Are we awakening or avoiding? Knowing the difference between “spiritual bypass” and actual awakening makes all the difference!
But first a definition according to Wikipedia: “A spiritual bypass or spiritual bypassing is a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks”.
Here’s the invitation mentioned in the video.
Why I hesitated to even speak about spiritual bypass
I have been wanting to share this for a couple of days now but I was kind of pushing it away and hesitating. I wasn’t sure how to communicate this. I didn’t want to say it in a way that could be misunderstood. But I guess the only way out is through it. So here it goes…
As you may know I have been speaking a lot about joy and awakening, for a long time, and it is one voice among many, many others speaking about the evolution of our times, the human evolution and us as humanity stepping into a higher frequency and higher level of consciousness. Which is wonderful and beautiful, obviously.
And, there are some challenges that come along with that greater expansion, challenges that we may not be aware of. Spiritual bypass is one such challenge
I want to share with you my own experience with that because I don’t want you to think that I’m just preaching what we should and should not do. On the contrary, everything I say is based on my own experience.
My personal experience of spiritual bypass
I had one such experience quite recently. And it was such a great learning experience, actually.
A little bit of a backstory
I spent the first 40 years of my life struggling with loneliness really badly. It was very painful and really difficult. At some point I hit the proverbial rock bottom — and in that moment I actually experienced an awakening. An awakening that didn’t last but an awakening nevertheless that then helped me embark on the next stage of the journey. From there I was able to discover a way of meeting my pain with love and transform it more and more and more (learn more about that experience here)
Eventually, coming from a place where I was struggling with loneliness in spite of doing all kinds of inner work, healing, mediation and therapy and what not, I was able to reach the place where I am today: where there is daily joy and there has been so much expansion… life has become pretty beautiful!
Encountering shadows of attachment
One of the things that I’ve been working with for quite a while in the recent year or so has been attachment. I’ve done some deep work with that. As a result it seems that the core of it, the main part of it I was able to transform. And, I’m still meeting shadows of it.
The way I’ve been experiencing it lately is that, because my access to soul connection, to joy, to love, to light has become so natural… What I have been doing recently and noticing that I do is that when I experience some sort of attachment I then immediately re-balance. In the sense that I immediately go back to the joy and the light, as much as I can. It’s like the natural thing to do, right? You see imbalance and then you go back to balance, again and again…
I’ve been doing it for a little while and then, at some point while speaking about my process with my coach… Because yes I have a coach. Just like I coach coaches, I have a coach too, it’s always helpful! … So, we were talking and what I noticed as I described this for her was that there was a sense of running around in a loop. Imbalance -balance, imbalance – balance, imbalance-balance. On and on… So I started to wonder:
What is this heaviness that keeps taking me out of balance? And then I had an intuition in the form of a phrase that came to me: “The Adjustment Bureau”. At first I thought: “Oh, yes, this is what I’m doing, I’m adjusting all the time”
Re-balancing as spiritual bypass
Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the film “The Adjustment Bureau”? it’s a great movie, highly recommended. The story takes place in a world very much like ours, except there’s something there that’s called the Adjustment Bureau. They know upfront that certain actions, certain very simple choices, like whether you turn left or right, meet this person or that person, can have huge consequences on how the human journey continues.
So to avoid negative results, to avoid war, unhappiness, to prevent that people take turns they should not take, because it doesn’t serve them or the world the best, this Adjustment Bureau adjusted people’s actions, quietly and invisibly. In the film there’s a whole story around it… Again, get the movie if you haven’t yet.
What I realized was that this was really what I was doing with myself now! Whenever I see the slightest imbalance I adjust myself, I control myself back into balance, back into light, back into joy. However, I do it so quickly, it has become so easy, that I actually miss the gift of the imbalance. Even if it wasn’t intentional I was using what some call “spiritual bypass”.
This is so important to get!
The gift of imbalance
It is so important to understand that when we have what we may think is a negative experience, or a painful experience, or just an uncomfortable experience…. In my case these were just shadows, it wasn’t deep pain. In other instances, it could have been something much more painful… But when these experiences come to us it’s not a mistake, it’s not some kind of outside force that is acting against us.
It is a gift from life. And the gift is there to be accepted and received.
If we don’t receive it then we will get it again. If I get a gift and I don’t accept it, and, as some people would say, don’t learn the lesson, don’t unpack the gift, don’t see the value and the energy that is there and whatever else is there.. when I reject the gift and jump back into balance (via a “spiritual bypass”), then I get the gift again. Fortunately so!
Knowing that, the better response, the more valuable response is to not to be so quick with jumping into those higher frequencies, and joy and love and light. Instead, stay with that experience, that challenge, that pain, that shadow a little bit longer.
Stay with it, allow yourself to feel it and to accept the gift. And then, as it is being received, as it is being felt, as it is being embraced, then we can bring joy and love and light and all good things in, all those higher frequencies.. And when we do…
How transformation happens (opposite to spiritual bypass)
When we bring these two worlds, these two types of frequencies together: the challenge, the tension, the separated energy one hand and then the higher frequencies, the flow, the uniting energies on the other hand… When we bring all this together then magic can happen. Then transformation happens. Then we truly receive the gift and can unfold into the higher frequencies with the gift.
That’s very different from just adjusting and going back and forth!
I cannot stress it strongly enough that so many of us, perhaps most of us here, have worked so hard and so much with our challenges, our problems, our pain, our past, our stories that it is very natural at some point of the journey to be really tired of it, and to have this “Oh no, not again!” reaction. That is very human and I understand it completely. So there’s nothing wrong with wanting to move very quickly though it…
And, when I say: “Stay with it a bit longer” that’s exactly what I mean. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to stay there for another 10 years. I t doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to go through years of releases and I don’t know what else. It might, I cannot exclude it completely, but in most cases, if you have done a lot of work already it probably won’t take that long.
It just means that there is no need and no help for you in rushing through it.
And just to give you an example of the latter… Well, I’m not even sure if I should share it because that in a sense opens a door to another escape… But on the other hand it’s a good example of how subtle it all is:
The good news
As soon as I noticed that I was playing the “The Adjustment Bureau” game with myself, I stopped doing that. Next time I experienced a shadow of attachment, I stayed with it and I allowed myself to feel it.
I then noticed that without me wanting to escape it this time, without me trying to bring in these higher frequencies, it untangled very quickly. It happened within a few days. A whole lot happened which as a result began to bring me into a new state of freedom, one that I have not known before in this life. Maybe I have known it as a baby but not since. And who knows, it can be temporary and I may go back to take another round with it and if I do that’s completely fine, I’m learning my lessons too. But it showed me something else that is also important.
When I’m willing to not run away from pain, when I’m willing to not run away from even the most subtle shadows…because it is actually with the subtle shadows that this gets difficult… When I’m willing to stay with it, then it’s as if my soul and the whole world is saying “Yes! Now she gets it! Now we can help her! Now that she gets it we can make the transformation pretty fast and pretty easy and pretty fantastic.”
But again, this is subtle, so please try to, next time you experience a shadow, a challenge, a pain and your immediate response is “let me jump into positive thinking and joy and love and light”… Stay with it instead, and trust it!
There’s no need for a spiritual bypass – we are not alone!
You don’t have to hurry into some sort of escape because your soul, your God, your angels, your world, your whatever you call it, it’s all there with you. We are never in these processes alone! When we do our part the “higher powers” do their part too. And the other way round: They cannot do their part unless we do our part also.
Things can transform but only when we do our part and unwrap our gifts.
How exactly to deal with pain (without spiritual bypass)
For some of you this unwrapping of gifts and staying with the pain may be difficult, or you may not be aware of how to do that and how to bring those higher frequencies in.
I wanted to let you know that the tool that I was given (from within) and have been using for 20+ years and that has brought me through amazing transformation, just with this one tool basically… I have been teaching it to my coaching clients in the past and I also had a course about it at some point but it’s really outdated. So I decided to create a new version of it.
Simple visit the page that I created for it, at Halinagold.com/see. There you can register for the course.
The last thing I want to say is this — and it’s really important:
Thank you!
So many of us have been through a lot of pain. I imagine that you have been too and this is why you’re watching this. By working with it, by meeting it, by moving along your path you have done tremendous work for yourself, for your own well-being, for your own happiness — and also for humanity, and for the world. Because we are all connected. Every time you meet your pain, you meet, in a sense, everyone’s pain. Every time you are willing to embrace your pain with love and light and joy and not escape it, you do the same for humanity. We all learn how to meet our pain, meet our shadows with love and light and peace. And we learn how to transform it, and become the more liberated humanity and become the more free, more liberated, more joyful human being that we are destined to be.
Thank you for being here, for doing what you do, and also for reading this.