I’d like to start by offering us all compassion.
The majority of English-speakers grew up in a domination, colonised culture, where only a very narrow band of feelings and experiences are deeply welcomed and valued.
This isn’t just a recent phenomenon. The demonisation of our bodies and feelings has been going on in many cultures for many centuries.
Whatever feelings and experiences our family and culture are not able to be lovingly present with in us, we will have then not internalised a deep capacity for presence with those feelings and experiences in ourselves.
Each family and nationality have different feelings and experiences that are welcomed, yet very few families and cultures nowadays have deep welcoming for the full spectrum of human experience and feelings.
Our own journey as adults, then, is often increasing our capacity to welcome, be with and embrace more and more of what we feel and experience.
Given that, let’s continue.
John Welwood said, “Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.”
The term Repression of the Sublime was coined in 1945 by Robert Desoille.
I wonder what you perceive to be the sublime in you, or in others? Love, consciousness, contribution, values, purpose, meaning, joy, ecstasy, giving, loving, compassion, acting in service of others?
What I love about the psychospiritual context I hold is that deeply values ALL of a human being.
So, it embraces every. single. element of us.
From our deepest wholeness, love, joy, wonder, ecstasy, play, delight, desire to contribute, be compassionate, create make a difference and live in alignment with our values.
As well as our deepest terror, rage, grief, fear, frustration and sadness, all the young parts of us, all our unmet needs, and all the ways we developed to be safe, belong, and be loved in a domination, colonised culture. (Which includes learning and believing judgments and self-judgments, guilt and punishment.)
Why is there so much judgment of feelings in the domination paradigm? Why is such a small range of our feelings and needs and capacities and experiences deemed ‘acceptable’?
We might look at the family we grew up in, and see which feelings were welcomed, and which weren’t.
Perhaps one parent was comfortable being present with sadness and another with joy. Perhaps one believed you when you talked about understanding what animals were communicating, and another valued your mind but not your feelings.
However, I love looking a long long way back, to see how long ago it has been that the body, (which is where our feelings are felt), has been devalued, shamed, seen as sinful. This can help us see the size and importance of the journey we are on – for most of us, this didn’t just start a generation or two ago. It has been going on for so much longer than that.
I used to think that “the East” and “the West” had very different historical perspectives about feelings, the body, the mind and the soul and spirit, until I read Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct.
From him, I learnt that the European and Indian languages have a common source from a common ancestor, and it was in that Proto-Indo-European language that a split first happened in the perception of consciousness.
So, the way I understand it, there were three main journeys consciousness took:
Those cultures that continued indigenous ways of being – panetheism, animism, interconnectedness /
Those that perceived a twoness something like yin and yang rather than ‘good’ and ‘bad’ /
Those that perceived a dualism of body vs. soul (or spirit) and good vs. bad.
And it was both the Ancient Greeks and Ancient India which held that third, similar perspective, a dualistic perception where there was a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ and the body was in the latter category.
Lent says, “When the Indo-European horsemen thundered from their original homeland into Greece and India thousands of years ago, they brought with them a shared set of ideas about the cosmos. What was it that led one tradition to create the “Greek miracle,” laying the foundation for the modern scientific worldview, while another became known for its spiritual investigation into humanity’s place in the cosmos? As we explore this question, we’ll identify some surprising elements both traditions continued to hold in common.”
So, with the Ancient Greeks and Plato came the idea that the Soul was above the body, and the body was something to be denied at all costs. Lent says, “The senses and emotions were no longer to be trusted. Reason and abstraction would henceforth be the source of what was good in human experience. Only through the power of the intellect could a person connect to the divine.”
In India, some pantheistic beliefs were maintained, so spirit was seen as both above the body, and also hidden within the container of the body: Lent says, “For the [ancient] Greeks, the ultimate Truth attained by reason is to be found above the world, separate from the world, in a dimension of eternal abstraction. In the Indian cosmos, dualism took a different form: the source of meaning is both above material things and hidden deep within them and is glimpsed by piercing through both the reasoning faculty and the senses.”
Yet in both, the body was often seen as dirty, impure, worthless.
Plato’s beliefs were spread widely because the the “Early Christian Fathers” were deeply influenced by him. The body was seen by Early Christians as the enemy, as and evil, filthy prison.
And then came Descartes, with his famous, “I think, therefore I am.” He replaced the concept of the “soul” with the idea of the “mind.”
So, the dualism continued, but instead of the battle being between soul and body, the split was now between mind and body. This dualism developed into both the Scientific Revolution in Europe and spread around the world with Christianity and colonisation.
As colonisation spread to America, the Protestant arm of Christianity had particular influence, with a powerful combination of shame and cognitive control, goal-setting and getting things done – the ‘Protestant work ethic’. We can see the influence that has had! And again, it was all about the valuing of the mind over the body and feelings.
Lent continues, “the split in human consciousness that the Christian fathers inherited from the ancient Greeks remains a central part of our modern reality.”
And of course, let’s add the power of colonisation – with so many indigenous cultures decimated and overpowered by these ways of thinking, including Europe, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland by the Romans, to colonisation by England and Spain of America, and by Britain towards India and Africa and Australia and so so so many other places and peoples around the world.
These ways of thinking have spread like wildfire, and have had a profound effect on our ways of thinking about ourselves and our relationship to each other and all of life, and to our actions in those relationships.
Then we come to the 1960’s, when the ‘West’ was deeply influenced by Indian religions and philosophies (and a whole lot of cultural appropriation happened too!). Concepts of ’spirituality’ became popular, as did meditation and yoga.
This led to a big awakening of consciousness to the West, where the Soul and the Spirit had become lost amongst seeing the mind as all-wonderful, thanks to Descartes.
There was the valuing again of peace, the honouring of love and compassion and empathy, the opening up of all the ways that Scientific Materialism had been on a big Repression of the Sublime mission to deny.
Humanistic and transpersonal psychology came into being. Carl Rogers developed a client-centred approach. We can imagine that before this time, listening to someone’s feelings and offering empathy and compassion was perhaps unusual.
Students of his included Thomas Gordon, who developed Parent Effeciveness Training. Another student, Gendlin, developed Focusing. And another, Marshall Rosenberg, went on to develop Nonviolent Communication.
We can see that the influx of this consciousness also led to a lot of spiritual bypassing, as we return to John Welwood’s work above.
For Westerners, raised to value the mind and devalue the body, came the ease of valuing spirituality and devaluing the mind and feelings and the body. And we can compassionately understand why, can’t we?
When the ‘ego’ is seen as something to be transcended, when needs are devalued, when feelings are judged as weak, when we try to bypass our physical and emotional experience with spiritual beliefs, these are ways that spiritual bypassing can happen.
There’s no wonder then, that given that there have been thousands and thousands of years of devaluing of the body, that feeling deeply comfortable with the full range of our feelings, which are bodily sensations, is a rare thing!
Whatever feeling we’re not able to be present with yet, we will need to do something to avoid our experience of conscious feeling of that feeling.
With spiritual bypassing, we might use spiritual concepts and thoughts to avoid the feeling, we might dissociate, we might connect with bliss and oneness and ‘all-is-wellness’, without acknowledging our needs, our grief, fear or outrage.
On the other hand, with repression of the sublime, we might avoid connecting with wonder, ecstasy or a deep sense of meaning and purpose, and believe that all we are is humans who have experienced trauma.
Along with the demonisation of the body has been the doubly painful experience of colonisation – where so many of us have been torn away from our deep interconnectedness with the land and the seasons, with tradition and culture, with lineage and ancestors and elders, with meaning and story – whether that was two thousand years ago for those with Celtic heritage stormed by the Romans, 400 years ago with the colonisation of America, or 200 years ago to the indigenous Australians, and so on.
Deep hurts and pain around disconnection – from our bodies, from the land, from our ancestral knowing, combined with profound domination culture shaming of the body and feelings, concepts of guilt and essential wrongness, all combine to a soup where we might celebrate whenever we ARE able to be present with any feeling in our bodies, rather than have judgments of when we don’t have capacity to be present.
No wonder then, that many of us experience Spiritual Bypassing and/or Repression of the Sublime.
Compassionate reflecting on the huge length of time that bodies and feelings have been so deeply shamed, can be a part of the grieving process.
For so so many generations, for most of us, our ancestors were shamed for having bodies, and taken away from their natural kinship with the land. For how many generations has the welcoming of grief and rage, wonder and ecstasy, fear and true power, been denied?
No wonder then, that the process of reclaiming and welcoming our feelings can be hard.
What next? How do we support ourselves so that we have more capacity in our bodies to be more present with a wider range or our feelings, so that we have less need to turn to Spiritual Bypassing and Repression of the Sublime?
One of the key elements is expressing feelings to someone who IS able to be lovingly present in their bodies with the expression of that feeling, so we literally experience that we are safe whilst we feel and express that feeling.
As we experience another being with us, we increasingly are able to be with that feeling in our bodies, and stay present with the sensations.
I wonder which feelings you feel comfortable being present with in your body, and which you feel uncomfortable with?
Do you notice tending more towards spiritual bypassing, or more towards repression of the sublime?
Would you like to spend time with someone who is deeply comfortable with the feelings and experience that you don’t yet feel comfortable with?
Big love! xoxox