Spiritual Bypassing: How Personal Development Might Actually Be Stunting Your Influence Femmefluence Radio

In today’s world, modern women have turned from “taboo” vices to things like self-help, meditation, yoga, prayer and special nutrition to alter consciousness. All in the quest to “feel good” at all times. But what we Femmefluencers really need is to see the big picture and learn how to be present with both the light and the dark emotions. I’m showing you how on this episode.
 
Your episode worksheet: Femmefluence.com/ep17
 
Key Points from this Episode
The toxic brew women create to divide ourselves and play into a system called the patriarchy that harms ourselves, our relationships and our connection to other women and men who we could be instead linking arms with and building longer tables is called pink slime. Spiritual bypassing is a form of pink slime that’s highly visible on social media. I am a self-proclaimed personal development junkie. I’m obsessed with why humans behave a certain way. I've become fascinated with the ways in which we try to feel endlessly good. We've gotten progressively more skillful in our methods as humans, turning away from “taboo” vices like drugs or alcohol to alter our consciousness and turning towards things like self-help, books, meditation, yoga, prayer and special diets.  We are now spiritually distracting ourselves from our feelings, thinking that we're walking a healthy spiritual path as a result of calling these spiritual things better than who we were before. Now. This is why we as women have to get real with the level of influence we desire and acknowledge the pink slime in our lives because it is getting in the way. There is a myth that is causing a lot of harm goes a little something like this. ‘I have to feel good to be happy.’ Or another way to put it. ‘In order for me to do it, it has to feel good.’ Now straight up this is fucking up good women everywhere. Spiritual bypassing is a real problem in the personal growth movement and it's also part of the mindset and performance coaching industry that many of us invest our time, energy and money in. These things aren't bad things, but I'm here in this episode to show you all of the sides that it could be affecting you, and worse creating pink slime in you. How does spiritual bypassing show up? In quick fix inspirational quotes trying to summarize, complex issues in single pithy statements. It shows up in New York Times bestselling books. It shows up in people's advice to just be grateful. It shows up in self-prescribed gurus who according to their PR stories, suffer from depression and anxiety until they woke up one day, realized they didn't have to feel negative feelings anymore, and boom, all of those negative feelings went away. Spiritual bypassing is an experience of reacting to things that don't feel good. It’s a defense mechanism that looks prettier but still serves the same purpose, shielding us from the truth. It disconnects us from our feelings and helps us avoid the big picture. It's more about checking out than checking in, and the difference is so subtle that we usually don't know that we're doing it. Now the shorthand for spiritual bypassing is platitude rather than gratitude, arriving rather than being, avoiding rather than accepting.  Sometimes self-care is actually about taking care of ourselves, unplugging from too much work and plugging into more balance and harmony, right? But sometimes under the guise of self-care, we're really just checking out, denying what's happening and how scary it feels to show up for life on any given day. The idea or fantasy that one way or one thought or one blueprint will give us all of the things we need to get the things that we want. And we think especially in the form of spiritual practice, that these should afford us. The freedoms from the messiness of life as though perfection is an attainable standard, and that's especially true in social media overload and feeling the new mental concerns around Fomo or imposter syndrome, right?  Many ti