You introduced the term "spiritual bypassing" 30 years ago now. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, could you define and explain what it is?
Jw: spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.
When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage to dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an "occupational hazard" of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.
TE: What kind of hazard does this present?
Jw: Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the of buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind spirituality where one pole oflife is elevated at the expense of its opposite Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over feeling One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing