Before Lian came to me for help with his depression, he had been meditating for a long time. He had been a part of a spiritual community that told its members to pray and meditate when they were angry, hurt, anxious, or depressed. He had learned that Spirit would change the way he felt about him and give him the peace he was looking for.
Still, Lian was sad. "I've done everything I've been taught to do, so why am I still sad? What am I doing wrong?"
"Spiritual bypass" is the term for what Lian was going through.
Spiritual bypass is when people use their spiritual practise as a way to avoid dealing with and taking responsibility for their feelings. Alcohol, drugs, food, TV, work, gambling, spending, shopping, anger, withdrawal, and even meditation become addictions when they are used to avoid feeling and taking responsibility for feelings. If you start meditating as soon as a hard or painful feeling comes up in order to calm down and get rid of the feeling, you may be addicted to spirituality.
What you get out of meditation depends on what you want to get out of it. People can meditate for two very different reasons: to avoid pain or to learn about love.
Meditation is a good way to get out of your head and into your heart if you want to connect with yourself and your spiritual guidance to learn more about loving yourself and others. It is a good way to connect with a loving part of yourself so that you can welcome and embrace your painful feelings and figure out what you may be doing or thinking that is causing your own pain. When you want to be loving to yourself and take responsibility for your own feelings, meditation can help you get centred and compassionate enough to do an inner exploration with your feeling self.
But if you use meditation to escape your pain and feel good, you are abusing your spirituality. You use your spirituality to avoid learning about your feelings and being responsible for them.
Lian was doing these things. Because he didn't want to learn from how he felt, he kept thinking and acting in ways toward himself and others that made him feel sad. Then, instead of trying to figure out what he was doing that made his feeling self, his inner child, feel sad, he tried to get rid of the feelings by meditating.
Lian found out through his work with me that he was either ignoring his inner child, which is his feeling self, or judging himself all the time. He mostly ignored himself through meditation, but he also judged himself, which made his inner child feel unloved, unimportant, and unseen. Lian realised that if he treated his real children the way he treated himself—by ignoring their feelings and constantly judging them—they would also feel bad and maybe even depressed. But Lian did care about how his real children felt and what they needed. It was his own that he didn't care about or judge.
Lian saw that he was treating himself the same way his parents had. He was a much better parent to his kids than his parents were to him, but he raised his inner child in the same way he was raised. He treated himself not only the way he had been treated, but also the way his parents had treated themselves. So, he wasn't a good example for his kids of taking care of himself and his own feelings, just like his parents hadn't been a good example for him.
Lian learned the Inner Bonding process that we teach by working with me. During meditation, he learned to accept the pain he felt. He learned to shut down the part of himself that was hard on itself and to be kind and respectful to himself. He learned to do loving things for himself so that his inner child didn't feel like he had left him. His depression was caused by a feeling of being alone inside. He realised that his depression was a gift from his inner child, who was trying to tell him that he wasn't being kind to himself. Lian got better at taking care of himself over time, and his depression went away. Now, he could no longer use his meditation as a spiritual shortcut.
