This is an essay that is personal and dear to my heart. I attended a Jesuit high school, and in one class I was assigned a paper to write about religious perspectives on a controversial issue, and to find a religious perspective for and against the issue. I chose suicide at the time, and had to look hard to find in Shinto a perspective that condoned suicide.
As an adult practicing in neopagan traditions, experiencing the suicide of a person in my life, that young me lifted up his head and wondered, “What do pagans think of this?” This essay is the result.
Spiritual bypassing can look like ignoring the pain and discord in the world and retreating to my comfort, my meditation, my transcendent spiritual practice.
Yet simply succumbing to despair, only listening to the prophecies of doom, and surrendering my will feels like another kind of bypassing.
To live in this world and continue to make efforts, knowing how challenging it is and yet believing what I do matters, is both liberating and heartbreaking.
Recently a friend shared with me a quote that I know now is by Antonio Gramsci, who was an Italian Communist imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist government, ostensibly from a letter written by him in prison: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
Context aside, this quote came after a session of working with the intellectual, emotional, and willful parts of self with a client, in which I was surprised to hear the potent energy and optimism of the willful parts of self restrained by the fearful and suspicious protections of the intellect.
Gramsci’s summation cuts to the heart of a human psychology that I see in clients and myself, I am saying. The will only focused on the work and the effort, taken out of the personal and social meaning. To be will-driven is to be indifferent to what this effort means to me, who is against it, my personal story about it. To be intellect-driven is to be wholly ruled, often by fear, by a removed and totalizing belief that one knows everything and thus should not bother trying anything.
All of these, in a sense, are forms of bypassing the experience of the heart, which cares for others and experiences the personal impact of life. And yet it is the heart which may gather the insights of the intellect and the power of the will and direct it in ways both life-affirming and socially conscious.
In this video, I discuss the need and benefits of looking at our beliefs about money, work, and material wellbeing in contrast with our deep longings about belonging and safety. In a time when we are being forced to reckon with these basic questions as a society, let’s take time to look inward and begin to find the personal and collective solutions to foster more resilience in creating the lives and communities we desire.
Lately I find myself having thoughts along the lines of, “How can we be such sophisticated monkeys who create so much beautiful art and innovative technology, and this is the society we’ve made?” How can I live in a country that seems to really pride itself on being a land of opportunity while, compared to other industrialized countries, the likelihood of social mobility is rather low? A country that prides itself on its virtue while still struggling to admit to our tendencies toward wealth inequality, gender-based and racial violence, and environmental harm.
The veil of cynicism is not enough to cover over despair, disappointment, hopelessness. These feelings point to our deepest longings and hopes that want to surface. Something in me, and I think many of us, believes—knows with a surprising certainty—that life can be different. Knows that we’ve been given false choices around what kind of life is available to us, what kind of resources, who is worthy of comfort and joy, who deserves health and protection.
That belief, that hope, runs into tension with those parts of us that feel disillusioned. Parts that remember feeling a deep sense of belonging that turned out to be conditional. Parts that remember the hurt we’ve experienced when we took risks and tried. Parts that fear if we question the values we’ve received, if we reject the society we’ve been given, we’ll lose our ground of connection. Parts that fear betraying our family legacies, even when those legacies carry harm.
These parts constrict in fear when we want to move toward faith and hope. These parts take in our ancestral legacies of seeking safety and security when we want to move toward possibility and freedom. We need to bring all of these parts of us into dialogue, to discover the new dream that is free of the old illusions, one in which we can pursue with hope and passion.
The veil of cynicism is not enough to cover over despair, disappointment, hopelessness. These feelings point to our deepest longings and hopes that want to surface. Something in me, and I think many of us, believes—knows with a surprising certainty—that life can be different. Knows that we’ve been given false choices around what kind of life is available to us, what kind of resources, who is worthy of comfort and joy, who deserves health and protection.
That belief, that hope, runs into tension with those parts of us that feel disillusioned. Parts that remember feeling a deep sense of belonging that turned out to be conditional. Parts that remember the hurt we’ve experienced when we took risks and tried. Parts that fear if we question the values we’ve received, if we reject the society we’ve been given, we’ll lose our ground of connection. Parts that fear betraying our family legacies, even when those legacies carry harm.
These parts constrict in fear when we want to move toward faith and hope. These parts take in our ancestral legacies of seeking safety and security when we want to move toward possibility and freedom. We need to bring all of these parts of us into dialogue, to discover the new dream that is free of the old illusions, one in which we can pursue with hope and passion.
In this video, I offer a few simple strategies for calming the nervous system to help stay focused, thoughtful, and resilient when doing the things that matter to us.
If reality is a hallucination created by the brain from our environment, biological processes, and learning history, then one cannot escape the questions of whether one’s apprehension of reality is correct, and to what extent that matters. While our neurosystem is able to build a coherent sense of “ego” that believes itself to be consistent across time and experience, practice in self-observation leads us to begin to see all the inconsistencies and vacillations that occur throughout at day.
My personal favorite these days is making plans. When I make plans, I feel excited about them—but they’re far away. When it’s time to do the plans, some days I spend the morning hoping they’ll be canceled. If they’re not and I do the plans, I usually end up thankful that I did. In these sentences I’ve used “I” to denote the brain-body-bucket that had all these experiences, but with so much vacillation there does not seem to be a consistent character to that “I”.
At times our “I” becomes what Internal Family Systems would become “blended” with parts, each of whom have their own distinctive worlds and subpersonalities. That blending could be momentary or pervasive. At times I might be blended with a part that feels sensitive to rejection, and perceives in those around me all these signs of rejection. Maybe that part of me is right—these are little rejections. Or maybe it’s projecting its rejection fear onto others.
Either way, when that rejection-sensitive part runs the show, I’ll respond to these with all of my rejection “stuff.” These reactions often tend to foster greater experiences of rejection in me, either because they gravitate toward rejecting people or they wear down my loved ones into finally rejecting me. When in that rejection-sensitive part, we may have the same conversations with the same people, seeking the same reassurance that they’re not rejecting, but find the conversation never lands, which exhausts everyone.
These experiences of rejection, and all the thoughts and sensations that go with them, are in some sense actually occurring within the organism of the self. Whether the other person believes they are rejecting or not, the person “in” rejection experiences all the pain of it.
Where growth and maturation happens is whether that person can be with the pain but not identified as the pain—to see that what they feel is real and valid, but the story about the pain may not be. When we agree with the story, then we have to fix the story, but the story is not the pain. The story might be “My partner secretly hates me,” no matter how often the partner provides evidence to the contrary, until they get wearied of explaining themselves and show even the mildest moment of impatience that confirms the story for that part.
If we can be with the feeling without trying to fix the story, if we can get access to the consciousness that surrounds and is greater than the part, we are in touch with a greater selfhood that helps the pain of that part to move and heal. Perhaps this pain is activated by an actual rejection, perhaps not, but either way what we need to heal is presence and supportive people in our lives who can validate our feelings but give us space to work through the stories.
Jung often spoke of synchronicities, and the Jungian therapists I have worked with and admired often speak to these moments when we make contact with the greater Self and either heal or free ourselves from the complex, which seems to transform reality itself. After years of anger, I finally forgive my sibling, and then they call me out of the blue. I work through fear and decide I’m ready to step into power, and suddenly an opportunity arrives to do it.
Perhaps there is a mystical dimension of this, or perhaps having freed ourselves of that particular painful hallucination we are ready to see a greater field of reality. Perhaps these opportunities were already there and we weren’t ready to see it. Perhaps we live in a field of social energy and intuitively sense when openings arise. No matter what, it’s really cool when it happens.
Photo by Keagan Henman, courtesy of Unsplash
As the phenomena of “gaslighting” and “spiritual bypassing” become more popularly understood as a form of abuse, I find myself often reflecting on the relationship between these behaviors and the psychoanalytic defenses. Projection, repression, denial, bypassing, and other defenses may be said to be a form of self-gaslighting—constructing reality in a way that denies or mitigates certain troubling truths.
At the same time, these defenses lend themselves quite easily to deployment as gaslighting tools against people. I suspect that is one reason I see them less widely used in popular discourse. Popular connotations around the defenses are that such experiences are “not real” or not valid in a meaningful way. One can imagine the enlightened guru saying, “You’re just projecting your anger onto me!” after spending ten minutes telling you how shameful your behavior has been and how un-enlightened your objections are.
I notice that the intrapersonal, intrapsychic model of spiritual growth and development that seemed so prominent since the 1970s, which gave rise to The Secret, seems to be giving way in younger generations toward a more external attention to systems and abuses of power. Now talking about how freeing one’s self of a projection lead to a new job opportunity would be met with the valid counterpoint that focusing only on the internal process ignores the material systems in which one lives. To ignore this allows us too easily to blame people for “manifesting” their misfortunes and focus exclusively on the personal.
This is a view that Jung himself critiqued in his long essay “Answer to Job.” In this excerpt, Jung speaks of Job being allowed to suffer and have all of his wealth and family be destroyed, and then having his friends and family wonder what it was he must have done wrong to deserve such suffering:
“Job’s friends do everything in their power to contribute to his moral torments, and instead of giving him, whom God has perfidiously abandoned, their warm-hearted support, they moralize in an all too human manner, that is, in the stupidest fashion imaginable.”
There is no simple answer to whether one is projecting or being gaslit, at least not at present. In a sense, I believe we tend to project onto people who have something in them that we can “hang” that projection onto—meaning there is a little both/and. But then we could also say that to be gaslit, we must allow ourselves to receive the gaslighting—a little both/and.
That both/and is not wholly helpful in working through circumstances on the ground. If one is actively being gaslit, then stopping one’s internal gaslighting is a necessary and healthy step toward breaking away from the abusive relationship. If one is actively projecting, then recognizing the validity of one’s projections but also finding the psychic roots of the projection is a necessary and healthy step toward having a mature relationship with others.
We need both, and we need to fumble our way toward competency in both. We need validating, supportive, safe relationships, and we need internal self-awareness and ability to discern. We need to take risks in having scary communications, and we need clear boundaries. We need the awareness that we live in a context, and we need to remember that we only know that context through our subjectivity.
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When you become who you are,
the stories you’ve told are leaves
browning and shriveling in fall
when your reverence withdraws.
In winter you stand exposed,
vulnerable, undecorated, cold,
bereft of those justifications
and names that shaded you,
equipped only with the truth
of your bark, your heartwood,
your roots interweaving among
those of your copse, yielding
nourishment according to need.
When returns the sun and heat,
your truth emerges anew, fresh
with green expressions of self,
boldly thrusting into weather
to feed, flower, fruit, and seed,
and spread your knowingness
to where it might flourish new.
Until, again, these bolder truths
desiccate in obligation, stories
told too often, ready to be shed.
Returning to silence, heartwood,
the winter source of the self.
So many popular strains of spiritual healing and coaching, frequently referencing popular spiritual modes like The Secret, are revamped and de-Christianized forms of Evangelical prosperity teachings that wealth and success go to the spiritually adept, and those who experience pain or suffering in this world have manifested it through their own failings. Like many popularized teachings, I think there were one or two profoundly insightful truths that at some point got blended up and watered down to be accessible (and marketable) to a wide audience.
Nearly every religion and spiritual system has something in it that we can use to try to avoid, minimize, or rationalize our suffering, just as most or all of them also have teachings that we could use to deepen, strengthen, and bring more resolve to times of difficulty. Even in the same church or coven you might hear one person saying a chronic illness is a sign of poor practice and another saying this is the time when one most needs their practice.
United States culture is not particularly friendly to limitations, restrictions, restraints. Like the capitalist system we tout, success to us looks like a continuous upward path of constant growth. When we experience contractions and constrictions, we respond as though these are crises engendered by some bad actor and not something inevitable when living in mortal bodies in a finite planet.
Photo by Chris Barton
We’re not here to grow upward and outward indefinitely. Sometimes we must move downward and inward. Sometimes we must experience those unpleasant, messy, painful feelings to discover the next path of growth. Contraction, grief, anger, resentment—none of these have to be anybody’s “fault”, but they can very well point out larger causes of suffering that need to be addressed for future health. Like pollution of our lands and water sources. Like cultures of sexual coercion and entitlement that elevate a narrow range of human experience and demean the rest.
Or, more personally, those experiences of grief, pain, and anger that have secretly ruled us for years, things which we’ve taught ourselves not to look at too closely. Those sources of envy and jealousy that show us our secret insecurities, the things we long to achieve but are too afraid to risk trying for.
Few people are excited to face unpleasant, toxic truths about ourselves and the cultures in which we live. Naming our poisons helps us to discover the antidotes. These “dark” emotions are connected to our deep needs, needs we have yet to know well enough to meet. These needs are not the face they wear—my envy won’t be satisfied by my neighbor being less, but rather by me becoming the more that I am afraid to be.
Sitting in meditation, some days I find myself lost in thoughts not matter how much I practice. Other days, when I sit I feel pain and discomfort in my body. The pain roots me in the moment, it calls me back to presence. Parts of me despise it, but this limitation is no longer allowing me to move through life like an automaton.
This does not mean I simply endure it, believing this suffering is warranted and I should just suck it up and not complain. This pain is something to work with, to learn about, to discover where it leads for healing. This pain is a wakening.
When I began working with a therapist, I expressed that my problem was being indecisive. He looked up the definition of “to decide” and found its etymological origin of decidere, “to cut off.” What he suggested was that I was “indecisive” because every choice I could think of involved cutting off a piece of me, and none of my pieces wanted to be cut off. When I attempted to cut something away, it rebounded with greater intensity.
Developing a center creates a space in which these parts can speak and be heard, which enables us to find more creative, flexible, and creative choices. So often groups become toxic when people feel unheard and left out of choices that affect them, where those who are making the choices feel that they cannot possibly please everyone and want to push forward or avoid choosing anything.
Most of us understand that nothing can meet all of our needs, yet we long to be heard, seen, and included in the choices that affect us. It costs less, in the long run, to slow down and acknowledge the validity of each person’s perspective. The importance of each part of me, especially the ones that seem irreconcilable. To sit in the messiness of the problem. This allows for a richer solution to form.
In a solution, each part dissolves and integrates into a new whole. We could not separate out its parts without great effort. This person’s need meets this person’s fear and this person’s anger. One’s skills, longings, fears, and resources meld together.
So often we become attached to finding the “right” solution that we think we can decide what elements to exclude. Those exclusions become weaknesses to the solutions we enact. With this kind of solution, emerging from center, often people feel a sense of stillness, of rightness. They may not be able to say why this choice is right, and it may not be the choice they would make at another time, but this is the solution emerging from this confluence of time, place, and perspective.
There’s a lot of anger and fear in people’s’ hearts. Much of it comes from our experiences of being unheard, unseen, cut off, marginalized, deprived of an opportunity to have a say in the choices that affect our lives. Or from our fear that we’ll be put into that situation if someone else has their way. There’s risk that allowing one person a voice will mean someone else’s gets squelched. There’s also a risk that finally allowing someone to have a voice after ignoring them for a long time means learning some uncomfortable and painful truths that are hard to integrate. The avoidance of these fears and risks prevents us from finding solution.
More and more I’m coming to think that people and organizations that are run by rigid, legalistic systems with rules and processes for everything arise in part by avoidance of this conflict. When we are unable to tolerate honest sharing of our experiences, rigidity and tension arise.
People deeply want to be heard and seen. When we feel heard and seen, we feel more safety and trust with each other. Feeling scared, anxious, or afraid of being hurt, we might be inclined to avoid or attempt to control anything that makes us uncomfortable. We respond by not hearing, by invalidating, by mocking. We respond by controlling, threatening, coercing. All of these responses engender mistrust, powerlessness, and rage in the people being marginalized, ignored, and controlled.
I define presence as the experience of being in full awareness and acceptance of one’s immediate physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, and cognitive experience. In action, presence is simple. It is experiencing the present moment as it is. Engaged in life as it is unfolding. Connected to the environment and beings we are in relationship with and connected to the inner experience. This is in an aspirational capacity that most people do not have without effort and practice, but I think it is what we long for and forget we long for.
Experiences of grief and loss awaken us to this longing most acutely. When something or someone important to us is lost, we face the reality of death and the realization that we have not been wholly alive. We think of how much we missed out on, how we failed to savor the moments we had, how taking for granted the existence of these important people and experiences also meant allowing us not to be fully engaged.
This is one facet of the human condition. I might spend hours planning and preparing the perfect meal for the perfect dinner party, only to spend most of the evening caught up in my anxious thoughts and worries about whether the party is going well, whether the food is really okay or if people are pretending, whether people are having a good time. At the end of the night, I might realize that I did not actually attend my party. I forgot to savor it, and now it’s over.
Mental, emotional, and behavioral problems intensify this struggle. People stuck in a deep depression are both disconnected from the moment because of their depression, and also struggle to find the motivation to become present, because being present means feeling exactly how poorly they feel. Anxiety pulls us out of the moment. Addictive behavior is in part a turning away from presence, chasing an experience that is only fleetingly glimpsed through substance or behavioral abuse and avoiding the raw immediacy of being.
Full presence also comes with a feeling of intimacy and vulnerability that might be painful for those unused to it. This reminds me of the moment in the Adam and Eve story in which they gain the knowledge of good and evil, and God wants to speak with them, but they feel ashamed because they are naked. One might read that as the dawning of conscious awareness, realizing that one is a human being among other conscious beings, seen exactly for who you are, unguarded, unprotected. Most of us want to run away from that. Most of us don’t want to see ourselves exactly as we are. And yet I believe we also have a deep longing for this, this experience that we try to describe through phrases like “being seen” or “being heard.” Both point to this experience of authentic, vulnerable connection in presence, witnessing and being witnessed. This state is in itself healing. Those parts of us that are fearful of rejection, criticism, and shame flourish when they are finally recognized within a state of full presence and acceptance.
Accessing states of presence happens to all of us in moments, but we need practice and diligence to really cultivate and expand them. Many religions offer such practices, whether that is the stated intention or not, to help people become more connected to the here-and-now and less imprisoned by habits of thought, feeling, and action. Psychotherapy offers its own tools and practices, in part by helping to name and dissolve the blocks in our personality that make presence so painful and challenging. Presence is also a modality of healing. Therapists offer this witnessing and presence to the client, who ideally begin to internalize this and develop their own capacities for self-witnessing and becoming present.
Full presence also comes with a feeling of intimacy and vulnerability that might be painful for those unused to it. This reminds me of the moment in the Adam and Eve story in which they gain the knowledge of good and evil, and God wants to speak with them, but they feel ashamed because they are naked. One might read that as the dawning of conscious awareness, realizing that one is a human being among other conscious beings, seen exactly for who you are, unguarded, unprotected. Most of us want to run away from that. Most of us don’t want to see ourselves exactly as we are. And yet I believe we also have a deep longing for this, this experience that we try to describe through phrases like “being seen” or “being heard.” Both point to this experience of authentic, vulnerable connection in presence, witnessing and being witnessed. This state is in itself healing. Those parts of us that are fearful of rejection, criticism, and shame flourish when they are finally recognized within a state of full presence and acceptance.