present in our humanness. To be a genuine person is to relate to ourselves and others in an open and transparent way.
If there’s a large gap between our practice and our human side, we remain unripe. Our practice may ripen, but our life doesn’t. And there’s a certain point when that gap becomes very painful.
TF: So you’re saying that spiritual bypassing not only corrupts our dharma practice, it also blocks our personal ripening?
JW: Yes. One way it blocks ripening is through making spiritual teachings into prescriptions about what you should do, how you should think, how you should speak, how you should feel. Then our spiritual practice becomes taken over by what I call “the spiritual superego”— the voice that whispers “shoulds” in our ear. This is a big obstacle to ripening, because it feeds our sense of deficiency.
One Indian teacher, Swami Prajnanpad, whose work I admire, said that “idealism is an act of violence.” Trying to live up to an ideal instead of being authentically where you are can become a form of inner violence if it splits you in two and pits one side against the other. When we use spiritual practice to “be good” and to ward off an underlying sense of deficiency or unworthiness, then it turns into a sort of crusade.
TF: So dismissing how you feel can have dangerous consequences.
JW: Yes. And if the ethos of a spiritual organization leads to dismissing your feelings or relational needs, this can lead to big communication problems, to say the very least. It’s also not a great setup for a marriage if one or both partners is dismissive of emotional needs. So not surprisingly, Buddhist organizations and marriages often turn out to be just as dysfunctional interpersonally as nonbuddhist ones. Marshall Rosenberg teaches that honestly and o