John Welwood (1943 to 2019) was an American psychologist, psychotherapist and long-time Buddhist practitioner who coined the term “spiritual bypassing” in 1984. He coined it because he saw people in spiritual communities, himself included, using meditation and spiritual ideas to avoid or rise above unresolved feelings, wounds and the ordinary tasks of growing up. Therapeutic Shamanism uses his term and agrees with his analysis, and adds that bypassing is also a symptom of our disconnection from nature.
Who was John Welwood? #
A psychotherapist who spent his working life bringing Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practice together. He was born in 1943 and trained in existential psychology, gaining a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago in 1974, where he worked with Eugene Gendlin, the philosopher who developed FocusingFocusing. Eugene Gendlin’s method of turning towards the felt sense, the body’s whole sense of an issue, with curiosity and no agenda, and asking whether anything needs to happen. In this approach it is valued because, like journeying, it means going beyond the wants of the self and listening to something wiser and deeper. Read the full answer.1 He went on to direct the East/West psychology programme at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco and was an associate editor of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.2 He died on 17 January 2019, aged 75.3 See Who was Eugene Gendlin?
Why did he coin the term “spiritual bypassing”? #
Because he kept seeing it happen, in others and in himself. As a psychotherapist and a meditator, and after taking part in a research project on spiritual groups, he noticed a disturbing tendency among some members of spiritual communities, including the Buddhist community he belonged to. Many were doing very good work on themselves, yet some seemed to be using meditation and their spiritual lives to step around personal and emotional issues.4 He gave the tendency a name in a paper of 1984, adapted from a talk given the year before, as the tendency “to try to avoid or prematurely transcend basic human needs, feelings, and developmental tasks”.5
He also saw why it was tempting. Spiritual bypassing, he wrote, can be particularly tempting for people struggling with life’s basic developmental stages, at a time when ordinary landmarks such as dignified work, raising a family and keeping a marriage together had become hard to reach for many. Later he called it “premature transcendence”, which means trying to rise above the raw and messy side of being human before we have fully faced it and made peace with it.6
The signs, the costs and the ways psychotherapy helps are in What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?
What did Welwood think a healthy spiritual path needs? #
Earth as well as heaven. In the same paper he described human beings as standing upright, “with our feet on the ground and head raised up to the open sky”, and said a complete path needs three things: groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this, letting go, and awakening the heart. Spiritual bypassing fails to respect our life on the ground. He used the image of a plant, too. A practice that reaches only upwards may lose “the grounding of earth in which the plant is rooted”, and drift off “into the wide blue yonder”.7
Therapeutic Shamanism has its own teaching here, and it comes from the Plant People. A plant that believed “up is good and down is bad” would die, with shallow roots, top-heavy and sickly. Plants keep a balance between Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this and Father Sky, and that balance is what they teach us. We are to honour the Earth as much as the Sky, and to treat descent as being as valuable as ascent.8 See What are Plant People, and what gifts do they bring?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism use his term? #
As its own working word. Spiritual bypassing means using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid painful feelings and unresolved psychological wounds. People reach for it because most of us have little desire to face our pain, let alone enter it and work with it, and so when a teacher or religion says we can simply transcend our pain, we jump at it.9 On a psychological level, Therapeutic Shamanism agrees with Welwood’s analysis completely, and holds the idea of spiritual bypassing to be “such an important and useful concept”.10 It is a large part of why Therapeutic Shamanism brings shamanism and psychotherapy together. See Why does Therapeutic Shamanism bring shamanism and psychotherapy together?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see further? #
Beyond the human. The signs Welwood describes, such as too much detachment, being ungrounded, repressing emotion, projecting it onto others, and believing ourselves full of compassion when we are full of judgements, are all human, psychological issues. That is not surprising, since he was a psychologist, but it shows the characteristic limits of Fallen thinking, in which everything is reduced to human concerns.11
Seen in a larger context, spiritual bypassing is a symptom of something much bigger, our narcissistic obsession with the human, and its underlying cause is our disconnection from nature. So, it can never be properly healed on a psychological level alone, since that would treat the symptoms and not the cause. Its costs, too, reach far beyond us, since “the cost of our spiritual bypassing has been (and still is) utterly devastating to far more than just us humans.”12 This is a limit of almost the whole of psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychology, not of Welwood alone; ecotherapy and ecopsychology are the exceptions.13 See What can ecotherapy and ecopsychology offer shamanic work?
How have others built on his idea? #
The term has spread far beyond the community he coined it in. The psychotherapist Robert Augustus Masters wrote a whole book on it, Spiritual Bypassing (2010), opening with Welwood’s definition and listing many of the same signs, from exaggerated detachment and anger-phobia to “overemphasis on the positive”. Masters adds a gentle note. Almost everyone who comes to spirituality bypasses to some degree at first, so bypassing “is not something to eradicate, but it is something to outgrow.”14 Welwood himself, later in life, became most interested in how bypassing plays out in relationships, where he thought it often does its worst harm.15
What else did Welwood write? #
Mostly about love and relationship as a spiritual path. His best-selling Journey of the Heart (1990) was followed by Love and Awakening (1996), and Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships (2006) won a Books for a Better Life Award in 2007. Toward a Psychology of Awakening (2000) brings together his essays on Buddhism and psychotherapy, including the 1984 paper in which spiritual bypassing was first named.16
