Spiritual Bypassing: What Do Ethics Have to Do With It?
The Subtle Temptation of Rising Above
In my therapy practice, I often hear phrases like “I’m focusing on the positive,” or “I’m staying in my light.” It’s a beautiful intention to hold peace, to stay centered, to not get lost in the noise of the world. But sometimes, beneath that language, I sense something quieter but more concerning: an avoidance of discomfort that looks like spirituality, yet moves us away from responsibility.
This is what psychologists and spiritual teachers alike call “spiritual bypassing”, meaning to use spiritual ideas or practices to sidestep pain, conflict, or ethical engagement. In my opinion, it is not malicious; in fact, it is deeply human. When life feels overwhelming, we reach for the tools that soothe us. But over time, bypassing can flatten our growth. It numbs our empathy, erodes accountability, and keeps us hovering above the very ground where healing wants to happen.
I’ve seen it in clients, in colleagues, in family, and when I hold a mirror, in myself. This is a temptation to rise above rather than turn toward, meaning to seek transcendence instead of integration. But spirituality, what is sometimes called “embodied spirituality”, always asks us to come closer, not drift further away. It invites us to have a relationship together, no matter how challenging.
The Illusion of “Higher Ground”
I once worked with a client who came into therapy after a painful breakup. She spoke eloquently about energy, soul contracts, and karmic lessons. Everything, she said, was “happening for her evolution/for a reason.”
Her insight was genuine, but something was missing. Beneath her polished spiritual understanding, she was heartbroken and yet, she didn’t allow herself to grieve. She said, “I don’t want to go backwards/feel negative emotions. I want to keep my vibration high.”
What unfolded in therapy was not a rejection of her spirituality, but an invitation to ground it. As she began to let herself cry, rage, and feel, as she met the raw ache beneath her spiritual framework, she began to soften. She discovered that compassion isn’t a vibration to maintain; it’s a relationship we practice.
Ethical spirituality begins right there: not in rising above suffering, but in how we meet it. It is not about moral superiority or perfect behavior, but about our willingness to stay real with our humanity, to feel, to question, and to remain in relationship with truth.
When Love Needs a Backbone
Spiritual bypassing often hides behind the language of love. “Everything is love,” we say. “We’re all one.” And that’s true, but it is also incomplete.
In psychodynamic therapy, we speak about integration being the capacity to hold paradox, to recognize both light and shadow within ourselves and others. Integration demands discernment. Love, without discernment, becomes sentimentality. It lacks boundaries and can quickly slide into complicity.
In moments of injustice or harm, love needs a backbone. Compassion needs ethics.
As a culture, we often confuse neutrality with wisdom. We think staying “out of the mess” means we’re evolved. But sometimes neutrality is just another word for avoidance. To witness cruelty and call it “someone’s soul lesson” is not enlightenment, it’s disengagement and/or disassociation.
True consciousness is not detached from ethics. It is, conversely, rooted in relational accountability, in how we respond to the suffering of others, how we use our privilege, and how we hold ourselves responsible for the ripple effects of our choices.
Relational Healing and the Two-Eyed Way
Indigenous teachings offer an antidote to this form of bypassing. In Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall’s concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, we are invited to see the world through both Indigenous and Western lenses , with one eye grounded in relational, spiritual wisdom, the other in critical, scientific understanding.
Two-Eyed Seeing teaches that true vision is relational. We cannot separate knowledge from responsibility, or insight from action. This framework has deeply influenced my work as a therapist. It reminds me that spirituality is not about ascending beyond the human story, but participating in it with humility, with reciprocity, and with care for all our relations.
In Western therapy, we might say the same thing through the language of attachment and repair. Healing does not happen in isolation; it happens in connection. Ethics is not an abstract code, rather it’s part of the fabric of a relationship.
The Shadow Side of Light
The moment we claim to be “beyond judgment,” we often start making unconscious ones. The moment we claim to be “above duality,” we stop seeing suffering clearly. This is the shadow side of the modern spiritual movement, the way privilege, trauma, and ego can hide inside the language of enlightenment.
In my own journey, I’ve learned that shadow work, often being the practice of integrating what we’ve exiled, should not be separated from ethics. When we disown our anger, we project it. When we deny our fear, we avoid hard truths. But when we bring those emotions into awareness, we discover they have wisdom: Anger can become moral clarity; Grief can become compassion; Fear can become vigilance in service of care.
This is what I mean by relational healing: turning toward what’s painful not just for our own liberation, but for the wellbeing of others.
Ethics as Embodied Love
In an era where “raising our vibration” has become a kind of spiritual currency, we risk confusing inner peace with disengagement. Yet, from a therapeutic standpoint, peace without participation is fragile. It can crumble the moment life demands something real from us.
Ethics is what gives love its shape. It keeps our spirituality from floating away.
When I work with people who have bypassed their pain, we often begin by slowing down. We track the body. We listen to what the nervous system is trying to say. Often, ethics begins right there in the body because how we inhabit our presence determines how we impact others.
When we stay connected to ourselves, we make fewer reactive choices. We speak with more care. We set clear boundaries. We stop confusing avoidance for peace.
In this way, embodied spirituality becomes a living ethic, one that’s grounded, relational, and responsive to the world around us.
The Integration of Spirit and Responsibility
I believe spirituality and ethics are not separate paths, rather they are two expressions of the same consciousness. To walk one without the other is to lose balance.
If spirituality is how we connect to meaning, ethics is how we express that meaning in relationships. If spirituality is awareness, ethics is application. If spirituality is love, ethics is love in action.
As a therapist, I see the fruits of this integration every day. Clients who once floated in abstraction begin to feel their feet again. They learn that accountability doesn’t diminish their light, instead it refines it. They begin to live with integrity, and that integrity becomes its own kind of peace.
Ethics, in this way, is not a burden but a form of freedom. It’s the practice of being trustworthy in all of our relationships: to ourselves, to each other, and to the world that holds us.
Beyond the Bypass
We live in a time when spirituality is accessible at the click of a screen. Meditation apps, plant medicine retreats, self-styled gurus, it is a landscape that is vast and varied. Yet the challenge remains the same as it has always been: how to stay human amid transcendence.
To me, authentic growth is not about escaping darkness, but transforming our relationship to it. It’s not about being “above” the world, but of it: rooted, embodied, and awake.
So when I ask, “What do ethics have to do with spirituality?”, I try my best to answer with simplicity: everything.
Why? Ethics keep our spirituality honest. They keep it connected to life. They remind us that enlightenment is not a private glow but a collective responsibility and a way of walking with awareness, humility, and care.
Spiritual bypassing may offer temporary relief, but ethics offer something deeper: belonging. Belonging to each other, to the Earth, and to the sacred responsibility of being alive.
That’s the work. That’s the real awakening.
WALLACE MURRAY
Psychotherapy | Coaching | Facilitation | Educator | Urban Shamanism | Psychedelic Assisted Therapy
