JW: Right. This helps to integrate the realization of emptiness— as complete openness— into our life. With spiritual bypassing, emptiness doesn’t become integrated with our feeling life. It can turn into a personal dryness where we can’t actually feel ourselves.
TF: What would help our sangha communities develop in more emotionally honest ways?
JW: We need to work on relationships. Otherwise our relational wounds are all going to be played out in the sangha unconsciously. We need to recognize that everything we react to in others is a mirror of something we’re not facing or acknowledging in ourselves. These unconscious projections and reactions always become played out externally in groups.
For instance, if I’m not able to own my own needs, then I will tend to dismiss others’ needs and see them as a threat because their neediness subconsciously reminds me of my own denied needs. And I will judge others and use some kind of “dharma logic” to make them wrong or make myself superior.
TF: So people need to be doing their personal work?
JW: In conjunction with their spiritual practice. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find psychotherapists who work with present experiencing in a body-based way, rather than conceptually. Maybe we need to develop some simple ways in Western dharma communities to help people work with their personal material.
TF: How can we become more conscious in our sanghas?
JW: We could start by recognizing the fact that spiritual communities are subject to the same group dynamics that every group is. The hard truth is that spiritual