Spiritual Bypass || By Beth Hinnen, Certified Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher
When I think of a bypass, I think of a shortcut. A way to get around something unpleasant, to go over a traffic-laden road, to divert away from a crowded city center. It’s a sense of not getting caught in the mess of things, not having to endure pain or delay, basically, avoiding the dirty business of living.
The Buddha’s First Noble Truth lays it out very clearly. There is suffering. While I disagree with the translation, “Life is suffering,” as I believe I have experienced the absolute joy and bliss that life can offer, I also contend that life is neither suffering nor bliss when lived from an enlightened state, or when lived with awareness and compassion. It is simply an acceptance of “this is how it is,” and its our perception of events that make them painful or not painful. (As an aside, I believe enlightened folks feel a sense of deep joy constantly, but the source is inside, not from the outside.)
When I first heard the expression, “there are no mistakes,” from my old Zen teacher, I thought she was nuts. On the one hand, a part of me was thrilled to hear there are no mistakes, that Life offered me a proverbial “get out of jail free” card no matter what I did. On the other hand, the folly is that if important lessons go unlearned, we will continue to make the same choices that don’t turn out so well (i.e. what we normally call mistakes). The reason there are no mistakes, especially if we look at life as a spiritual journey, is because we take every misstep as an opportunity to learn — to learn about life, other people, and most importantly, ourselves.
When the Buddha was teaching about the First Noble Truth, he said to his students, “to grasp this truth, suffering must be fully known.” Meaning, we can’t avoid suffering (though it is far from being the only experience in life) and we all know what suffering is — the searing pain of a knife cut; the heart vacuum of losing a loved one; the utter regret of choosing something that felt good in the moment, and later turned out to be deeply painful, to ourselves and/or others. The real trick then, to know suffering fully, is to be able to completely enter the pain, despair, remorse, anger, fear and numbness that causes our suffering. Only when we fully know it inside and out — the depth, breadth and width of the suffering we encounter — will be able to see how the Second Noble Truth is true: that suffering is caused by craving.
Craving what, you ask. Well, while cravings might take the form of different objects, ideas, or people, underneath it all, I speculate that what we are all craving is to be loved, accepted, seen and heard. Only, to say that, and even more challenging, to feel such vulnerability and complete humanity, is not only frightening, it can be down right life threatening. And I don’t mean in a physical sense, I mean in an emotional and mental sense. We are taught early on through the Western ideal of individualism that we are islands, that we can be self-sufficient and utterly independent. And in doing so, we can not then admit our desire (see my blogs on desire and the positive spiritual interpretation of this word) to be connected, seen, in relationship with others, whether others are people, pets, trees, water, trash, diseases, and a host of other objects we come into contact with minute by minute.
So rather than being in relationship, we instead crave to possess things, places, people, objects. They are ours, and not independent (even though we are, go figure). And herein lies the rub. Because we can’t actually possess things, and I mean this in a way of taking them into our bodies and making them us (other than food which is a miraculous process), we are forever buying, collecting, gathering things and people around us to fill some kind of hole deep inside, and in so doing, we end up wreaking havoc. Such a hole will never be filled by material objects. I’ve yet to hear of a wealthy person say, “yep, $40 million is enough.” I mean marketing is built on buying, obtaining more. Potato chip, anyone?
It makes sense, then, that possession is nine-tenths of the law. If its in our hands, someone has to take it from us if they want it. This compounds the materialistic view that permeates not just the Western world anymore, but everywhere that has internet which publicizes wealth and obtaining as a noble goal. While we are trying to fill the hole, what we are really doing is creating more suffering by acquiring things, bling, people, jobs, spaceships, immortality that in the end, can not satisfy our deepest craving, to be loved, accepted, seen and heard.
Which brings us back to spiritual bypassing. Instead of acknowledging and addressing the deep hole inside that calls out for care, love and belonging, we buy things, pop in and out of relationships, binge watch Netflix (guilty), eat indiscriminately (guilty), drink even more so (in recovery), and never get to the root of the issue. Everything that is here in our experience is really to keep pointing us back to the reality that we are Divine Intelligence, Christ Consciousness, Buddha-Nature. Such words are pointing to something ineffable, untouchable, eternal and unchanging. It can not be comprehended by the mind, it can only be experienced by the heart.
This is why spiritual bypassing is so big in the spiritual world. We explain away our hurt and pain through spiritual concepts rather than sitting in the muck of resentment, loss, despair and anger. And because we are adept with all the teachings, it becomes even easier to call on them to explain away our hurt and anger. Saying fancy words, and bringing up difficult concepts as ideas gives us a way to intellectualize the pain and suffering without feeling it.
For instance, let’s say I interact with a friend and the conversation gets heated and I say something that is hurtful. And let’s say my friend has enough courage and fortitude (and perhaps balance and equanimity) to call it out. Perhaps taken aback, I look at this dear one and say, “Oh, my bad. That was Mara (the Lord of illusion and delusion) talking. I got caught in papanca (a whirlwind of thoughts) and said the first thing that came to mind.” Certainly, I get points for having the Pali words roll so easily off my tongue, and more points for so quickly addressing the hurtful language with spiritual concepts, but such a reaction has done nothing to heal the relationship between me and my friend.
However, the hurt started before that. Where my spiritual practice actually needs to begin is the moment I felt heat in the conversation. If I had really been practicing, I would have noticed my skin prickling, my heart feeling heavy, my mind begin the papanca. And because of my deeply ingrained practice, I would know that it was here I felt injured, or triggered. It might have been something my friend said, it could have been the topic itself, it could have been a combination. And while a part of me might want to leap to blame and outwardly project the hurt, as a spiritual practitioner I would instead focus intensely on my own inner state and attend to that. This is the old, put on your own oxygen mask first. Even if I didn’t break the conversation, I could internally take a deep breath, mentally put a hand on my heart, acknowledge to myself that something was amiss, and recognize the internal hurt, frustration, confusion, whatever the emotion was that began bubbling up for me during the conversation. And the beauty is, I don’t have to get my friend to see or understand this. As long as I see it, I can attend to it.
From there, I might be able to chose different words, to exit gracefully from the conversation, to ask my friend to pause a moment for me to consider my response. Once, in a heated argument with a boyfriend at the time, I fell quiet. He finally yelled at me, asking me why I wasn’t engaging with him and I calmly replied, “because I’m staying present so I don’t get angry.” The whole argument was over right then. We both took deep breaths and resumed the conversation in a more kind manner.
While we learn wonderful concepts about suffering, the point of spiritual practice is to get out of it and not simply be able to name it. Where we change how we are in the world is internally first, giving all of us a chance to see our adequacy, to know our capacity for love, kindness, relationships, and connection. We no longer have to bypass because we know how to go straight into the pain, how to care for it, and how to come out the other side feeling whole.
About the Author: Beth Hinnen came to the spiritual path from the corporate world. After experiencing impermanence and greed, she left to study Yoga and has over 1,000 hours in Yoga teacher training, and ended up specializing in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, spiritual scripture that closely aligns with Buddhism. From there, she studied Zen Buddhism for over ten years, including in-person, month-long monastic retreats, until she earned certification, in January, 2023, as a Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. Currently, Beth is a co-leader of the IMCD Council, and on the Teachers Collective, as administrator. She hosts a Meetup group called Yoga Meets Buddhism, and for the past three years, has held an online Dharma Wednesdays class that discusses the Yoga Sutras while also bringing in Buddhist teachings, along with Sufi poets, Christianity, Judaism and other spiritual paths that reinforce the words of Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga where Beth studied. “The truth is one, the paths are many.” More information about Beth is at www.samayaco.org.
