Spiritual Maturity or Bypassing

Power, love, humility - precious capacities and aspects of us that we recognize and deepen into over the course of our lives. Each a mystery, each longing to be honoured and embodied.

What is power? How does my personal will fit the will of Life?

What is humility? Is it the relinquishing of power?

What is love? How can love be abused?

Power, Powerlessness, and Hope

To understand power, we must explore powerlessness. To feel powerless is to feel depleted, flat, incapable of action. It is common to feel powerless in moments when we actually are not powerless. 

This often happens when we are feeling depressed. The feeling of helplessness and powerlessness inherent in depression is something to deeply explore and emerge from. There is such pain hidden underneath depression, such pressing down of emotion that keeping ourselves thus repressed ends up exhausting us.

Such powerlessness is not a spiritual virtue, but often a byproduct of early life trauma. It is power collapsed on itself. It is not acceptance or surrender, but a desperate giving up. It is not a transcendent going beyond the personal will, but a sign of deadening one’s self to life.

Hopelessness is also a very close state to what we’re exploring here. Desperately holding onto hope or collapsing into hopelessness are very different than going beyond hope.

Letting our hope die and grieving the loss of what we don’t have is about transcending hope and opening to something much more real, something we already are.

When we are truly empowered, we naturally become aware of the limitations of our personal will. At this point, we can genuinely feel and be in touch with what’s always been in power. We recognize and even bow to the natural flow of Life. This is humility.

Humility: Performative or Authentic

As we left off above, the full embodiment of our power brings about an awareness of the limitations of our personal will. This awareness can give rise to genuine humility. Such humility is not meek, but a fully alive, open-eyed, and dynamic response to Life and our place in it.

Performative humility is a type of mask trying to appear genuine. This type of humility is an attempt to cover up self-centredness and grandiosity. It is shame and unworthiness trying to hide themselves under a disguise of self-effacement - spiritual ambition turning into a nightmare.

Such humility does not free but further chains us, it does not transcend pain but gets suffocated underneath it. It is an abandonment and denial of our power and natural dignity, instead of an expression of genuine freedom. It is a tendency we can closely look at and compassionately outgrow.

Love: Heart Broken Open

Love is just as much an aspect of Reality as it is what shines through us (and as us) the more that we are broken open to What Is.

Empowerment prepares a sane foundation of healthy self-protection. Humility softens and further roots us upon that foundation. And love is the flowering at the top, ever deepening our being and opening our wings.

Love is the greatest journey and adventure. The freedom beyond freedom.

From the perspective of Love, personal salvation is but the beginning of an infinite grace. Love takes risks and jumps into the fire, not through performative self-sacrifice based on self-betrayal, but because it cannot do otherwise.

Love is the profoundly liberating experience of having no choice. 

The imitations of love are just as common as our longing to die into a love beyond imagination: Pity, sympathy, and blind compassion.

When we pity someone, our heart is not empowered but collapsed. We treat them as if they have no will of their own, we already condemn them as incapable.

Sympathy is no different. We are too removed from the other’s pain, too untouched by their condition and struggle to really show up with our whole heart.

What’s missing in these states is our own empowerment. If I’m getting crushed under the weight of the suffering I witness or already feel within me, I cannot show up fully for the pain of others. If my cup is empty, I have nothing to give.

Strengthen the foundation of your being. Empower yourself. Learn about healthy boundaries. Speak up more often and begin to embody your healthy “no.”

When we are in the grips of blind compassion, we cut people too much slack instead of confronting and challenging their hurtful or unfair behaviours. We are being driven by fear and by our desire to appear more spiritual and more loving. Yet instead we end up allowing others to abuse our love. 

In blind compassion, we are more interested in not rocking the boat than maturing. This avoidance weakens the capacity and reach of our hearts and deadens our connection with our self-worth and dignity. 

A very common way that blind compassion shows up in our relationships is through premature forgiveness. When we prematurely forgive someone, we might think we are being spiritual yet we are simply being self-abusive. Premature forgiveness makes a mockery out of accountability and the need for repair after harm was done. 

For me to forgive you and for us to move forward together in our relationship, first I need to get in touch with my pain including any justified anger I might be feeling. Then I need to feel and witness your genuine remorse for having hurt me so that I can begin to trust you again.

When we are in the grips of spiritual bypassing, we try to skip over the messiness of relationships and hold onto a naive fantasy of clean-cut unconditional love, harmony, and bliss.

Cutting through blind compassion is an essential step in opening more deeply to a kind of love that is freedom embodied.

Spiritual bypassing is as natural as the need to outgrow it. Keep cutting through this tendency with determination and remember to be compassionate with the part of you that carries your wounding and conditioning as you do so.

Keep deepening and you shall discover a freedom grounded enough to include pain - a true transcendence of suffering.


For more on this work, visit my page on Spirituality and Embodiment. To book a free discovery session with me, click here.