TF: Might this account for some of the messiness in our sangha communities?
JW: Definitely. It is easy to use the truth of emptiness in this one-sided way: “Thoughts
and feelings are empty, a mere play of samsaric appearances, so pay them no heed. See
their nature as emptiness, and simply cut through them on the spot.” In the realm of
practice, this could be helpful advice. But in life situations these same words could also
be used to suppress or deny feelings or concerns that need our attention. I’ve seen this
happen on a number of occasions.
TF: What interests you most about spiritual bypassing these days?
JW: I’m interested in how it plays out in relationships, where spiritual bypassing often
wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your
psychological wounding might not show up so much because your focus would be
entirely on your practice, in an environment that may not aggravate your relational
wounds. It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues tend to show up
most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in
and through our relationships with our early caretakers.
The basic human wound, which is prevalent in the modern world, forms around not
feeling loved or intrinsically lovable as we are. Inadequate love or attunement is shocking
and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. And as we
internalize how we were parented, our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis
for valuing others, becomes damaged. I call this a “relational wound“ or the “wound of
the heart.”
TF: Yes, something we are all familiar with.
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JW: There is a whole body of study and research in Western psychology showing how
close bonding and loving attunement— what is known as “secure attachment” — have
powerful impacts on every aspect of human development. Secure attachment has a
tremendous effect on many dimensions of our health, well-being, and capacity to
function effectively in the world: how our brains form, how well our endocrine and
immune systems function, how we handle emotions, how subject we are to depression,
how our nervous system functions and handles stress, and how we relate to others.
In contrast to the indigenous cultures of traditional Asia, modern child-rearing leaves
most people suffering from symptoms of insecure attachment: self-hatred,
disembodiment, lack of grounding, chronic insecurity and anxiety, overactive minds,
lack of basic trust, and a deep sense of inner deficiency. So most of us suffer from an
extreme degree of alienation and disconnection that was unknown in earlier times—
from society, community, family, older generations, nature, religion, tradition, our
body, our feelings, and our humanity itself.
TF: And how is this relevant for how we practice the dharma?
JW: Many of us— and I include myself here— originally turn to the dharma, at least in
part, as a way of trying to overcome the pain of our psychological and relational
wounding. Yet we are often in denial or unconscious about the nature or extent of this
wounding. We only know that something isn’t right and we want to be free from
suffering.
TF: We may turn towards the dharma from a wounded place that we're not even aware of?
JW: Yes. We turn to the dharma to feel better, but then may unwittingly wind up using
spiritual practice as a substitute for facing our psychological issues.
TF: So how does our psychological wounding affect our spiritual practice?
JW: Being a good spiritual practitioner can become what I call a compensatory identity
that covers up and defends against an underlying deficient identity, where we feel badly
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about ourselves, not good enough, or basically lacking. Then, although we may be
practicing diligently, our spiritual practice can be used in the service of denial and
defense. And when spiritual practice is used to bypass our real-life human issues, it
becomes compartmentalized in a separate zone of our life, and remains unintegrated
with our overall functioning