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. ✨