Over the past year, I have lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with students and friends about how to stay centered and hopeful in a world that feels in radical disarray. How do we remain light-bearers when there is so much darkness around us?

It is a fair and urgent question. While there are dozens of ways to address it—many of which I have explored in lectures, podcasts, and classroom discussions—I want to focus here on a specific, common tendency: Our urge to concentrate on the light while avoiding the dark.

Is this focus a form of spiritual bypassing?

Before I define spiritual bypassing, let me address the two core terms: the light and the dark. I admit it is not an easy task to define them because there are many important layers of meaning that coexist without hierarchy and that are relative to context. Everything I am about to write is premised on two fundamentals: first, that light and dark are aspects of the same energy along a spectrum; they are expressions of one life-force energy; and second, that they are not oppositional but complementary: Just like up and down or right and left, one has no meaning without its complement in the pair. So, to be brief, at the expense perhaps of oversimplifying, I am mostly talking about spiritual positivity and negativity. Spiritually, the light is considered a refined vibration and indicative of a developed consciousness, and it is associated with wisdom, goodness, unity, compassion, even holiness. Darkness is most often considered a low vibration or indicative of an underdeveloped consciousness (or the unconscious “shadow”), and is associated with ignorance, disruption, corruption, solipsism, and the like. However, you are free to define these terms as you prefer within the same complementary parameters, because like the perception of Andean sami (light living energy) and hucha (heavy living energy), the perception of light and dark is relative to our own state of being, and to our personal beliefs, ethics, morals, and such. So, what is dark (or like hucha, heavy) for you may be lighter (or more like sami) for me. And, to be really “real” about this discussion, most of us feel we know what represents the light when we see or feel it; the same for the darkness.

And so back to spiritual bypassing. . . This is the tendency to use spiritual beliefs, perspectives, and practices to avoid facing distress, whether that distress arises from painful emotions, psychological wounds, or harsh real-world problems. The term was coined in the early 1980s by psychotherapist John Welwood. He used it to describe a behavior he noticed among a subset of spiritual practitioners who insisted on focusing on positivity regardless of what was happening around them—usually as a way to avoid dealing with reality.

The reality is that humans are messy, complex, and often confounding creatures. This description includes every one of us. No matter how much we focus on “awakening” or “ascending,” we cannot make genuine progress as spiritual beings until we acknowledge and, ultimately, own the ways we are still far from the light. True resilience doesn’t come from pretending the shadows don’t exist; it comes from having the courage to meet them head-on.

Recognizing spiritual bypassing in our own lives requires radical honesty, because it often wears the mask of high-vibe wisdom. The even trickier thing about spiritual bypassing is that it is remarkably easy to spot in others, but almost invisible to us within ourselves. Here are several classic behaviors and beliefs that either constitute spiritual bypassing or easily pave the way for it:

• Destiny over Will: Believing that everything happens for a reason or things are exactly as they should be. This view bypasses a critical examination of how our own choices, actions, and beliefs shape our reality. It effectively abdicates our free will to fate.

• Excessive Positivity: Focusing exclusively on positive vibes at the expense of our authentic, messy emotions. By valorizing the good vibes over the bad ones, we reduce our ability to honestly and safely process fear, anxiety, anger, worry, despair, or other “heavy” emotions. Essentially, we bypass the fullness of our humanness. That which we deny in ourselves has only one place to go: into our unconscious, our shadow.

• Spiritual Blind Spots: Ignoring clear warning signs in other people’s behavior—such as gaslighting, manipulation, or deception. Because spiritual blinders can constrict our vision to seeing only (or mostly) the light in others, we tend to frame even the most egregious behaviors in the most generous way. We rationalize, giving others the benefit of the doubt when they don’t deserve it, often to our own and others’ detriment.

• Ritual Action as Panacea: Relying on rituals, ceremonies, affirmations, and the like to influence or solve real-life issues. While our sacred practices are essential, overreliance on them can lead to delaying necessary action. It can keep us from personally participating in creating the real-world conditions to enact solutions.

• Hyper-Spiritualizing Reality: Elevating intuition, inspiration, or optimism over a sober, grounded acknowledgment of “what is.” We then tend to favor abstract spiritual conceptualizations over commonsense and reason. Just as we are both physical and metaphysical beings, we are both spiritual and rational beings.

• The Elitism Trap: Believing that our spiritual practices, experiences, or knowledge make us “special” or provide us drastically heightened insight or understanding. This spiritual and ego inflation often manifests as assuming we possess above-average perceptions about life that the “unawakened” or “average” person simply cannot grasp.

• Spiritual Benchmarking: Declaring “truths” about another person’s inner state or spiritual development to validate our own opinion of them. Similar to the Elitism Trap, this tendency has us labeling others as “old souls,” “young souls,” “advanced,” “beginners” and such, or claiming that others’ paths are “ego-based” rather than “heart-centered.”

While spiritual bypassing manifests in the many ways I have listed, and plenty of others, the core issue I want to zoom in on is our tendency to ignore, deny, avoid, or harshly judge the darkness, whether we perceive it within ourselves, someone else, or the world at large. Which raises a potentially perplexing question: Do other people and the world actually need our light?

 Plenty of spiritual teachers and philosophers would tell us the answer is an emphatic “No.” They say that when we cultivate the light within ourselves, we are doing so first and foremost for our own evolution. Consider a metaphor, as imperfect as it is, from nature: Every plant in a field turns toward the sun based almost entirely on its own unique state of being—its physical condition, the condition of the soil, its position relative to the sun, and so on. Each grows according to its own nature and necessity. This is the stance inherent in Mahatma Gandhi’s famous wisdom: We must be the change we want to see in the world. Our light is ours to cultivate. We have plenty to do to develop ourselves without worrying about how everyone else is doing. Yet, also embedded in Gandhi’s statement is the payoff for self-improvement: How we each cultivate ourselves determines the health and beauty of the entire field. One plant does not a field make. So, our primary work as individuals contributes to the state of the collective. When each of us grows strong and resilient, we can better thrive individually and collectively whether we find ourselves in a fertile environment or a blighted one.

The world needs us to cultivate the spiritual fortitude to experience the dark without feeling overly anxious, trying to banish it, or panicking. The real practice is learning to accept “what is” without reservation. To paraphrase author Lysa TerKeurst, we don’t have to be the world’s saviors; we just have to be willing to sit with the world in all its beautifully ugly reality.

When we favor only the light, we turn the dark into something oppositional to it rather than complementary. Our impulse shifts to resistance—we want to ignore it, deny or resist it, or fight against it. Yet, as Carl Jung, developer of the concept of the unconscious shadow self, warns us, when we refuse to acknowledge or explore our own inner darkness (and by extension, the world’s), we give it power over us: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” In other words, what we avoid about our own heaviness and the world’s not only persists, but tends to intensify. 

By viewing darkness as the absence of light or, mistakenly, as oppositional rather than complementary to light, we miss the reality that darkness is the bearer of its own unique beauty. It is associated with many of the same profoundly life-giving qualities we ascribe to the light: creation, incubation, fertility, depth, imagination, inspiration, transformation, revelation. When we stop bypassing the dark, we stop fighting reality and allow ourselves the freedom to explore, and perhaps even to play in, the darkness. It takes an almost brutal honesty to acquire the spiritual strength to experience the complementary nature of human existence—its awe and its agony—with equanimity and to accept “what is.” While we naturally, and commonsensically, prefer to experience what is light, bypassing experiences of the dark suppresses the essential labors of self-evaluation. Our spirituality becomes more like a denial of our complex nature rather than an appreciation of it. In this way, spiritual bypassing serves as a coping mechanism at best and an outright refusal to immerse ourselves in the crucible of reality at worst.  

The process of spiritual transformation, which is often seen as only or mostly a turning toward the light, actually requires that we be willing to linger in the darkness that lives within us. This is the proverbial dark night of the soul. It is a kind of shamanic or mystical descent: one driven not by trepidation but anticipation. Darkness has a purpose and a function, just as light does. It has its own kind of transformative brilliance, for it is not a featureless, sterile void, but a realm of intensity and power. When we are willing to explore without judgment or fear how the darkness lives within us, then we can use it in furtherance of our own evolution, which admittedly is no easy undertaking. Still, when we grow more comfortable with our own darkness, we are less likely to despair at seeing it in others or the world.

It is true that, as the late Wayne Dyer famously said, “You can’t discover light by analyzing darkness.” And it is equally true that most spiritual traditions lean toward the wisdom of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who taught: “Don’t fight the darkness—bring the light, and the darkness will disappear.” Within certain contexts, I agree with both views. However, my point here is that we cannot live in the light or be the light unless we are first willing to face the darkness. The reality is that none of us individually can bring enough light to make the world’s darkness vanish entirely. No single figure—not Christ, Buddha, nor Muhammad—possessed enough light to permanently banish the dark from our human existence. What they did do was acknowledge it, face it, and ask us to do the same. None of them would have ignited a spiritual or religious revolution by simply pretending the dark wasn’t there; the very tension between light and dark is what defines their philosophies.

Ultimately, spiritual bypassing is a diversion from—or an outright refusal of—the difficult work not only of mediating both the light and dark aspects of human experience, but of honoring them. It is a forgetting of a core truth of both the self and the universe: growth, transformation, and movement of any kind require contrast. As the artist Bob Ross beautifully observed about painting: “Put light against light—you have nothing. Put dark against dark—you have nothing. It’s the contrast of light and dark that each give the other one meaning.” Spiritual bypassing is, in the end, a kind of sentimentality. It is an emotional shield that blinds us to raw reality, flattening the beautiful, agonizing complexities of human beings and our world into simplistic, comfortable binaries. In this way, it stalls or even blocks our development rather than nurtures it.