It's Saturday, just after sunrise, on a rooftop in Jumeirah.
Twenty people lie on mats while the sound of the bowls rolls over them. The facilitator's voice is soft. Let it go. Breathe out what no longer serves you. You do, and it's lovely. For a while you feel light, open, almost new.
An hour later you're in the car, and your phone lights up. It's your sister. It's the same old thing, the tone you've known since you were twelve, the little dig folded inside a question. You feel something hot rise in your chest.
And then you catch it. You've done so much work. You've let this go. You type back: "Sending you love. Everything happens for a reason." You add a heart. You put the phone face down.
Your jaw is tight for the rest of the day. You check her message four more times. And you tell yourself that you're past this now, that you've risen above it, and that the tightness is just something leaving.
What is spiritual bypassing?
Spiritual bypassing is using spiritual ideas and practices to step around painful feelings and old wounds instead of meeting them. It's using the light to avoid what's buried. The practice isn't the problem. The problem is what it's being asked to cover, and the cover never holds for long.
That's the short answer. The longer one is about why it's so easy to do, and so hard to see.
What does spiritual bypassing look like?
It rarely looks like avoidance. It looks like growth.
It looks like "good vibes only", which quietly means no anger, no grief and no fear allowed in the room. It looks like forgiving someone the same afternoon they hurt you, out loud and with real sincerity, while your body still flinches when their name appears. It looks like "everything happens for a reason" said at the exact moment you'd otherwise have to feel what happened. It looks like detachment that's really distance, calm that's really numbness, and a quiet sense of being above the people who still get upset.
None of the ideas are wrong. Acceptance is real. Forgiveness is real. Some things do turn out to have a meaning you couldn't see at the time. Bypassing doesn't misuse false ideas. It misuses true ones, as a lid.
If you'd like to go underneath all of this, to who you are when nothing needs to be covered, the free Who Am I? masterclass was built for that. Or read on.
Why is spiritual bypassing so easy to miss?
Because it works, for a while.
Picture a damp patch on a wall. You paint over it, and the room looks clean again. You feel better every time you walk past. A season later the stain comes back through the paint, a little darker, and you paint again. Each coat is real paint and a real relief. And the damp is still in the wall.
That's what bypassing does. The practice brings real relief, so it feels like progress. The calm on the surface is real calm. What it doesn't do is reach the thing underneath, so the same feeling keeps coming back through, at the same people and the same moments, usually when you're tired.
And because you've worked so hard on yourself, the return of the feeling can be harder to bear than the feeling itself. You start to think you're doing it wrong. You meditate longer. You forgive harder. I've written about the trap of forgiving before you've felt anything in how to forgive someone who hurt you.
Is spirituality the problem?
No. And I want to be careful here.
For many people in this region and beyond, faith and practice are the ground they stand on. Prayer, meditation, gratitude and stillness have carried people through things nothing else could. Nothing here asks you to step off that ground.
The question is never whether you practise. It's which direction the practice is facing. A practice can turn you toward what's in you, so you can meet it with more steadiness. Or it can turn you away from it, so you never have to. The same hour on the same mat can do either.
One simple tell: after real practice, you can think about the hard thing and stay present with it. After bypassing, you can't think about it at all, or you think about it and immediately reach for a phrase that makes it go away.
What's the difference between bypassing and removal?
Bypassing paints over what's buried. Removal faces it, and takes the weight off.
Every pattern that keeps coming back is a thought fused to a charge, a memory with weight the body put on it. With your sister, the thought might be "I'm never good enough for her". The charge is the heat in your chest that's been arriving at her tone since you were twelve. Bypassing adds a new thought on top: "I've forgiven her. I'm past this." The new thought is lovely. It just never touches the charge, which is why your jaw stays tight all afternoon.
Removal goes the other way. Instead of adding a better belief, it finds the old charge and takes it off. The memory stays. The weight goes. You'll still remember being twelve. You'll still recognise her tone. It just stops landing in your body, and the forgiveness you'd been performing becomes simply true, with nothing to hold down.
That's the whole difference between adding and unbecoming, which I've written about in what does it mean to unbecome. You are not broken. You are buried. And you can't paint your way back to what's under the paint. The freedom is in the removal.
If you've seen yourself in this, the gentlest next step is to meet what's underneath without needing to fix anything. The free Who Am I? masterclass takes you from understanding into a direct experience of the part of you that was never covered over in the first place. It's ninety minutes, and you can start it here.
What can you try the next time you reach for the light?
Try a short body check before the practice, not instead of it. It takes about three minutes.
- Catch the reach. The moment you notice yourself heading for the phrase, the affirmation, the mat or the breath, pause. You haven't done anything wrong. You've just noticed.
- Ask: what was I feeling ten seconds ago? Not what you think about it. The feeling itself. Anger, hurt, fear, shame. Name it in one word.
- Find it in your body. Chest, throat, jaw, stomach. Put a hand there if that helps.
- Let it stay for ninety seconds. Don't fix it, explain it or forgive it. Just let it be there, the way you'd sit with a friend who's upset without trying to cheer them up.
- Ask it one question: "How old are you?" Let the first answer come. It's often much younger than you are now.
- Then do your practice, if you still want to. You'll notice it feels different when it isn't being used to make something disappear.
This won't remove the charge. But it turns the practice back toward you, which is the direction it was always meant to face.
A note before we go on. If what you've been stepping around includes trauma, grief that won't move, persistent low mood or anxiety, please see a doctor or a mental health professional. Therapy has its place, and it works on a layer that matters. If you're already working with someone, keep going. Nothing here replaces that.
What would it take to face what's buried, without drowning in it?
Not abandoning your practice, and not reliving every painful memory in detail. Whatever finally lets you stop painting over it has to do three things.
- It has to stop treating you as broken. Bypassing and endless self-fixing start from the same place: something in me is wrong and must be managed. That premise is the first thing to go.
- It has to go underneath, not add another layer. A brighter coat of paint is still a coat of paint. What helps is subtraction: finding what was buried and taking the weight off it.
- It has to end in experience, not just understanding. Bypassing is often very well read. Knowing more about the pattern hasn't moved it. Meeting what's underneath does.
That's the direction I wrote Unbecome about. It's a book for the people who did everything right, read the books, did the practices, and still feel buried. It walks back through the fixing years and the survival identities underneath them, and it doesn't hand you one more system. It took the Amazon best seller badge at launch.
Paint changes the surface. Removal takes the damp out of the wall, and what changes then goes all the way through. Talya Whitaker's words for it: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being."
If you're ready to stop painting over it, the book is here: Unbecome. And if you'd rather begin tonight, with something that takes you underneath instead of telling you about it, start with the free Who Am I? masterclass. It's ninety minutes: a written guide, my narrated video with slides, and a guided session at the end. It's normally USD 297 and currently free with the code GIFT26 at checkout, no card needed.
Start the Who Am I? masterclass
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. The next time your phone lights up with that name, you'll feel the heat before you've decided anything, and you'll reach for the phrase that makes it go away. Before then, give ninety minutes to the free masterclass and meet what's under the paint. Start the masterclass.