Spiritual Bypassing or Bypassing Spirit? A Felt Inquiry
Lately, the phrase spiritual bypassing keeps surfacing—this idea that spirituality is being used to avoid, dismiss, or control. I understand the concern, but what I feel when I hear it is something else entirely.
Because bypassing, to me, isn’t just a concept—it’s a felt sense. It’s something the body recognizes before the mind names it. It’s when someone speaks of spirit but isn’t in their heart. When words pass through the mind but do not take root in the body, when they do not originate from the soul’s voice.
I don’t just hear it—I feel it. And it feels like absence.
What Are We Really Avoiding?
Here’s the paradox: while we speak of bypassing, I wonder—haven’t most of us spent our lives bypassing spirit itself?
We were taught to trust what can be seen, touched, and measured. Conditioned to grip onto the realities we were handed, to intellectualize, to stay tethered to the known. Many of us have spent more time avoiding the living intelligence within us than actually listening to it.
So when we talk about spiritual bypassing, are we really witnessing someone avoiding life? Or are we brushing up against our own resistance—our discomfort with the vastness of what spirit actually is?
Make it stand out
Where Am I Bypassing Myself?
Lately, I’ve been sitting with this phrase—not just as an accusation or confrontation, but as an inquiry. Listening to the circumvented and re-routed, the doubted and dismissed. Listening to the ways we sidestep spirit itself.
And I turn the question inward—where am I bypassing myself?
When I feel tethered to the constructed “reality” of now, when I feel caught in the weight of this moment, I ask myself:
Where am I staying in my mind instead of my body?
Where am I using intellect to control what is meant to be felt?
Where am I shrinking the vastness of my experience into something easier, more explainable?
If I accuse someone of bypassing, or if I'm accused of it, I'm being invited to listen more deeply—to reconnect with my own soul and stand in my own integrity.
Spiritual Intelligence Lives in the Body
True spiritual intelligence isn’t an escape route. It doesn’t hover above suffering, but it doesn’t collapse into it either.
It moves through—through breath, through presence, through the willingness to sit with what is alive right now. It listens. It softens. It holds.
This is the conversation I want to have—not about bypassing but about being with. It is about letting spirit move through us fully without forcing it into a framework, without cutting off the edges, without making it smaller than it is.
Because when we stop bypassing spirit, spirit stops bypassing us.
