Month: April 2026

From Spiritual Bypassing to Embodied Spirituality

What if the very practices meant to help you heal have been helping you to avoid it instead?

That may not be a comfortable question but it might be the one we need to ask ourselves.

There’s a particular kind of spiritual seeker who meditates daily, speaks about love and light with genuine warmth, extends grace to almost everyone, and is quietly, persistently running from something they haven’t yet been able to name. They’re not doing it on purpose. They’ve simply found that rising above pain is much more manageable than delving into it.

The problem is that what you rise above doesn’t go away. It quietly waits in the corners of our mind and tissues of your body until they are stressed enough for it to surface.

When Spirituality Becomes a Strategy

Psychologist John Welwood named this pattern in 1984. He called it spiritual bypassing: using spiritual practices and beliefs to sidestep painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs that still require attention.

The tricky thing about bypassing is that it looks good. It presents as peace, acceptance, gratitude, non-attachment. On the surface, it can be hard to distinguish from genuine spiritual development. But underneath, there’s often a telltale quality: a kind of floatiness, a struggle to tolerate anger, a sense that the body is beside the point.

Bypassing can look like constant positivity that doesn’t quite reach the eyes. It can look like compassion so boundless it has no capacity to say no, to be angry, or to draw a line. It can look like spiritual credentials that substitute for the harder work of processing the backlog of emotions we may have stuffed since we were children.

It sounds like: “I’ve moved past that.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “I’m choosing love.”

It doesn’t mean these statements are false. It means something in the body, or related passive aggressive behaviours, are often telling a different story.

What Gets Left Behind

When we bypass, we don’t just skip over pain. We skip over unintegrated sensation, emotion, memory, and behavioural information.

The nervous system stores everything that hasn’t been processed. Grief that was labeled “negative thinking.” Anger that was reframed as “an invitation for compassion.” Fear that was dissolved in meditation before it had a chance to say no.

These experiences don’t disappear. Their unintegrated charge accumulates within the nervous system over time, and the body, as always, keeps the score.

Spiritual bypassing doesn’t only show up in spiritual communities. It travels in the same company as: people-pleasing, e.g. the habitual extension of grace to everyone except yourself; perfectionism, e.g. the relentless pursuit of a self that needs no healing; and intellectual bypassing, e.g. the endless analysis of your experience as a way of not quite having to feel it.

All bypasses, whether spiritual, positivity-based, or people-pleasing, share the same root: the preference for leaving over staying, for rising above rather than descending into what is here. Because what is here is simply too overwhelming to feel.

Compassion Without a Body

Here’s what’s rarely said about spiritual bypassing: it often comes from a genuine longing for healing. The turn toward light, love, something larger than the wound; usually one that Western medicine or talk therapy couldn’t heal.

That impulse is not the problem. It is the bypassing the body on the way there that is.

Real compassion, the kind that doesn’t collapse under pressure, has weight to it. It knows how to hold both the tenderness and the difficulty. It can be present with pain without immediately trying to transform or transcend it.

That kind of compassion isn’t learned in the mind. It’s learned in the body. In the slow, sometimes uncomfortable practice of staying with what’s here: the tension, numbness, grief, anger, and the ordinary ache of being human; without rushing toward resolution.

Tara Brach says, “Radical compassion is an all-embracing tenderness that moves toward our suffering first, then others, rather than away from it. It is embodied, active, and all-inclusive, not a feeling we perform or a state we claim to have arrived at.”

This experience stands in direct contrast to Marion Woodman’s description of the “inner critic or disembodied spirit, which judges us as fundamentally not enough and drives us further into bypass, e.g. the addiction to transcendence or fleeing into spirit, beauty, and light rather than having to face the shadow, messy, imperfect human.”

Exercise: Are You Here, or Are You Above It?

This one asks something of you for a few moments of honest contact with ourselves.

Find a comfortable position. Both feet on the floor if you’re sitting. Take a breath, inhaling and exhaling.

Think of something in your life that you’ve made peace with. Something you’ve reframed, released, or risen above. Hold it lightly in your mind.

Now drop your attention into your body.

Start at your chest. Does it feel open and settled, or is there something faintly braced there, a subtle holding?

Move to your belly. Soft, or quietly contracted? Is there any tension that wasn’t there a moment ago?

Notice your throat. Any tightness? A sense of something that hasn’t quite been said?

Maybe something that has been waiting to finally surface while you check in.

Ask yourself this question: Is the peace you found about this issue something that landed in you, or something you climbed to?

Landing has a quality of weight to it, e.g. feet on the ground, and something settling rather than something being set aside.

Climbing feels lighter, which isn’t always wrong. But the body usually knows the difference.

Whatever you notice, stay with it for one more breath. Not to fix it. Not to reframe it. Just to let it be seen and felt until it naturally finds its way into integration.

That’s the practice. Staying just a moment longer than the urge to rise above the challenging emotions and sensations.

Embodied Spirituality

We can invite both the human body and its messiness, alongside the divine nature of its Spirit to live together in harmony.

Thomas Hübl shares about the difference between having spiritual insights and understanding and spiritual embodiment. Insight arrives quickly, and embodiment takes time. It asks the nervous system to let what we understand actually land as part of embodied wisdom.

Giving human pain its actual due before asking it to transform, often feels opposite to what we expect. Not dissolution or peace, but a kind of landing. A feeling of weight returning, and our feet actually touching the ground.

Like Miriam Greenspan shares, “The emotions of fear can become clarity, grief can become compassion, and despair can become hope.” What felt like a dead end, becomes a threshold for integrated evolution.

What remains, when we stop running, is almost always the doorway into embodying our greatest home.

For a 3-minute YouTube video on the same subject click here.

This kind of embodied, honest healing is what we practice in the School of Sacred Somatics, as well as in our Retreats. If you’re ready to stop rising above and start going through, join us in early July 2026 near Ottawa, Canada for a 4-day Retreat or in Ubud, Bali in mid-December 2026 for an 8-day deep dive. Find out more at jayahollohan.com. 🍃

Authenticity: The Antidote to the Masks that Exhaust Us

What if the exhaustion you feel isn’t about doing too much but about overriding your natural impulses and authenticity for too long?

Most of us learned young that certain parts of ourselves were acceptable and others needed to be hidden. We shaped ourselves around what our primary attachment figures could hold, what our culture rewarded, and what kept us safe and belonging.

We built multiple masks, they became normalized, and then we forgot we were wearing them.

Performing and Perfectionism is a Full-Time Job

There’s a type of tired that no amount of resting or sleep repairs. It lives in the tension of our jaws, shoulders and chests. Also, our breath that is barely audible no matter how many we times we go to yoga and learn to exhale deeply.

Canadian Jungian analyst Marion Woodman called perfectionism a spiritual crisis. Not a personality flaw, or a productivity problem; a crisis of being cut off from the truth of what it means to be human. She saw it as a war against the body itself. Against the parts of us that hunger, ache, need, and fail.

The achiever, the people-pleaser, the perfectionist, these aren’t defects to be resolved, they’re your protectors. These masks learned very early on, that performing was safer than being who you are. That accommodation kept the peace. That being good enough might finally earn you the love and rest you were deserving of.

But the nervous system can’t discharge what’s always being held in. It can’t rest when it’s always turned on. Chronic performing keeps the body in a state of low-grade vigilance. Held breath, forced smiles and nodding while something inside contracts. These are all signs of the old masks in place.

This is a central origin of where exhaustion actually comes from. It’s not weakness. It’s the cost of wearing a costume and its mask for too long.

Culture Hands Us our Masks Early

We don’t make up our masks from out of nowhere. Our culture and families summon us to wear them long before we’re old enough to question what we’re being asked to wear.

Western culture has long prized the measurable: productivity, achievement, rational thinking, and spiritual perfectionism. What it tends to quietly devalue are the things that can’t be optimized: the body, emotion, rest, need, and receptivity.

For many women, in particular, the conditioning runs deep: be agreeable, be small, be useful. Don’t take up too much space. For men, the message is different but equally constricting: be strong, be smart, don’t feel, and be productive. Keep it together.

Somatically, this early conditioning often settles into the body and stays there, e.g. a collapsed chest, frozen pelvis, tight jaw holding words that were never safe to speak. The mask doesn’t just sit on the face. It moves through and lives in our tissues.

And sometimes it shows up in more visible ways, like disordered relationships with food, with the body, and with control itself.

Woodman was particularly clear on this: the drive to perfect, discipline, and erase the body’s hungers comes from a culture that told us the natural body, with its needs, cycles, and animal aliveness, needed to be corrected.

Healing begins with asking: who told you that?

The Body Is Already Telling the Truth

Here’s something worth reflecting on. Your body hasn’t been performing this whole time. It’s been responding to everything your mask has asked it to do.

The swallowed truth lives in the jaw and throat. The grief that never had room sits in the chest. The instincts that were overridden settle in the belly. The body holds what the mask was trying to conceal, not as punishment, but as memory.

It tracks authenticity in real time. When something is true for you, there’s a quality of openness in it, an expansion, a sense of connection. When something isn’t, you can feel the pull inward, the contraction, the body’s quiet refusal to agree.

Learning to listen is not soft or indulgent. It’s an instrument of true discernment.

Saying no when you mean no, and feeling the regulation that comes from that instead of the temporary relief of accommodation, is one of the most concrete experiences of what it means to be embodied. The boundary that comes from the body isn’t a performance of self-care. It’s the self, speaking plainly.

Try This Now: Where Is Your Mask Living?

Let’s take a moment of directing our attention inwards.

Sit or stand however you are right now. Take one slow breath and let your eyes soften.

Ask yourself a simple question: What have I been holding together or overriding today?

Don’t answer with your mind. Answer with your body.

Notice your jaw first. Is it clenched? Slightly forward? Holding something unsaid?

Move to your throat. Is there a tightness there, a sense of something swallowed?

Drop down to your chest. Does it feel open, or is there a subtle collapse, a caving inward?

Now your belly. Soft or braced? Held in or held still?

You’re not looking for a diagnosis. You’re just looking. The body doesn’t lie, but it does speak quietly. This is how we learn its language.

If you find tension somewhere, don’t try to fix it. Just place one hand there. Let it be witnessed.

That sensation you found? It has a history. It’s not random. It’s the mask, living in your tissues.

The questions worth sitting with after you close this page: Who told you that you had to wear it and what is the cost of keeping it on? What would it be like to finally relinquish it all together?

What Becomes Possible When the Mask Comes Off

Woodman wrote that without boundaries in relation to the cultural, societal and familial identities that we take on, a person gradually disappears into service of others and forgets she had a center at all.

Many people discover this not through crisis, but through the quiet accumulation of symptoms: constant fatigue, inability to digest food, disconnection from others they can’t explain. The sense of moving through life as though watching it through glass.

The authentic self isn’t a destination to arrive at, or a version of ourselves that has everything sorted out.

Authenticity is a moment-to-moment practice of returning to our gut sense of who we are and what and who we choose to be from that place. Noticing when we’ve drifted into performing instead of connecting, and choosing, again, to return.

What that return feels like in the body is immediate. The breath deepens, shoulders drop, chest opens. We know.

When we connect we know that our hunger and tiredness matters. Our grief and joy both deserve space. Our body’s signals are worth organizing our lives around.

It is not a luxury to respond to them. It is what it means to be unapologetically, freely, and truly alive in a human body.

Want to explore what living from your authentic self feels like in your body, nervous system, and life? This is the heart of the work we do in the School of Sacred Somatics. Find out more at jayahollohan.com. ✨

Bypassing, Shadow & the Body’s Way Through

bypass spiritual shadow somatic trauma integration

You’ve read all the self-help books, shared in circles, meditated, journaled, mastered yoga poses, and likely cried your way through many therapy sessions. And yet something still feels stuck in your body and the trajectory of your life.

You may not be able to put your finger on what it is but you know that you are not quite free: emotionally, physically, energetically, relationally, spiritually, etc…

If that lands somewhere in your body, this blog is worth reading.

What Is Bypassing, Really?

Bypassing is any pattern that keeps us from feeling what is here.

It is an intelligent coping strategy that helped us to avoid overwhelm. The nervous system learned early on that certain feelings or expression, were too much. Too likely to get us rejected or unable to cope. So it found ways around them.

Examples of some common bypass patterns in people doing healing work are: 1) Perfectionism: endlessly refining and improving to avoid simply being with what is; and 2) People-pleasing: staying so focused on others’ comfort that your own truth never surfaces.

Notice either of those in yourself?

Why We Bypass

We bypass because we are protecting parts of ourselves from unbearable pain.

Centuries of cultural conditioning have taught us that the body, darkness, and difficult emotions are inferior. We fear our own shadows. If we feel rage, lust, or grief fully, something dangerous might happen. So we project those parts outward, or push past them, or rise above them.

There is also something else at work. When we stay too long in states of activation, we flood. When we bypass, we avoid overwhelm and shut down. Neither one leads to integration. This is the edge that somatic trauma healing, alongside the lens of shadow work, teaches us to meet: inviting connection with our bodies so that we can feel, while cultivating enough resources not to drown.

Shadow: What We Have Exiled

Shadow is not what is bad about us. It is what we exiled to belong.

In childhood, certain parts of us learned they were not acceptable, safe, or lovable. So we hid them. We built a false self, a mask that could get our needs met, while keeping us safe from rejection. The shadow then carries what we disowned into adulthood: our vitality, creativity, grief, desire, rage.

Our body holds it all. Throat constriction when we swallowed our words. Chest collapse around a vulnerable heart. Jaw clenching where we held back truth. Pelvic tightening where life force was shut down.

Your body remembers what your mind rejects or tries ceaselessly to forget.

What Bypassing Costs Us

When we consistently skip over what the body is holding, we don’t fully heal and find wholeness. We float above our wounds and mistake that lightness for freedom.

Bessel van der Kolk’s work reminds us that the body keeps the score. Repressed sensation does not dissolve. It turns inward. It expresses as symptoms, as burnout, as illness, as a persistent low-level sense that something is missing even when life looks fine on the outside.

Awareness is where change begins. Not dramatic change. Just the willingness to notice what we usually move beyond without feeling.

A Simple Practice: Awareness Before Action

Try this for two minutes.

Sit still. Let your eyes soften or close. Ask yourself: what am I usually doing when something uncomfortable arises? Do I reach for my phone, pivot to problem-solving, go into my head, or suddenly feel very busy?

Then notice: is there something in your body right now that you might be moving past? Tightness, dullness, held breath?

Just take a moment to drop in and feel. Then let it be there. You don’t need to fix it or name it. Simply give it your attention for a moment until something changes.

That is awareness. And awareness, as a foundation for somatic trauma healing, is where integration becomes possible.

Healing Asks Us to Feel, Not Rise Above

Sustainable transformation honours both movements: the going in and the coming out. The contraction and the expansion. The shadow and the light.

This is not about flooding ourselves with what we have avoided. It is about building enough capacity in the nervous system to stay present with what is here, one small step at a time. Titrated, resourced, and embodied.

When the body feels safe enough to feel, something opens. The exiled parts of us stop needing to hide. Shadow stops running the show from below. And we begin to move from performing our healing to actually living it.

Ready to Dive In?

This July, I am holding a 4-day somatic retreat in the woods of Wakefield, Quebec. Burnout to Embodied is an immersive retreat for shadow and trauma integration, nervous system regulation, and remembering what it feels like to truly be at home in your body.

We work with the bypass patterns that keep us stuck, the exiled parts that are ready to come home, and the body’s own capacity to lead us back to wholeness. In a pristine natural setting on a private lake, with a wood-fired sauna, nourishing food, and sacred community. We create the space and provide the resources to let your body know, its safe to come home.

July 2-5, 2026 | Wakefield, QC | Early bird pricing ends May 1st. Find out more here.

The Spiral Inwards: How Your Body & Ancient Cultures Heal Trauma

You’ve probably heard that healing isn’t linear. But what if it’s something much older and wiser than that?

What if it lies in our capacity to spiral inwards?

Ancient cultures around the world mapped the importance of spiraling journeys long before somatic trauma healing modalities described needing to spiral inwards to meet our trauma. And your body already knows this pattern.

Your Body Is Made of Spirals

Look at your nervous system, muscles and fascia trains. Their tissues wrap around themselves, your bones, and across your body. Your breath spirals outwards and inwards. Your nervous system moves between external activation and inward rest.

Spiraling into contraction and expansion is something we all know intimately.

When trauma gets stuck in the body in contraction and/or expansion, it interrupts the spiraling rhythm. Either braced and on guard, or shut down and collapsed.

Somatic trauma healing isn’t about forcing yourself out of contraction or expansion. It’s about learning to move gently inwards towards our centre.

Ancient Wisdom Already Knew This

Long before trauma was a clinical word, cultures across the world mapped the spiral as a path of transformation.

At Newgrange in Ireland, older than the Pyramids and Stonehenge, the triple spiral, is carved in stone at the doorway to an inner chamber. On the winter solstice, light travels 19 metres through a hidden passageway above the doorway to illuminate that chamber. Expansive energy spirals towards the contraction, as darkness becomes light.

The Celtic Triple Spiral was a map of human consciousness and life, death, and rebirth. It showed the inward descent into the shadow, and then the return with wisdom. The ancient Irish knew: we need to meet the contraction before we can authentically expand.

This same pattern appears in many other ancient cultures that carry out related rituals that invite the human into the fullness of their integration. They move us inwards to find wisdom, then return outward when we feel whole, and ready to serve others.

These were the maps of how human healing happens.

What Modern Spirituality Often Misses

Much of modern spiritual culture focuses on expansion: light, growth, or rising above. We’re told to meditate away discomfort and transcend our pain.

But what happens to the contraction?

When we skip feeling our bodies in the inward descent to where the broken parts live, we don’t fully heal. We float above our wounds and mistake levity for freedom, while “the body keeps the score” staying stuck in its patterns, rhythms and matter.

Sustainable transformation honors both movements. The going in and the coming out. The tomb and the resurrection. The winter and the spring.

Celtic seasonal festivals also hold this truth. Samhain, the darkest point, is just as sacred as Beltane, the full bloom of life. One gives meaning to and feeds the other.

Your Nervous System and the Subtle World

When cortisol is high and your nervous system is stuck in survival mode, you focus on the material world. Access to the subtle realms dims, and intuition becomes less reliable when the body feels unsafe.

As regulation grows, something opens. The senses soften, perception widens, natural beauty, connection, and meaning become more available again.

This is why nervous system regulation is not just a mental health tool. It is also a spiritual one. When the body feels safe, everything shifts, and more possibilities become available for us.

A Simple Somatic Practice: Pendulation

Here is something you can try right now.

Sit comfortably. Close your eyes or soften your gaze.

Notice any area in your body that feels tight or tense. Don’t try to fix it. Just feel it. Notice its texture, weight, and temperature. Stay with this for a minute or two.

Then shift your attention to somewhere that feels more at ease. Your hands in your lap. Your feet on the floor. The gentle movement of your breath.

Slowly move your attention between these two places. The tension or numbness, and the ease. Not trying to change either. Just letting your awareness travel between them, like a pendulum.

This is called pendulation. It teaches your nervous system that contraction is not forever. That ease, or greater expansion, is always somewhere nearby. That you can move between states or polarities without getting stuck.

Five minutes of this, done with curiosity and no force, can begin to restore the spiral dance within.

You Don’t Heal by Going Around It

You don’t heal trauma by escaping or bypassing it. You heal by spiraling through it. Moving inward to meet it. Outward to integrate. Inward again to go deeper, and outward to embody its integrated wisdom.

The spiral asks for patience with the inward journey, trust that the descent has purpose, faith that contraction is also gestation.

Often following meeting it, our bodies might offer a deep exhale, letting go or down regulation.

Our ancestors knew that we need both the contraction or darkness and the expansion or light to fully integrate our human experience.

The Invitation

What if the dark phases of healing or life are not failures? What if they are the inner arc of the spiral, necessary for transformation, and to bring you out on the other side, more purposeful, and alive?

The ancient ones carved spirals into stone as a map for human consciousness and bodies, leading us inwards towards the centre, showing us where our spirits and feet need to go in order for us to find wholeness.

So when you find yourself spiraling towards the contraction of long-held trauma, know that it is not a setback; that your body, innate wisdom and the nature of things will take you exactly where you need to go to soon find yourself on the other side of it.

Want to explore the foundations of somatic trauma healing more deeply? I invite you to join my 6-week online training, Living Trauma-Informed: Foundational Somatic Training, beginning April 13th, 2026, to learn more.

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