A Chink in Our Spiritual Armour
Can we spiritually bypass while sincerely practising the transformational psychology of yoga?
During a recent Rounding Day, our conversation turned to spiritual bypassing.
It is a term used frequently today within psychology, psychotherapy and contemporary wellness culture. I understood it to mean using spirituality to circumvent the difficult emotional, psychological or relational work we may need to undertake.
But as we spoke, another question arose:
Does the idea of spiritual bypassing properly apply to someone sincerely practising yoga?
By yoga, I do not mean practising āsana, breathwork or meditation in isolation. I mean the complete transformational psychology set out by Patañjali through the eight limbs of yoga.
If we genuinely submit ourselves to that path, is there anywhere left for the conditioned self to hide?
What Is Spiritual Bypassing?
The term spiritual bypassing was coined by psychologist and Buddhist practitioner John Welwood. He used it to describe the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds and unfinished developmental work.
He described this as a form of premature transcendence—attempting to rise above the difficult and untidy reality of being human before we have fully faced it.
In contemporary culture, spiritual bypassing might look like:
Meditating to avoid feeling
Speaking of detachment when we are actually withdrawing
Using forgiveness to avoid acknowledging anger or harm
Invoking karma to explain away suffering
Using spiritual teachings to avoid responsibility for our behaviour
Claiming to be “the witness” while remaining disconnected from the body or emotions
Believing that sadness, anger or fear represents a failure of spiritual practice
Even when spiritual ideas contain truth, they can be used defensively.
Our spirituality can become a kind of armour—protecting the existing personality from what it does not want to confront: its own shadow.
Perhaps spiritual bypassing is the chink in that armour—the place where unresolved conditioning remains concealed beneath spiritual language, knowledge or identity.
Can Yoga Become a Bypass?
Individual spiritual practices can certainly be used to soothe, suppress or escape. We can meditate to avoid relationship, mistake emotional suppression for equanimity, use detachment to justify withdrawal or invoke surrender to avoid taking responsibility.
But is this yoga?
Or is it the selective use of yogic concepts and practices by the very conditioned personality that yoga is intended to transform?
Patañjali did not present yoga as a collection of isolated techniques designed merely to calm, comfort or elevate us. He presented a complete eight-limbed path:
Yama
Niyama
Āsana
Prāṇāyāma
Pratyāhāra
Dhāraṇā
Dhyāna
Samādhi
Together, these limbs work upon every dimension of the practitioner: our conduct, relationships, habits, body, breath, senses, attention, mind and deepest sense of identity.
The yamas confront how we live and relate to others. Ahiṃsā asks us to recognise harm. Satya demands honesty, including honesty with ourselves. Asteya, brahmacarya and aparigraha bring us into conscious relationship with our desires, excesses, attachments and ways of grasping.
The niyamas turn the practice inward through purification, contentment, discipline, self-study and surrender.
Āsana and prāṇāyāma work through the body, breath, energy and mind. Pratyāhāra reveals our dependence upon external stimulation. Dhāraṇā and dhyāna expose the habits and fluctuations of the mind. Samādhi gradually loosens our identification with those fluctuations altogether.
This leads me to a hypothesis:
One cannot spiritually bypass while sincerely practising the transformational psychology of yoga as set out by Patañjali.
This does not mean that everyone who attends a yoga class or meditates regularly is incapable of avoidance. Fragments of yoga can be used to bypass. But the complete path does not permit us to separate meditation from conduct, inner experience from relationship, or transcendence from truthfulness, non-harming, discipline, self-study and surrender.
Practice cannot remain confined to the mat or meditation seat. It must enter the way we speak, behave, choose, react and relate.
Purification, Refinement and Surrender
tapaḥ-svādhyāyeśvara-praṇidhānāni kriyā-yogaḥ
—Yoga Sūtra II.1
Tapas, svādhyāya and Īśvara-praṇidhāna constitute Kriyā Yoga.
Here, Kriyā Yoga does not refer to a particular set of kriyas or techniques. The Sanskrit word kriyā conveys action, activity or practice. In this context, Kriyā Yoga is yoga put into practice: the active, lived application of the path.
What follows is my own interpretation, arising from my practice, study and experience of yoga. I understand this threefold process as purification, refinement and surrender.
Through tapas, we enter the fire of purification. Disciplined practice begins to work upon our habits, resistances and conditioning, developing our capacity to continue even when the process becomes uncomfortable.
Through svādhyāya, the process becomes one of refinement. Increasing self-awareness, self-study and the study of sacred teachings reveal our motives, attachments, aversions and self-deceptions. As our understanding is refined, we develop greater discrimination between the movements of the conditioned personality and the deeper Self.
Through Īśvara-praṇidhāna, we surrender. We offer our actions and their fruits to Īśvara, gradually relinquishing the ego’s need to possess the practice, control its outcome or use spirituality to construct another identity.
Patañjali tells us in the following sūtra that Kriyā Yoga is practised for the cultivation of samādhi and the attenuation of the kleśas:
samādhi-bhāvanārthaḥ kleśa-tanū-karaṇārthaś ca
—Yoga Sūtra II.2
The kleśas—avidyā, asmitā, rāga, dveṣa and abhiniveśa—are ignorance, ego-identification, attachment, aversion and clinging to life. They shape what we seek, what we resist and what we believe ourselves to be.
Earlier, Patañjali tells us that the fluctuations of mind are brought towards stillness through abhyāsa and vairāgya:
abhyāsa-vairāgyābhyāṁ tan-nirodhaḥ
—Yoga Sūtra I.12
Read together, I understand these teachings as part of the same transformative process. Abhyāsa keeps us steadily engaged in purification, refinement and surrender. Vairāgya loosens our grasping, resistance and attachment to particular experiences and outcomes. Through sustained practice, the fluctuations of mind begin to settle, the kleśas lose their hold, and the conditions for samādhi are cultivated.
The relationship between Kriyā Yoga, abhyāsa, vairāgya, the kleśas and samādhi describes a sophisticated transformational technology that deserves a fuller exploration of its own. For the purpose of this article, the central point is that these practices do not allow us simply to place spiritual language over our conditioning. They bring us into direct relationship with it.
No Place Left to Hide
Spiritual bypassing attempts to reach freedom without undergoing transformation. Patañjali’s path offers no such shortcut.
When yoga is sincerely practised as an integrated path and embodied in the way we live, our conduct, relationships, conditioning, attachments, aversions and identifications are all brought into awareness. Even the shadow must be encountered.
We may borrow spiritual language or isolate meditation and transcendence from the ethical, embodied and psychological foundations of yoga. In doing so, spirituality can become armour for the existing personality. But the complete path does not reinforce that armour; it exposes the identities and defences from which it was constructed.
Ultimately, even attachment to the teachings must be surrendered. They are a means through which ignorance is removed—not another identity for the ego to possess. For mokṣa, our identification with being the practitioner, performing the practice and moving towards attainment must also fall away.
There is no route around this transformation and no place for the conditioned self to hide—not even behind spiritual knowledge.
Yoga does not take us around our humanity. It transforms us through it.
This is yoga as a transformational psychology: the movement from discipline to freedom.