02-03-2017, 07:54 AM
Had a major breakthrough yesterday. Anyone familiar with spiritual bypassing? This may be relevant to some people here on this forum.
This has been me the past few years. The irony of pursuing a spiritual path above all else is that you actually take yourself further away from yourself and the lessons you're supposed to learn. I would have been better off finding a psychologist when I was suffering with depression when I was a teenager than thinking I could find the answers in a book on spirituality. And this is what's so damn awful about books like the Secret and Abraham Hicks and all that other pop-spirituality garbage. It completely neglects the importance of the so called "negative" in ones life. Claiming people with lower vibrations should be avoided and to only think positively. NO! Absolutely not. I find myself more interested in people who have difficulties in life and struggle because half the time those people are neglected already in life. This forced positivity is cancerous and I'm sick of it. I never liked their teachings, something always felt wrong about them. And it hit me the other day that all these teachings are going through the filter of the human mind which naturally seeks to avoid or resist pain or discomfort. It's really no surprise that 90% of the books out there on spirituality are really just a display of not being comfortable with aspects of negativity.
So what this means for me. I began this alpha journey to grow. But along the way I was blind to the fact that my perceived growth doesn't actually match up to my actual growth. Or maybe I did and I didn't like it, so I repressed it and tried to ignore whatever deeper emotions or feelings came up. I wanted to so desperately believe I was so far ahead in growth that I actually neglected where I needed to grow. There's a strong appeal to being a badass self sufficient man that doesn't need validation from people, but it's important to understand when you're really there vs trying to be there. Until you are there, there are aspects of yourself you have to come to terms with. Loneliness, feeling abandoned, wanting to be loved, etc. You can't shun these away because if you do, you don't grow.
I'll be honest when I started this sub my goal was to make my life easier. I've always looked to make my life easier somehow, I've avoided conflict and perceived difficulties in my life. But now I see that I've been given these difficulties to learn how to face them instead of trying to circumvent them through other means.
Quote:Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.
This has been me the past few years. The irony of pursuing a spiritual path above all else is that you actually take yourself further away from yourself and the lessons you're supposed to learn. I would have been better off finding a psychologist when I was suffering with depression when I was a teenager than thinking I could find the answers in a book on spirituality. And this is what's so damn awful about books like the Secret and Abraham Hicks and all that other pop-spirituality garbage. It completely neglects the importance of the so called "negative" in ones life. Claiming people with lower vibrations should be avoided and to only think positively. NO! Absolutely not. I find myself more interested in people who have difficulties in life and struggle because half the time those people are neglected already in life. This forced positivity is cancerous and I'm sick of it. I never liked their teachings, something always felt wrong about them. And it hit me the other day that all these teachings are going through the filter of the human mind which naturally seeks to avoid or resist pain or discomfort. It's really no surprise that 90% of the books out there on spirituality are really just a display of not being comfortable with aspects of negativity.
So what this means for me. I began this alpha journey to grow. But along the way I was blind to the fact that my perceived growth doesn't actually match up to my actual growth. Or maybe I did and I didn't like it, so I repressed it and tried to ignore whatever deeper emotions or feelings came up. I wanted to so desperately believe I was so far ahead in growth that I actually neglected where I needed to grow. There's a strong appeal to being a badass self sufficient man that doesn't need validation from people, but it's important to understand when you're really there vs trying to be there. Until you are there, there are aspects of yourself you have to come to terms with. Loneliness, feeling abandoned, wanting to be loved, etc. You can't shun these away because if you do, you don't grow.
I'll be honest when I started this sub my goal was to make my life easier. I've always looked to make my life easier somehow, I've avoided conflict and perceived difficulties in my life. But now I see that I've been given these difficulties to learn how to face them instead of trying to circumvent them through other means.