Welcome, I'm Connor Beaton, and today we are going to be talking about understanding spiritual

bypassing. And this is a fairly relevant topic, whether you are a deeply spiritual person,

or, you know, whether you have spiritual people in your life and want to understand them better. And we've all seen examples

of spiritual bypassing, whether it is through the use and the means of a specific religion,

religious ideology, or whether it's through the use of a spiritual ideology or misinterpreting and misrepresenting

a spiritual doctrine as a means of bypassing or moving past something specifically.

So I'm going to basically do a few things here today and I'm trying to keep this brief.

I'm going to define spiritual bypassing,

talk about why people do it, how it shows up, and then maybe leave you with just a little bit of

how do we address when people are using spiritual bypassing? Because I think what I've seen is,

you know, sometimes people in relationships, there's a partner that is using spiritual bypassing or in a work environment.

There's someone who is spiritual bypassing and it can be very challenging to get through to them.

And spiritual bypassing was, I think originally coined by a gentleman named John Wellwood, and he was the prominent

psychotherapist and author in the transpersonal psychology field. He since passed away, but amongst

many of his accolades, one of the things that he coined, one of the things he helped to create

was this concept of

spiritual bypassing. And in his book, toward a psychology of awakening, which was one of the

books that I've read and I've really found to be quite profound in terms of a psychological

view into spirituality. Mr. Wellwood defines

spiritual bypassing as using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional,

or unfinished business to shore up a shaky sense of self or to be

little basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks. So the goal of such a practice, he claimed,

...