A quote by John Welwood

With spiritual bypass, we turn to the absolute as a way to avoid the relative and use meditation or any spiritual teachings to avoid feeling pain or discomfort within or around us. If anger arises, we might ignore or dismiss our feelings by trying to force a sense of calm, oneness, or even an insistence that if we were truly spiritual, we would nev

Emotional bypassing is when you intentionally use the witnessing state as a means to purposefully avoid feeling or even noticing painful emotions. It’s a spiritual form of being in emotional denial. The true witnessing state is both a freedom from being held captive by whatever you are experiencing and a freedom to experience whatever experience yo

These were the imitative and self-absorbed qualities that Chogyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism.”

However, the spiritual problem comes when we seek to repress what is negative or vulnerable in us, to deny or live “above” our mortality, fallibility, negativity, or pain.