Our world is an unsettled place to be right now. There are mountain towns in North Carolina being wiped out by the climate crisis and the U.S. government’s response is to spend money on more bombs to a Zionist entity that is using that imprimatur to expand their genocide to include ecocide, while those who speak up against are facing shocking levels of repression such as tenured professors being fired for saying “Free Palestine.” Last week, the state of Missouri killed an innocent man, Marcellus Williams, who was a poet, an imam, and a father. Today, there is a chlorine gas spill in Atlanta that has closed the interstate and has some 90,000 people under a shelter-in-place order. And, an impending strike by dock workers, may stall supply chains and economies across the globe beginning at midnight. Oh, and there’s a fascist running for president in the U.S. who is telegraphing he won’t abide by the election results if he loses, and there’s Black woman running against him who is leaning in to continuing the aforementioned genocide and ecocide. There’s also the whole Diddy thing, which is putting story after story of sexual assault in the news.
*whew* It’s a lot being a human right now. There is a lot of uncertainty and chaos and devastation.
For those of us who realize that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, it makes sense that we want to retreat to sacred spaces and get away from news feeds that chunder garbage. And we need to do that sometimes. Get away. Shut it off. Take a walk. Dance it out. ROLLER SKATE to Earth, Wind & Fire (my favorite). Meditate. Connect with Source. Retreat.
And, yet.
That very impulse to retreat can lead us astray. We can end up in “spiritual bypass” instead of transcendence. Spiritual bypass is the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing difficult or painful issues.
That’s where this video by this lovely human, Keisha (@keishathemystic), really helped me. I encountered her on the woo-woo side of TikTok (posted here with her permission), and what she says here reassures me that I’m not wrong to feel a disconnect in those spaces.
I’m always trying to find the connection between my spiritual healing and collective liberation. I, who am white-raised and spend a fair amount of time in spiritual spaces, struggle with the spiritual bypass I encounter in there. When I’m in these spaces with other humans who are doing some version of “positive vibes only,” or claiming we’re all “one race,” or having some version of anger-phobia, then it’s no longer healing for me. I feel less authentic, less fully welcome, and recently I felt very confused by all that. (Am I wrong? Is it me? Should I just chill?) I was in the midst of struggling with this when I found Keisha’s video and it healed me a little bit. I hope it does you, too.
Then, I picked up a book that’s also helped me see understand the spiritual bypass around whiteness and white supremacy, Rachel Ricketts’ Do Better.
Part of the solution that Ricketts points out is that white, middle-class girls and femmes are less likely to be openly angry (it’s the heteropatriarchy, innit?), so all that pent-up anger gets stored up and then comes out sideways.
Like that memoir I was writing about last time, in which the woman’s (white) mother had a “rage that lived outside her.” That kind of rage has a cost, and it’s spiritual as well as emotional and material.
Our world is quite literally on fire right now and that is hard on us as humans.
We may need to find some respite from all the discomfort but we cannot stop there. As Ricketts puts it, “The person partaking in spiritual bypassing is keeping their comfort prioritized.” We can, and we must, do better than just prioritizing our own comfort.
In “Embrace of the Serpent,” a 2015 film by Ciro Guerra, indigenous healers have an ill-fated encounter with white, Western colonizers who want to steal their medicine so they can profit from it. (Sound familiar?) In a pivotal scene, one of the indigenous healers says, “If we can’t get the whites to learn, it will be the end of us.”
This line feels true to me right now, and sums up the central problem I have with spiritual bypassing.
But perhaps it’s not. Perhaps it, too, cedes too much power to the white colonizer. Still, we have to find a way to do belonging without the bypassing.
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