The Courage to Live Deeply Authentic

Note: I wrote this late last August, 2017, but kept it as a draft and forgot to post it. So I am posting it now, because it is an important topic.

Recently this question was posed to me: “It is not uncommon for people to misuse metaphysical teachings to blame or judge themselves or the so-called negative things that happen in  their lives (or to unwittingly reinforce self-blame and guilt in others who are facing life challenges). In the same way, spiritual or metaphysical teachings are sometimes used to deny, circumvent, or skip over human experiences like anger or grief. How would you address/work with these issues in someone who came to you for spiritual counseling or direction?”

These issues are referred to as “spiritual bypassing” in a book of the same title by Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D. The term was coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984. Welwood defined spiritual bypassing as the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. Masters notes that it is much more common than we might think, and so pervasive that it is largely unnoticed except in its most obvious extremes.

Spiritual bypassing does not just come from certain metaphysical teachings; we, in fact, live in a culture which has normalized spiritual bypassing, promoting avoidance of what is emotionally painful, difficult, and messy. As only one example, our society does not face death or support the grieving process very well, although some small inroads have been made since Kubler-Ross’s informative work on the individual process of coming to terms with a diagnosis of terminal illness.

As a society, we still do not face death very well, and many people say incredibly insensitive and unhelpful things to those going through the work of grief. Encouraging people to “just get over it and move on” seems to be the most common suggestion. The grief and mourning practices of Judaism seem to me to be a great improvement over non-Jewish funerary rituals. Sitting shiva is no picnic, but built into it are some wise ways of facing death and being supported appropriately through that emotionally charged time, and continuing through the most difficult first year.

But there are myriads of examples that come from our ordinary life, not just the issue of death and grieving. The messy emotions of dealing with personal anger, deep disappointments, difficult people, dysfunctional family systems, and toxic work environments are bypassed frequently. Even more challenging are the very real instances of dysfunctional and toxic churches and religious/spiritual groups and congregations. Our culture’s avoidance of these issues by “spiritualizing” our shadow sides can show up as emotional numbing, repression, polly-anna positivity, refusal to acknowledge the disappointments and channeling or “manifesting” only happy thoughts, anger phobia, weak boundaries, delusions of higher spirituality, superficial band-aiding, and lack of clarity between protection of privacy and toxic secret-keeping that renders entire groups, families, and even congregations paralyzed.

Masters notes that, “it has been easier to frame spiritual bypassing as a religion-transcending, spiritually advanced practice/perspective, especially in the facile fast-food spirituality epitomized by faddish phenomenon like promoted by books such as The Secret. Some of the more glaringly plastic features of this, such as drive-through servings of reheated wisdom… are available for consumption and parroting by just about anyone. … Most of the time when we’re immersed in spiritual bypassing, we like the light but not the heat, doing whatever we can to distance ourselves from the flames. … if we really want the light, we cannot afford to flee from the heat. And being with the fire’s heat doesn’t mean just sitting with the difficult stuff in meditation, but also going into it, trekking to its core, facing and entering and getting intimate with whatever is there, however scary or traumatic or sad or raw.”

In essence, any spiritual path that does not deal in depth with the real nitty-gritty issues of being messy humans, that just glosses over the significant emotional issues, is reinforcing the fragmentation and avoidance of our wholeness as human beings. It prevents emotional depth and authenticity, and stunts true emotional and spiritual maturity. It maintains a white-washed, superficial spiritual façade of overdone niceness. Forced to flee from our darker, “less spiritual” emotions, impulses, and thoughts, we are trapped into a perpetual cycle of “shoulds” and deep repression which can lead to resentments and a powder keg of anger and outbursts seeking release. Like a volcano, we look beautiful on the outside but our deepest inner emotions are volatile. Trying to manage and control the feeling of anger because it is not spiritually worthy of our thoughts only serves to increase the likelihood that it will spiral further out of control. We are also wrong if we think we can pull the wool over everyone’s eyes with our fake faces. We are not serving ourselves, nor furthering our spiritual depth.

As we look at anger, for example, anger itself is just an emotion. How we express that emotion should not be confused with feeling that emotion. Anger itself is not an action. As with all of the  “darker” or “more negative” or energy intense emotions, it carries a message for us to hear. We must listen to the message of the underlying emotion. Being positive is important, yes, but not at the expense of repressing the underlying emotions. We do more harm in the long run, and the same issue will surface over and over again until we are willing to stop doing self-harm by spiritual bypassing.

One of the tools most helpful to me in this process is one I learned during my times of Vision Quest on sacred land. During the Vision Quest, the seeker sits in the center of a “protected” circle, and listens. That is the quest. Each animal, critter, bug, toad, or even leaf which comes into the circle during the quest brings with it a message, and it is the sole task of the quester to welcome each messenger and to enter into a dialogue with it, asking questions, and the listening for answers.

I find one of the best descriptions of that process in a deeply meaningful poem by the Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Spirituality–true, authentic spirituality–is not about finding ways to avoid, eradicate, cover up, or suppress our emotions. It is about getting close enough to our deeper selves to listen, to peer into the heart, to be deeply honest with ourselves and another human being, honoring all of who we are, even when it is uncomfortable. This is true spiritual practice. The issue is not having “darker” emotions; it is in ignoring what drives or triggers them and dealing with the root of the issues, and pasting on a fake face and acting as if they aren't there trying to tell us something important.

As long as we trap ourselves into thinking that we should always “rise above” and suppress or ignore the issues, as long as we continue to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower, spiritual and nonspiritual, we will never have a deeply authentic life.

Rumi, a deeply mystical and spiritual man, gets into the rawness of everyday life, and writes of the deepest emotions of sexuality and spirituality, finding neither to be higher than nor lower than the other, but all of a piece in our whole beings.

This is the work of true spiritual friendship: staring into the deep wounds and unresolved places and to find G!d there. Not living on the mountaintops, as much as we love the view and the spiritual high, but to slog our way through the muddy valleys. That is our truest spiritual litmus test.

Rumi reminds us of this true spiritual work in his poem, A Chickpea to Cook:

A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot where it’s being boiled.
‘Why are you doing this to me?’
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
‘Don’t you try to jump out. You think I’m torturing you. I’m giving you flavor, so you can mix with spices and rice and be the lovely vitality of a human being. Remember when you drank rain in the garden. That was for this.’
Grace first. Sexual pleasure, then a boiling new life begins, and the Friend has something good to eat.
Eventually the chickpea will say to the cook, ‘Boil me some more. Hit me with the skimming spoon. I can’t do this by myself. I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver, my way into existence. I love your cooking.’
The cook says, ‘I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.
My animal soul grew powerful. I controlled it with practices, and boiled some more, and boiled once beyond that, and became your teacher.


All of us are like this, hardened hearts, in the process of becoming soft, getting cooked. The whole of life is like this: cooking in the fire of love, going from a state of hardness to softness, from rawness to being spiritually “cooked.” There is a transformation that each of us must undergo before we are “done.” We begin to cook, to ripen, to soften, and mature as human beings. Being cooked is hard, letting go of our “raw”ness is painful. May we have the heart, the courage (the word courage comes from root word for having heart) to go through the cooking. May we have the courage to commit ourselves to the flame. May we have the heart to finish our cooking, to make each of us worthy of being inside the heart of another fellow human being.

As Rumi had his Shams of Tabriz to be his cook, his driver, his way into authentic existence, we would all do better if we had such a spiritual friendship, one person with whom we do not have to avoid or repress the “negative” emotions. Sharing them with a soul friend does not give them more power. Sharing them with a soul friend is a way we can learn to welcome them and listen to their deeper message. Sadly, finding such a soul friend is a rarity. If you have one, don't let go. They are too hard to find and too easy to lose.

I know each of us has our own way of processing challenging things in our lives. For me, I need even just one soul friend, one person who can simply listen. I can’t process the negative until I get it outside of my own head. Then I can move on. But finding someone who can be there with me just to listen? Not to fix me, not to judge me, not to tell me to get over it or to replace it with happy thoughts, but someone to just listen. In today’s world, that seems to be a real challenge for most people.

Spiritual bypassing is neither authentic spirituality nor authentic human be-ingness. As Nina Berberova writes, “I had learnt to seek intensity rather than happiness, not joys and prosperity but more of life, a concentrated sense of life, a strengthened feeling of existence, fullness and concentration of pulse, energy, growth, flowering, beyond the image of happiness or unhappiness.”

Happiness and feeling good are not the goals of authentic spirituality. Living a deeper, more fully authentic life is the goal, including the messy parts.

Who is your soul friend? How do you process the messy parts? Do you have the courage to live a deeply authentic life, or are you constantly trying to cover up the negative emotions and bypass them because you think acknowledging them gives them power? I’d love to hear your experience....