Spiritual Bypassing & Microdosing
Dear Soul Full Bloom Beings and Family,
Sometimes the Bloom arrives easily, expressions, feelings, and words outpouring before I can even write them. Other weeks, like this one, I felt blocked, choked up, and insincere. I tried for hours to produce something and everything felt spiritually diluted, so I let go, went to bed, and woke with clarity. The words that rang in resonance were: Spiritual Bypassing.
What Is Spiritual Bypassing?
The term spiritual bypassing was coined in the early 1980s by Buddhist teacher and transpersonal psychotherapist John Welwood. He described it as using spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid unresolved emotional wounds, psychological issues, or developmental tasks.
Instead of meeting discomfort directly, spirituality can become an “escape hatch.”
Common forms include:
Overemphasis on positivity (“love and light only”) while ignoring grief or anger
Suppressing pain with meditation or prayer rather than feeling it
Rushing forgiveness without processing hurt
Judging oneself or others for having difficult emotions
Bypassing can feel “enlightened,” yet it often creates emotional stagnation, relationship strain, and a shallow spirituality that avoids truth.
Why We Do It
Humans are wired for survival and approval. Spiritual bypassing is a strategy to protect the self from rejection, shame, and pain. Spiritual Bypassing also keeps us from embodying the deeper currents of truth consciousness, the spiritual ground where love, wisdom, and authenticity can actually live.
True growth requires integrating both light and shadow, not denying the shadow in the name of transcendence.
Signs You Might Be Bypassing
Minimizing or invalidating emotions (“I shouldn’t feel angry, everything happens for a reason”).
Escaping into practices—using meditation or prayer as avoidance instead of transformation.
Clinging to positivity while ignoring grief or trauma.
Judging yourself for struggling, believing difficulty means you’re “not spiritual enough.”
Rushing forgiveness or acceptance, skipping the embodied work of anger, sadness, and boundaries.
Microdosing & Breaking the Pattern
This is where microdosing entheogens can be an ally. Microdosing doesn’t allow us to “skip over” our inner landscape; it gently amplifies awareness. Rather than numbing or bypassing, it brings feelings, patterns, and truths into clearer focus.
Emotional awareness: Psilocybin microdosing can heighten interoception (our sense of what we’re feeling inside), helping us name emotions rather than bypass them.
Embodied truth: It invites us into the body, where the soul signals attention and asks for alignment.
Integration: Microdosing creates conditions for shadow and light to meet, offering clarity without the overwhelm of a full-dose journey.
Self-forgiveness & compassion: By softening the nervous system and expanding perspective, it supports forgiving ourselves for times we’ve hidden behind spiritual veneers.
With presence and intention, microdosing helps us stay real, grounded, and connected to truth consciousness instead of floating above it.
This Week’s Bloom
Let us commit to noticing where we may bypass and instead lean into truth:
Ask: “
What am I really feeling right now?” before jumping to meaning.
Let spiritual practices be places of presence, not escape.
Remember: it’s not about perfection, but about authenticity and integration.
We Bloom by being real, raw, forgiving, and whole.
We Bloom by letting love be our signal, not a mask.
We Bloom by integrating the shadow, not bypassing it.
Oooohm… Aaaah… Laaah…
To your soul-full beingness,
Christy Founder, Soul Sister & the Soul Full Bloom Field
