Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about why the opposite of spiritual bypassing is not the answer.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so spiritual bypassing, if you've, if you're a listener of this podcast, if you've read my book, followed my work, you should be familiar with this term. It was coined by John

Wellwood to describe this phenomenon he was seeing in his meditation communities where people would embody what could be described as a premature transcendence,

trying to rise above the raw, messy side of their life before actually doing the work to meet and heal and relax into it to find genuine freedom and surrender.

And instead sort of just adopt an identity of being at peace with all things without actually

having that in their core and having reorganized their beings their being's relationship to the world to actually

have that inner freedom. And so this is spiritual bypassing. It's basically trying to skirt

around the hard aspects of life instead of making the practice to move through them and learn about them and understand

how to be in better relationship to them.

So it would seem then that what we want is the opposite of spiritual bypassing.

But if spiritual bypassing is skirting around these experiences, not meeting them, then it might seem that the opposite

of that would be going head on into these experiences, just give it all to me, like, I'm going to

me, like I'm going to take it with almost like a reckless abandon.

And that is not the answer either.

Because what that can lead to is a nervous system overload and is actually coming from a similar compulsive place as the tendency to bypass, which is that, oh, yeah, there's something

here, and we just quickly go into a pattern.

And in the spiritual bypassing case, it's like the pattern is to avoid the thing.

But going into something full on is another form of a compulsive pattern,

which is like, oh, that's the thing, that's what I need to do, jump right in. Without actually being

attuned, the common denominator here is a lack of attunement and a lack of deep listening to what is actually needed to meet this moment

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