The Monk's Defence

spiritual bypassing and the path of articulation

Over the last year, I’ve found value in more “direct path” teachers.

These meditation or spiritual teachers point out a truth already present in experience, right here, right now. They will often emphasise that this is it—ultimate reality is already in full swing and that an unconditional wholeness is not only noticeable but, in fact, inescapable.

Some teachers who lean into a direct path approach:

John Astin

,

Joan Tollifson

, Suzanne Chang, Jeff Foster. Some teachers—Angelo Dillulo & Adyashanti come to mind—will use direct pointers but nestled alongside other approaches.

Many of these teachers recommend bringing attention to the fact of awareness itself, as opposed to the content of what’s arising.

There are many different forms of this: non-doing, resting-as-awareness practices (”everything is a cloud; you are the vast sky”) or practices that tune into the mysterious or unresolvable nature of reality—a personal favourite. Outside of the direct path, many developmental approaches like Vipassana also shun the content in favour of attention to the “underlying” characteristics of reality.

The Monk’s Defence

These are powerful perspectives. Their power lies in inviting us to attune to the fabric of our experience, rather than getting hooked in the endless stories we tell about it.

But seeing exclusively through this perspective creates its own problems.

Rather than an invitation to a fuller embodiment, it turns into a convenient way of avoiding a difficult feeling. Rather than sitting with discomfort, we can turn towards something more soothing and universal.

So begins the process of spiritual bypassing, the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues.”¹

Bypassing is a kind of defence mechanism. It functions to protect us from experiencing pain, through avoidance, detachment and dissociation.

When Jack Kornfield came off retreat and struggled in a relationship, he met a therapist who told him “You have the monk’s defense. You can be aware of anything, but you’re afraid to actually express it.”²

Richard Schwartz, the creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS) likewise noted that he found “the use of spiritual practices to transcend one’s exiles to be rampant in the communities I treat.”³

The inevitable bypass

The problem starts at the beginning: people often come to spirituality because they want to feel better. To be less stressed and more happy. To feel less pain.

The allure of spirituality is clear; finding something outside the chaos—untouchable, permanent and free from suffering.

Any spiritual teaching can lead to bypassing, but direct path or non-dual teachings carry a higher risk factor. As there is often an encouragement to step back from the content of your experience, it is easy to look away whilst believing you’re tuning into something deeper.

Something else that can arise is the interpretation of feeling bad as a failure to practice well. You’re angry because you’re not seeing things clearly. You’re sad because you’ve not recognised the nature of awareness.

How did you miss it? Why are you choosing to suffer? It’s so simple!

I fell into this trap for years and it fed a sense of shame that rivalled anything I’d experienced outside of meditation practice.

Redressing the balance

What would it look like to address this upfront?

It would mean admitting that bypassing is not a strange side effect, but an inevitability of practice. In other words, we should expect it. It’s a when, not an if: a question of how many flavours of it show up for you and in what frequency.

We could also remove the stigma from it: what we call bypassing is an innocent response to pain. The more we neglect to discuss it, the less we are able to develop an intimacy with what makes it so seductive and how it sells us short.

I think teachings that are more liable to bypassing should spend more time with these topics. This isn’t personal criticism: many teachers do address this… and many students go on to wildly misinterpret their meanings.

Finally, we can balance out awareness with articulation.

The art of articulation

What helped me was to develop fluency in both awareness and articulation: in working with pointers to an already-present awareness and, when appropriate, working with particular emotions: connecting, expressing and articulating.

This means giving voice to “the content”, not trying to reach beyond it.

Here’s where to start: tune into the uncomfortable feeling as it arises in your body. Where is it arising? How big is it? What texture does it have? Stay with the particulars of it. For once, give the feeling free reign. Give it space by holding space. Let it show you what it is. Don’t second guess it, don’t try to fix or resolve it. There’s no need to make sense of it.

Just stay with the feeling. The temptation can be to pop up into a narrative about why she said that and why he’s a prick and how everything is fucked. Instead, stay interested in the movement of the emotion, this cresting wave of feeling.

When you feel sufficiently steeped in it, name it. You might say that you feel angry or irritated, alone or abandoned, numb or restless. You’ll get it wrong plenty of times. But keep naming, keep describing, until you land on some words that turn a key.

When that door opens, stay attuned to what comes next. Something always comes next. The first feeling might morph into another. It might just change shape. A memory might pop up. An image may arise. Notice and articulate. Then listen anew. Rinse and repeat.

You don’t get to know what will arrive, or in what order. You can only show up, willing.

There are many ways to attend and articulate: write your worries down, talk out loud in the car, have a candid conversation with a coach, or read poetry and allow others to grant you their gift of words.

Emotions often need something more than a bare awareness. They need to be seen, picked up and spoken into awareness. They need to take flight and only you can grant them flight through your articulation. So move between the two—speech and silence—and see how things unfold.

A few other points on articulation:

• You can practice this in meditation with a “weather check”: for the first couple of minutes, name each thing you feel: tightness, pressure, restlessness, aversion, irritation, breathing, space, presence, doubt, fear, presence, curiosity. Stay attuned to your body-sense as you name each feeling.

• This kind of work is not popular in non-dual circles. It might reek of “indulging in content.” Try it and find out. What do you have to lose?

• This kind of work is also the essence of coaching, an articulation in tandem. Done well, it requires a willingness to sit in the unknown, to experience our inner multitudes and the ability to hold silence until the next thing arrives.

Where articulation saved me

Again and again, I have found this kind of attention and expression to be the only way to meet the most intractable contractions and long-standing malaises. Especially those that a meditative awareness did not address.

I could meet fear and panic, but I clamped down at the first sign of anger—felt deeply uncomfortable with any sense of being angry with another. Talking therapy allowed me to connect with and slowly give voice to a rage simmering just below the surface. Prior to that, seeing the changing nature of the sensations that make up rage, or the awareness in which rage arose did nothing to address the rage itself. These tricks only gave me a safe viewing hole that kept me distant from the anger; an anger I was terrified would destroy everything around me. That terror did not subside until I started to articulate the rage and gain confidence that the world didn’t crumble.⁴

I can do sadness. But I struggled to come to terms with despair: the powerlessness of it, the sense of being uniquely broken. Then I read David Whyte’s Despair⁵, and his words elevated the feeling to an exquisite fever pitch and release.

At other times, I was paralysed by grief, by being stripped bare and not knowing how to orient. Once again, the words of someone else helped me recognise grief as something bigger than I could hold.⁶ In the articulation, there was a coming home to myself.

When I went through burnout and anomie, writing Three Years was the gateway into a new life, the emergence of new and old friendships, and a newfound appreciation of what I’d been through.

I felt a deep tension in my throat for nearly a decade of intense insight meditation. No matter how constantly I recognised the sensations that made it up as impermanent, unsatisfactory and not belonging to a self, the tension never budged for more than a few minutes. In fact, it seemed to get worse.

Release only arrived through exploring somatic work, specifically TRE and tremoring. Whatever it was there demanded movement: the somatic language of trembling, writhing and noise. I learned that the body has a deep intelligence that knows how to coil itself into the original pattern of tension and then release it.

Incorporating a somatic approach completely revitalised my practice, which had felt stagnant for some time. It’s not a coincidence that the therapist who told Jack Kornfield he had “the monk’s defense” was also someone who specialised in bodywork.⁷

All of these feelings stagnated until I found a way of connecting with them, feeling their energy, and articulating them: whether journalling, living through the words of others, talking or trembling.

Some of these practices might seem anathema to meditators who are used to the idea of wisdom arising in silent stillness. But perhaps you need to bite, scream, pound, cry or stomp. Listen, articulate and find out.

Learning to articulate is building the confidence to feel and express, knowing that the expression will not define you.

The heart in articulation

All of this requires courage—an under-appreciated quality in spiritual circles. Courage comes from the French coeur, meaning heart.

Bypassing is a natural response to the fear of experiencing yourself fully. But if we want to venture deeper, we have to ask what we’re afraid of.

This is what Jack Kornfield calls taking the One Seat: the only seat you can take, and staying put for what arrives, come what may. I will not turn away.

Courage lets us look the darkness in the eye. Too often, spiritual pointers can be used as a soothing simplicity that keeps us at arm’s length from our messy particulars. The dark room remains unlit and we avoid it at all costs.

What you might find

From my own experience, a lack of articulation might not hold you back at the beginning. Things opened up very fast for me as I applied the Vipassana way of seeing to anything and everything.

But years on I realised I was still scared of myself. Addressing that fear required something more naked, more vulnerable; not filtering reality through any particular way of seeing.

To do this deeply means sitting without help, without hope, and so it is deeply unappetising, horrendously unsexy. But if you go deep enough, you’ll see there’s no other way. You might also find a vaster intelligence at play when you consent to listen.

We overlook this when we denounce "thought" as a whole, as is common in spiritual circles. Compulsive storytelling is one thing, but spontaneous articulation is one magical way that reality expresses itself, and it furnishes us with a wide array of imaginative, creative and novel ways to relate to this life.

Practising in this way won’t feel as spiritual. It won’t feel cool or fashionable. But such is the work. My experience is that this kind of work becomes more essential the deeper we go, and can provide an incredible release as we stop trying to see through, around and under our emotions.

You might discover a bustling inner world when you start trying to articulate it, when you begin to follow the thread; yearnings and emotional tides that have been vying for your attention since you began to look into yourself.

Labelling this world as “content” does a good job of obscuring it. But your inner life is not “content.” Your interiority is not a commodity.

If we do not invite all emotions to shake and rattle us, we will never discover that which is truly unshakeable. Fully feeling and expressing emotions creates a sense of groundedness, a comfort in one’s skin, an embodiment that doesn't need to engage particular forms of awareness to avoid or transcend.

Direct path teachings are powerful pointers. They orient us to something easily overlooked. But be ready to use and abuse them. Stay alive to the temptation to leave behind the particulars, and stay sceptical of any teaching that actively encourages this.

that Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahman, I was willing to dissect my self and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process.

—Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Photo by Alexander on Unsplash

1. Wikipedia: Spiritual bypass

2. The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Jack Kornfield — How to Overcome Apathy and Find Beautiful Purpose (#601)

3. Richard Schwartz. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, p. 78.

4. Therapy was also indispensable for addressing a lack of personal boundaries and a malfunctioning sense of self-regulation; things that you are very unlikely to address by sitting alone, in silence.

5. From the book Consolations, but also reproduced by David here.

6. See the Elizabeth Gilbert section in Three Years, Part Two.

7. In this case, Reichian therapy.