According to psychotherapist Robert Augustus Masters, PhD, spiritual bypassing – the use of spiritual practices or beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs — is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed.
Robert’s new book, Spiritual Bypassing, casts a critical eye on our deeply entrenched misuse of spirituality, furthering the body of psychological insight into how we use (and abuse) our spiritual practice in often unconscious ways. For example, he takes an in-depth look at the unresolved or ignored psychological issues often masked as spirituality, including self-judgment, “confrontation-phobic” compassion, excessive niceness, the demonizing of anger, and emotional dissociation.
Throughout the book, Masters provides a framework for how to deal with and integrate “negative” emotions such as anger, fear, hate and judgement into a more authentic way of living. While most self-help books these days seem to simply tell you to “just be more positive” “avoid negativity” or “have more compassion”, Masters suggests a method where we can simultaneously choose to be compassionate while also still choosing to acknowledge our heartfelt anger — without expressing it with excessive aggression or repressing it through denial or other practices that might numb our real feelings. His method goes beyond simply being present to our anger, but actually using our heart to integrate it into our thoughts, feelings and way of looking at ourself and other people.
Spiritual Bypassing is a must read for anyone who is looking for a more integrated spirituality, authentic relationship with themselves and others, and practical methods for dealing with unresolved wounds. It is available on Amazon if you Click Here