Have you ever had something difficult happen and your spiritual friend reminds you that,

hey, everything happens for a reason.

And it kind of pisses you off because you feel like they're spiritual bypassing,

which is to say they're dismissing your pain by using some spiritual platitude

that doesn't really have anything to do with what you're experiencing.

Or they use it to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility or to deny the severity of

what just happened, which could be interpreted as a form of spiritual bypassing. Either way,

having someone spiritually bypass your pain kind of just makes you want to clock them in the face, right?

But the question we don't often consider is, what's the alternative?

Should everybody be super serious about every challenging thing that happens to every single person,

even if that person is on the other side of the world?

Do we all need to stop what we're doing and stop following our purpose in order to grieve for every hardship

that happens to someone, even if there's nothing that we can do about it right now?

And if that's not the expectation, then who gets to determine which challenges we should take to heart and which ones we're

allowed to chalk up as just happening for a reason? Well, from a spiritual perspective, the answer

is we can do a little bit of both. Remember, our working definition for spirituality is the ability

to hold multiple truths in our awareness

at the same time without having to make one of them right and the other one wrong.

That means that something can be painful and require action, and we can also have the

understanding that it's happening for a reason. Now, obviously, depending on the situation, we don also have the understanding that it's happening for a reason.

Now, obviously, depending on the situation, we don't have to point out that it's happening for a reason.

We can silently have that understanding, but both can be accurate descriptions of the same situation,

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