The spiritual path doesn't get less rich when you stop bypassing. It gets more real. More embodied. More genuinely transformative.

- Tina Boss

Something that I have personally experienced and see so much out in the spiritual / personal growth space is this damaging narrative around “love and light” and being 100% calm and collected no matter what happens in your life. Even to the point that people throw back in your face – “I thought you were spiritual”, when you express your opinion or honour your boundaries. It’s a fucking joke and is doing wrong by people.

As I said I have walked this path and when you are there it’s hard to see it for what it really is, and when you can look back and recognise it, it’s almost like “holy shit, I was completely spiritually bypassing, no wonder I’m still in the same loop”. Because that’s what’s actually happening – this spiritual path many of us embark on to set ourselves free quietly becomes another way to avoid ourselves.

The reality around this is – it is extraordinarily common in women doing this kind of work, so we can’t feel shame around this, because this watered-down, bypass-everything version of spirituality is literally thrown in our faces as an acceptable way to evolve.

Not too long ago I was dealing with a stressful situation, which involved relying on an external company to do this certain job for me. They were mucking me around and didn’t really seem to care that it had a domino effect for me – which mind you I had already clearly articulated. One thing I was very mindful of was being upfront and clear with them around my expectations. On the fifth phone call with them I was being very firm around what needed to happen, which they were not delivering, and when I got off that phone call I was frustrated and expressed that to a friend who was with me at the time. My friend said to me – I thought you were all calm and your meditations each day meant you didn’t get angry. Well … now I was somewhat ‘more’ frustrated!

Taking care of my internal state and practicing the modalities that I do, does not mean I give my power away to allow others walk all over me. It is literally the exact opposite – I have taken my power back so people don’t take advantage of me. What matters is how we meet it in the moment – and what we do with it after. There is such a thing as healthy anger – we’ve been conditioned to believe that all anger is bad.

So, what is ‘spiritual bypassing’? This term was introduced by John Welwood – a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist – in the mid-1980s. He said 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". 1

Basically, before we have made peace with what is going on in the depths of our subconscious we try and rise above this, totally disregarding our humanness in the process. From the outside this can look like genuine growth and even feel like it from the inside. And the cruel irony – funny in the darkest possible way – is that sometimes the more spiritually literate we become, the more sophisticated our avoidance can get.

So what does this look like in our day-to-day? I can call these out because I’ve done this myself over the years.

• Reaching for "everything happens for a reason" before we’ve allowed ourselves to feel the impact of what happened.

• Meditating over the anger instead of sitting with what the anger is actually pointing to.

• Calling something a "lesson" or "part of your journey" before you have finished grieving it.

• Using high vibration language to bypass the very human, very valid experience of being hurt, disappointed, or furious.

In many other blogs and podcast episodes I have shared that a survival mechanism I developed from a young age was being numb. Flat line. Monotone. Whenever I did feel emotions strongly, I mostly suppressed them as quickly as possible. Sometimes though, when I was unable to suppress them, they exploded – messy, loud, and completely unpredictable. Not pretty. Not productive. And always left me feeling embarrassed and in victimhood.

I didn’t know how to feel my emotions. I didn’t know how to allow them to process through my body in a way that allowed them to be recognised, honoured and then leave my body in a healthy way.

So when I embarked on this deep journey into spirituality, I fell into this ideal of ‘rainbows and lollipops’. The story of love and light felt so good. But it was just another way to stay above my emotions rather than move through them. The reality of this was that this became another coping mechanism rather than a genuine path of inner truth.

And of course, this made complete sense at the time. The bypassing was protecting me from fully feeling my emotions – you can’t go from numb to acceptance in one step. There is a process, a journey, and it generally isn’t pretty or easy. We are hard wired to move toward pleasure and not pain, so of course it makes sense.

The recognition now looking back is seeing the spiritual bypasser as a protector part – and she developed for very good reasons. She kept the pain at a manageable distance when I didn’t yet have the capacity to meet it directly.

As smart, spiritually aware women we are especially vulnerable to this, as the more tools we have, the more elegant the avoidance can become. And let’s be honest, so many spiritual communities, women’s circles and the like, can inadvertently reinforce bypassing. You might recognise this pressure to hold a high vibe, to find the lesson, to not dwell in negativity. And yes, I support those philosophies – but only after you've actually allowed yourself to feel what's underneath first.

We can turn to the Universal Law of Polarity: everything has an opposite, and both poles are part of the whole. You cannot selectively experience only the light frequencies and call that spiritual growth. Shadow is not the opposite of spiritual – it is part of it.

And in Kabbalah it speaks of the concept of the klippot – the shells or husks that form around the soul when light is not properly integrated. Bypassing doesn't remove the darkness, it encases it. This can then lead to the physical dis-ease we experience. When we ignore these causal points they permeate through our spiritual field, then our mental field, then our emotional field, and it enters into our physical body.

Bypassing doesn't remove the darkness. It encases it. And what is encased doesn't disappear — it finds another way to surface.

- Tina Boss

And this is exactly why so many women who have done years of work still find themselves in the same patterns. The work has been happening above the wound, not inside it. We may recognise this as:

• Toxic positivity dressed up in spiritual language.

• Forgiveness offered before anger has been fully felt – which isn't forgiveness, it's suppression with good branding.

• Detachment mistaken for peace.

• Manifestation practices used to wish away the inner work rather than do it.

So, let’s circle back to healthy anger. Healthy anger is not a low vibe emotion to be transcended. It is information. It is a boundary trying to form. It is the soul saying that was not okay. And when we bypass anger with spirituality, we don't release it – we compress it. And compressed anger finds other exits: chronic fatigue, passive resentment, physical tension, depression, disconnection from self.

The Law of Perpetual Transmutation tells us that energy is always moving, always transforming. An unfelt emotion doesn't disappear – it moves deeper into the body and finds another way to surface. Therefore, we can apply this law, which allows us to gain control over our emotional and mental states, preventing negative emotions from dominating our experience. This is the key because being ruled by anger is very different to listening to anger – one is dysregulation, the other is intelligence.

That is why I love breathwork. Conscious breathwork is one of the most direct ways to access what the mind is bypassing and allow the body to complete the emotional cycle.

We need to be radically honest with ourselves - real spiritual growth doesn't happen above the human experience. It happens through it.

The way forward – is by walking through the fire. You’ve likely heard it – what we resist, persists – and grows stronger. Resistance creates friction and stagnation, so when we bypass because of this resistance, we block energy from flowing naturally, which can lead to stagnation, symptoms, and suffering.

So the integration is bringing the spiritual and the human into the same room – not transcending the human, but meeting it with all the tools and wisdom you've developed. You can compassionately thank the bypasser part and it can gently move aside when the Self has enough capacity to meet what's underneath. This is the work.

In spiritual alchemy we can use The Void – the blackening, the decomposition stage in the alchemical process. You cannot turn lead into gold by pretending the lead isn't there. The transformation requires you to go into the darkness, not around it.

What this looks like in practice:

• Feeling the anger before finding the lesson.

• Grieving the loss before reframing the growth.

• Sitting in the not-knowing before reaching for a meaning.

• Letting the body speak before the mind explains.

The spiritual path doesn't get less rich when you stop bypassing. It gets more real. More embodied. More genuinely transformative.

If this concept of spiritual bypassing resonates with you, my invitation to you is to sit with it, journal with it, allow yourself to dig a little deeper into what is underneath the bypassing or resistance.

When you're ready to go deeper, come and explore the ways we can work together. I’d love to support you on your inner authority journey.

You cannot turn lead into gold by pretending the lead isn't there. The transformation requires you to go into the darkness, not around it.

- Tina Boss

1. Fossella, Tina; Welwood, John (Spring 2011). "Human nature, buddha nature: an interview with John Welwood" (PDF). Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.