What To Do If Your Yoga Teacher Is Spiritual Bypassing
What exactly is spiritual bypassing?
Spiritual bypassing is stepping over negative and “bad” feelings, situations, or thoughts in favor of “positive vibes only” or “stay positive” rhetoric. Ignoring and trying to negate anything bad is a popular practice in the yoga community. People tell you to focus on the good, have gratitude, think happy thoughts; I agree that gratitude and focusing on good are great practices but ignoring the negative doesn’t make it go away. In fact, ignoring the mud of life without trying to glean its purpose is doing yourself a great disservice. Getting into the mud and working on your shadows and limiting beliefs reminds me of a saying I once heard, “A tree doesn’t grow tall unless it has deep roots”. You have to be willing to feel the sadness, anger, disappointment. Feel and question so that you can get to the root of your wound. Only once you’ve noticed your subconscious or deeper issues, can you truly expect any change to become possible.
In my life, I rush to anger. It comes to me like an old, reliable friend. When I feel sad- boom, anger. When I feel rejected- bam, anger. When I feel overwhelmed- SURPRISE, anger. I went on in this cycle for 30 years of my life ( being generous with my timelines here). I never questioned why I was so angry. I attributed it to my latinx roots.
Enter: yoga. Oh yoga, how you’ve saved me from a lifetime of darkness. By shining the light of awareness into the deepest, most hidden caves of my subconscious yoga has shown me who I really am. My anger was and is a mask for what I’m really feeling. Anger is easy to control and best of all, I can direct anger outwards at others. Directing it outward meant I could focus on the negative of someone else instead of focusing on the hurt inside of myself. I went on with this cycle for years; never fully healing, always disappointed. By taking responsibility for looking deep into my uncomfortable places (that’s what she said) I discovered so many things about myself. I get closer to heaven and the divine when I go deeper into myself.
So imagine my surprise when I started noticing how many yoga teachers spiritual bypass! I kept thinking, “surely not YOGA teachers?!” But yes, even our beautiful leaders can succumb to the “Positive vibes only” brigade.
So here’s what you do if your beloved is guilty
Be kind. Everyone bypasses at some point. Life is hard and who wants to work on their pain? Society has a lot to do with this mentality and its not always taught to us how not to SB.
Do some shadow work to make sure you aren’t projecting or bypassing, yourself.
Offer good articles or ask them for books on spiritual bypassing- if they don’t know any, it might ignite inquiry
If all else fails, take the class, not the spiritual advice. An instructor who doesn’t do the deep work can still teach a great class. Take the asana and find yourself a spiritual teacher who is doing the deep dives into their subconscious.
Above all else, learn how to smell bullshit when you come across it. Use it as fertilizer for your growth
Namaste, friend