like, oh, I have to earn my place in evolution or in expansion through learning lessons. No, it's what we came here to do. It's part of our human journey. It's the contrast. And through contrast, we find expansion. When we experience what we don't want, the other side of it is what we do want. That's that shadow light side, right? So it's about getting to the root causes of things and not treating the symptoms. This is really common in the church. Again, when I know from my experience, when people would talk about going to therapy, like, oh, therapist or, you know, worldly or, you know, all of this like bad, like demon, whatever, you know, it's just like outside of God. No, you got to trust God. Go to your pastor who has zero training on anything psychological whatsoever. It's like, no, you go, you take it to God, take it to the church. You don't need to go anywhere else. And that keeps us disempowered because we're not doing the real work. We're still, again, relying on something outside of ourselves to give us relief instead of going deep and facing these inner demons and resolving them so that we can move forward and expand in our life. And, you know, even if something could, I know we think like, oh, I would love to win the lottery and never have to worry about this again. Or I would love to have this, meet this partner that's going to just make me feel loved and safe. And I never have to like feel alone again. There's all these ways that we can reach outside of ourselves for relief. But the reality is, is we need these experiences in order to grow. And so like a butterfly in chrysalis, right? The caterpillar goes into chrysalis and it literally turns into goo, a primordial goo. Everything about it dissolves inside of this cocoon, completely mush. There's nothing left to it. And then it's rebuilt as this butterfly. But the thing is, is if a butterfly is breaking through its cocoon and you help it, it will die. Because it needs the strength that's built in breaking through the cocoon in order to fly. And I feel like that is such a beautiful metaphor to doing this work. Because if somebody saves us from it, if somebody breaks open our cocoon that we're working so hard to fight through, then we're not going to have the strength that we would have built in breaking through that ourselves to live the life that we want to live. I know myself, I have this vision of this life for myself where I'm making a huge impact. And I'm building this empire, this decolonized life and empire and impact on the world. But all of these challenges that have come my way and that I've dealt with, sure, it would have felt great for something to come and rescue me from them. But the amount of fortitude and resilience and strength and security within myself that I have built in the process is necessary because I'm going to do huge, I am doing huge things. And in order to be able to face the adversity that comes with doing those huge things, in order to be able to face myself, to be able to face all of the challenges that are going to come along the way, I've had to build the strength to be able to endure that. I've had to face the rejection because I know with success comes haters, right? And the more successful you become, the more haters you have. Well, if I reach this huge success overnight and I haven't done this inner work to have a strong sense of self, to know who I am outside of other people's opinions and acceptance and popularity, then it would crush me. All of the negative feedback, negative comments, whatever would crush me because I wouldn't be prepared for it. But because of the fighting through all of these difficult situations, I've built the fortitude that whatever is coming towards me, I can handle. When I have great wealth, I'm not going to live in fear of losing it because I know what it's like to live with nothing. You see what I'm saying? It's like we have to build these skills to reach this life that we want to live, not as a way of earning it, not as a way of proving ourselves, but because we literally need to build the skills in order to handle these things that we're asking for in life. You know, I could reach, and I, you know, I did when I was younger. I've had some gnarly romantic relationships, y'all. That's a gnarly romantic relationship. So it was a lot of trauma, a lot of baggage, right? A lot of lessons that I just kept having to learn over and over again. But I remember at one point, the best partner that I've had in my life, um, he was kind. He was loving. He adored me. He would do anything for me. Was he perfect? No, he was not perfect. And no, that obviously wasn't my person. He's actually passed away, um, since then. But I couldn't appreciate him because I hadn't been with enough men to realize what I didn't want. I hadn't been with enough men to show me all of these broken parts within myself, not broken, but these parts that needed to be healed, these parts that needed my attention. And I gave those parts my attention because of the disastrous breakups and relationships that I went through. It forced me to go deep within and to do the inner work. So that now if, if someone like Jeremy were to show up and pour their love on me and be present and be emotionally available, now I know how to appreciate that. And I know how to meet it with my own emotional availability. But it took all of the breakdown in order for me to go within and have the breakthrough to become the person who is able to receive that kind of love. So I hope I'm like really getting to this. Um, you know, why do we do this? Why do we bypass? I've talked about this before. It's because we're programmed as humans to avoid discomfort. Pain would often lead to our, lead to our demise, you know, in early human days and in our evolution, you know, when you, when you touch fire and it burns, you move away from the fire and then, you know, to stay away from fire. Right. It's, it's that kind of thing. It's that fear of pain and like, no, I'm going to avoid that because that will hurt me. And so we often avoid our shadow work and our emotional healing because it's overwhelming and it's frightening. And when these things are buried, it's like when you're, when your body's detoxifying, like your liver and all of your organs, like these, these collector organs, I don't know, the collector or processing organs, they have these, these free radicals, this toxins, this stuff that's there. And when you start supporting your body and cleansing that out, and I'm, not a big, like, we're not going to get into that, but just when you start to cleanse your body, you can often go through what's called a healing crisis because your body is now experiencing all of these things at once as it gets rid of them. So it was hiding in your body. And then when you're treating it and you're pulling it out, you have to feel it again. And it's uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that something's going wrong. It actually means that something's going right. Well, it's the same with our inner work. When we got these things buried in our subconscious, buried in our body, literally in our bodies, and they, you know, we've kind of built up our defenses around them and they're buried. And we think we're good, even though they're completely ruling our lives, but they're deep down in there. But when we start bringing attention to them and start looking at these, these parts of us that are hurting, we have to feel that pain. We have to feel that discomfort. And because we're conditioned to avoid pain and discomfort, we don't want to do that. We're going to avoid it in every way we can. And that's why, that's where bypassing comes in. It also happens with like a lot of religious and societal teachings, you know, it emphasizes this external salvation over internal transformation. You know, for me, I believe that is part of the design of oppression, whether it was a conscious design or if it's just in the energy of the design, I can't say that. I'm not the one who designed it, but I do believe that that is an intentional part of the design to keep us stuck, to keep us from reaching our full potential, to keep us from uniting as souls and evolving and expanding at the rate that we would like to, because that would keep those who oppress in power, I mean, from being in power. They would lose their power if we found our own. And the way to find our power is to go through the trenches, is to go through the shadows. On the other side of the shadow is your light. And if they can keep us out of our shadows and keep us afraid of our shadows and ashamed of our shadows, then we're never going to look at them and we're never going to reach that light. So then they can maintain their power over us. We still need them. We still need to consume. We still need all of this external validation because we haven't been able to face those shadows on our own and we're terrified of facing them. So there's a lot of social conditioning around it. It's not just our own internal fear. It's also been like conditioned into us. And again, this shame and vulnerability, it's a barrier to this inner work. It prevents people from facing their perceived flaws, because especially as children, we're punished for being flawed or conceived as flawed. We don't pay attention in class the way we're supposed to, or we don't follow all of these rigid rules that are given to us. And we kind of live our wild and free lives as children. And it is conditioned out of us to fit into these norms and to be easy for our parents. And I feel like parents are getting more and more aware, hopefully, as we evolve, people are getting more and more aware as we evolve. But especially those of us who had boomer parents, you know, there was a lot of like physical abuse, a lot of our parents just seriously bypassing working all the time. A lot of us were latchkey kids. And so we were expected to fall in line. And if we didn't fall in line, it caused problems. It caused problems for our parents who were overworked and tired and hadn't done their work. It caused problems for our teachers who were the same. It caused problems for everyone. So we were conditioned to fall in line and anything that didn't fall in line with what made things easy or convenient was considered flawed or bad or naughty. And we were shamed for those things and we were punished for those things. So that shame really gets buried in the subconscious. It becomes a trauma. And we're afraid to look at these parts of ourselves that we perceive as flawed because of that shame and that guilt that is around it. And there's a vulnerability to that when you get into this inner work and you really start dealing with these wounded parts of yourself, of the inner child and the inner teenager and just all of it. When you start looking at these inner parts, it's very vulnerable because those parts felt so helpless and they felt so flawed because of all the shame and the punishment that was, you know, came along with it. So in the church, this can look like, you know, pray about it, give it to the Lord, trust God, have faith. It's all going to be okay. And again, while those things are true, it's okay when we do the inner work, right? But then also in this spiritual guru world, you know, there's the high vibe movement of just be positive, think positive thoughts. And again, yes, those things work once you've done the inner work. But if you're keeping yourself in positive thoughts and something awful is happening, you're like, it's okay. This is happening for my highest and greatest good. But you haven't done the inner work to build that belief, then it's not doing what you think it's doing. When you've done the inner work and you've done your shadow work and you've really, really developed a state of surrender and trust, then that works to remind your human. When your human starts to worry and fall back into those patterns, that really helps to remind yourself, this is all happening for my highest and greatest good. I don't see the purpose in it right now, but I know that I'm going to turn this into something beautiful. That's alchemy. That's something I talk about often, right? Is alchemizing the pain and turning it into something beautiful, turning it into something powerful. But if you haven't done the inner work, you're just fighting against these parts of yourselves that have these beliefs that are going to keep you returning to these patterns over and over again. A lot of spiritual leaders capitalize on this, on bypassing. They offer surface level solutions and you have to keep coming back to them rather than promoting genuine transformation. Like buy this course, do this course. Oh, you did that and you learned, but you haven't gotten an alignment. So now you need this course or you need to do this thing or buy this book and listen to this thing. And again, there's so many helpful tools out there. There's so many courses and books that have helped me tremendously, but without doing that shadow work, without facing those wounded parts of myself, it's just piling stuff on. It's just avoiding the reality. I apologize. My neighbor's cat, I call him my part-time kitty, is in here. If you hear him meowing, I've tried to put him out. He meows. I have him inside, he's meowing. He's just really needing a lot of attention today. As long as these teachers, and a lot of them believe it because they haven't even done their own inner work. They believe it because they have found this level of numbness and level of success that they believe what they're selling. And a lot of them, they don't even have the layers of trauma. They have a lot of privilege, emotional privilege, financial privilege, familial, whatever their privileges are, that they don't even understand that there's people that have healing work that has to be done before these tools work and have any real effect on their lives. And some of them know it, and they use it to capitalize and to make money off of you. As long as you're reaching for something outside of yourself, they can keep selling you that thing that you need. But when you find that within yourself, nobody can sell you anything that you don't need. You can decide for yourself. You can use your intuition and listen to your own inner guidance and be like, oh, that sounds really expansive and fun. And I would like to experience that thing. So then you go for it, but that's coming. Can you feel the difference in that vibe? That comes from an entirely different place. And this is part of the reason why one of the many reasons why it's so important to have your own discernment, to have a strong relationship with yourself and with your inner guidance and your intuition, because then you can kind of see the difference and you can feel the difference. And like, if it feels expansive, and even if you haven't done a lot of inner work, I can just give you a hint and I'll talk about this over and over again. If it feels expansive, that's a great sign. That's a big yes. If it feels contracting, that's a big no. And if you can't feel the expansive or the contracting, then we go into embodiment. Then we need to work on our embodiment and being able to feel what our body's telling us. I have a whole episode on that called embodiment. So what is it and how to do it? I don't remember the exact title, but easy to find. Go in the backlog, embodiment, listen to it. When we've really like got that embodiment, then we can feel it in our bodies. Glennon Doyle described it the other day as, does it feel warm or does it feel cold? That's such a great way to think about it because it really does. When you are in an expansive state and your soul is like, yes, then it does. There's this warmth that comes from it. And when it is in a contracting state and it's pulling you away from that inner knowing and that what your soul says yes to, there's a coolness, a coldness to it. It doesn't have that emotional warmth, that feeling of warmth. So it's important to develop discernment in these things. So you know, is this going to be bypassing or is this actually going to help me do the work that I need to do? And it's important to, again, build a strong sense of self before, you know, deep diving into this spiritual work. And because without a strong sense of self, we risk falling into new spiritual traps that keep us from our inner truth. And that's what happened with me. I left the church and moved 6,000 miles away to Hawaii where it's a lot of spiritual guru, you know, wellness, all of that stuff. And I was really attracted to that. But it was just jumping from one thing to another thing because I hadn't built that sense of self yet. And you know, it was two decades in the church, two decades in the spiritual world almost before I really got deep and started doing my shadow work and doing the deep inner work and building a strong sense of self. So I was easily succumbed to others' guidance. I mean, I did have some resistance because of falling for everything I had fallen for in the church. There was a bit of a defense there that a lot of the charlatans and the woo-woo, I was like, meh, no thank you. And I have a strong intuition. I've always had a strong intuition. So a lot of