Why I Stopped Chasing "Awakening" and Started Focusing on Patterns, Worldviews and the Nervous System
Awakening is a worthy goal, but it's much harder to change your worldview and habitual patterns
Chasing the Next Peak Experience
If you’ve had a powerful psychedelic experience or been on a meditation retreat, you might feel a little bit disappointed coming back to normal life when the afterglow starts to wear off. You might want to get back to feeling some of those peaceful/blissful states, so you sign up for the next Vipassana retreat or the next psychedelic ayuahasca journey in hopes of “breaking through.” Or, you might think that going to these retreats will allow you to simply “let go” your personal problems.
I experienced this feeling during my first long silent meditation retreat over 6 years ago. It was an eye-opening, face-slapping, rug-pulling experience. It showed me that I could tap into an internal sense of contentment and happiness without anything external. I remember sitting for hours on end in a hot room during the Indian summer and being happier than I have ever been in my life.
But upon my return, I quickly went back to drinking mojitos, stuffing my face with chocolate and enjoying all of the pleasures life had to offer. After some time I had an itch to go back to more retreats, and I went to several. I spent a long time chasing these experiences to get back into heightened spiritual states. Eventually, there was a moment I realized that while awakening was a worthy goal, it was not the be-all-end-all. It was no silver bullet. And in fact, the real work was right in front of me, although it wasn’t easy to see.
The Risk of “Spiritual Bypassing”
A lot of people who get into spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, and psychedelics are looking for a rapture, opening, peak experience that will put them in a permanent state of bliss or joy and solve all of their problems in one swoop. On the surface, looking to purify your mind, open your heart, and let go of your “stuff” is a great goal to have. And having these experiences can definitely help you do that.
However, there is a difference between reaching certain experiences/states, and actually changing your patterns. Furthermore, there is a skill in integrating your insights into a way of being in daily life. The latter is much harder and slower than just feeling states of bliss or equanimity. Even if you are relatively far along in terms of your bag of spiritual attainments or experiences, you could still be operating from a very one-sided perspective and fall back into old patterns.
I’ve met people who’ve done psychedelics dozens of times and are on their 10th silent meditation retreat, yet still seem to be neurotic, fidgety, and anxious. Some of them avoid challenges in their lives, like working on their relationships with family, or getting on with their careers. One might deny their negative emotions and say something like “everything is perfect as it is,” yet be short-tempered and fail to look at the actual wreckage they’ve caused due to their behavior.
This isn’t a criticism of them, and I know we are all at different stages of our journey. However, it’s useful to know when your journey can lead to spiritual bypassing, a term coined by John Welwood in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening. He defines it as:
“The tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."
A few more examples of spiritual bypassing:
Projecting your negative feelings onto others (‘they have a negative vibe’) instead of working on being more compassionate
Always being positive and brushing real problems under the rug
Thinking that you need to rise above your emotions or that they are not real; denying the fact that you live your life through emotions/bodily sensations
Over-reliance on meditation retreats/psychedelic retreats without integrative follow-through to heal trauma and relationships
Being one-sided and believing that your view or spiritual technique is better or more enlightened than others
I have personally fallen into every single one of these traps, and I am sure there are many more. Part of this comes from a core belief that I held onto for some time, a fallacy that I fell into. I was the belief that simply having a peak mystical experience in meditation or psychedelics was enough to undo my patterns and solve all (or at least most) of my problems. In reality, meditation helped me see my problems — but it still requires a lot of action on my part.
By the way, “bypassing” comes in many flavors, and it’s not just spiritual bypassing. For example, you can believe that focusing 100% on your career is going to bring you happiness. Or taking the extreme view that diet, health and exercise are the root cause of your suffering and by just having the right mix of food/protocol etc. that you will be happy. Or even that getting enough knowledge or mentors under your belt — books, videos, courses — is going to be the key to your happiness. There is of course benefit to eating well, working hard and reading lots of books — but to pretend that one of these is going to be a silver bullet is a delusion.
Taking a More Holistic View
Like anything in life we can become too narrowly focused in our spiritual practices. As
mentioned in a recent post, the whole idea of the “Middle Path” is still pretty new for most people. That means not taking the extreme position, but finding a comfortable middle ground.The basic way to avoid spiritual bypassing or other forms of bypassing is to remember that there are so many ways to develop as an individual and over-emphasizing one of them will likely leave you unbalanced.
The Buddha said something along the lines of “Don’t get attached too any teachings. That includes my own teachings.” For those going down the spiritual path, I want to share three ideas on how to create more balance as you go down your path. These are what worked for me, and they may not be perfect for you, but they can at least serve as food for thought and perhaps open up some conversations.1
#1. The Integral World View
The first idea comes from Ken Wilber, who developed what he calls Integral Theory. He emphasizes the importance of multiple perspectives and the evolution of consciousness. One of the frameworks he uses is called the Altitudes of Development. This theorizes that the world, and people, go through different stages over time. For most of history we have been mythical, religious, or rational stages; it’s only recently that we are taking a more globalized, pluralistic view of things.
How does this relate to the spiritual journey? The existing worldview and structure you find yourself in — your culture, the culmination of past experiences, and your emotional maturity — are all going to play a role in how you interpret the spiritual experience. You will interpret your experience with the existing tools you have.
What this suggests is that you can have many deep, mystical experiences, but be operating from an older world view. You could be a terrorist that believes in salvation through suicide-bombing, or you could be a devout Catholic priest, or an atheist with no belief in god. Or you believe that science has all the answers and see the world through facts. Every single person, at any point in their life, could have a spiritual experience, awakening, or at the least have a very transformative peak experience.
For a small percentage of people (less than 5%, Wilber estimates), they reach the integral or higher 2nd and 3rd tier integral states. Integral means that you hold multiple perspectives and take a holistic view; you see the pros/cons of everything that has ever emerged in our societies. An integral view looks like this:
"I have one major rule: everybody is right. More specifically, everybody -- including me -- has some important pieces of the truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace." - Ken Wilber
At the integral stage, you have not only integrated this world view on an intellectual level, but on an embodied physical, spiritual and emotional level. These stages are not something you can “attain” like having some peak spiritual experience. They are views that emerge gradually and that most of us are not consciously thinking about; we are like the fish in water that doesn’t know what water is. Simply becoming aware of where you are at in the tiers can help you move up the next tier.
#2. Healing Your Nervous System
The foundation of our nervous system is largely developed due to the relationships we have with our caregivers/parents in the first 18 months of our lives. When we have parents who are emotionally detached, or perhaps just super busy with work and not there, or different dynamics with siblings, these can impact how our nervous system develops.
We can, for example, grow up in a heightened sympathetic state that causes us to have higher heart rates and more mental/physical tension. People you see who are chronically anxious likely can trace this back to their nervous system development childhood (the high-functioning anxious person is all too common). Or, we can be in a more dorsal vagal state, the opposite of fight or flight, and feel really down and detached from others. These are all defense mechanisms our nervous system used during our early years which no longer serve us. (read more in my post here)
Watch the above video about Polyvagal Theory to understand how all of this works. Intentionally working on your nervous system to unblock frozen energy through deep breathing techniques, somatic mind-body work, or deeper trauma work like TRE or Somatic Experiencing can rewire the neural pathways that we developed in our early years. This work on your body and nervous system is a key to letting go of negative patterns and it will very likely make your meditation easier!
#3 Becoming Whole Through Shadow Work
Another powerful pattern release tool is Shadow Work. We go through our lives pushing down different parts of ourselves because society, parents, friends and teachers tell us that we should be a certain way. We should be “nice” or “proper” or “friendly” or “behave” and we are constantly told what is good and bad. As a result, we internalize this and shut down our natural desires, curiosities, and creativity.
When we do shut down these parts of ourselves, it causes to react to OTHER people who exhibit those traits. Any strong reaction you have to something, like getting offended by something, is almost certainly pointing to a Shadow element that you haven’t uncovered yet. I wrote a post recently about The Sentence That Changed my Life, which goes into prompts that you can use to uncover your own unconscious biases. The sentence that changed my life was this:
“What you reject in others, you haven’t accepted in yourself.”
A technique that combines mindfulness and shadow work I have found powerful is to see how I am holding on to things in each moment, in each interaction, in each difficult situation in my life. The tendency especially when you are chasing peak experiences is to sort of ignore the difficult stuff in life, to push it down and avoid it, to want to replace it with something better. But the other approach is to use every difficult situation in your life as fuel for your personal growth and transformation.
Am I jumping to conclusions?
Am I holding on too tightly?
How can I bring love/compassion to the situation?
Am I becoming more open, or less open?
What are the other perspectives?
Am I resisting more, or am I letting life flow?
Do I think I am right, or am I able to see the value in anyone’s opinion (or at least understand why they have the opinion)?
If I ask myself these questions in each interaction, I can use meditation to sit with it and let go. And then it moves me closer towards building better patterns and habits, undoing old ones, and integrating a more holistic world view, regardless of what spiritual states I have experienced in the past.
Summary: What Does This Mean for Spiritual Seekers?
Spiritual seekers can fall into spiritual bypassing; ignoring work that needs to be done and overemphasizing their practice with negative side effects on their daily lives.
Experiencing transcendental states, and even awakening itself, doesn’t mean that you have an unbiased worldview. We all operate within certain structures and beliefs. Identifying where you are at can help you get perspective and uncover blind spots.
In tandem with meditative practices, there is a LOT of work to do on other parts of life — this is a lifelong journey. Don’t get sucked into silver bullet approaches, be curious and explore! Take a look at shadow work, integral theory, and nervous system healing as starting points for deeper work.
Thanks for reading! As always, I’d love to hear from you.
Have you ever found yourself chasing certain spiritual states or experiences?
Do you find yourself engaging in spiritual bypassing, and what does that look like for you?
What is your world view now in the Altitudes of Development and what would you like to work on?
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It’s also important to remember that meditation isn’t always a transferable skill. Sure, you might be more easy-going, less-attached and have a different experience of consciousness, but being a good meditator does not mean that you are good at managing finances, playing video games, handling relationship conflicts, or that you are a good chef. This seems really obvious, but it’s easy to forget that you still have to do the work to build those other skills. Waking up is not the same as growing up.