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What is spiritual bypassing & how to know if you have fallen into it

BS Spirituality: The difference between Bypassing and Doing the work.

Ayahuasca Insights

Nicolas Canon

September 16, 2022

What is bullshit spirituality?

Bullshit spirituality is another layer that we use to remain distracted, another thing we do, another identity that we embrace in order to feel good, in order to gain some sort of inner and outer recognition, in order to pat myself on the shoulder and think: “I’m being a good boy/girl.” “I’m a great person and spiritual person.”

Bullshit spirituality for me is spirituality that is based around mostly doing and not being.

For example, I once knew this woman that was working in the sex industry and through that her energy was quite contaminated by the clients and people that she worked with, she would wake up and she would share on her social media things like: “Oh, cleansing the bad vibes – burning a bit of palo santo, a little bit of sage.” Throughout her room and i thought.

Come on, what you need is a change of habits, a change of outlook, a change of the way you relate to your body. You need to relate to yourself as someone who is worthy of respect, it’s not your room that has the bad vibes it’s the things that you’re doing.

Once at a music performance in Costa Rica this guy came close to me, he was the steriotypical hippie; braids and dressed up in a very “hippy” manner – he was smelling really, really bad, probably from camping a few days without a shower, so he stunk.

When he came to me, the odor was really intense and he started reaching through his backpack, I thought: “Yes! He’s gonna grab a deodorant!” – He pulled out a stick of palo santo, burnt it, and started smudging his armpits.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or cry but it painted a very clear picture: “It’s not evil spirits that are haunting your armpits, it’s lack of hygiene…

Bullshit spirituality can look in different ways for everybody, it’s a way of bypassing, essentially, it means using spiritual things or things those branded as spiritual in order to feel like you’re doing something good without really addressing the core, the shadow, the work that needs to be done at the essence of who you are.

Bullshit spirituality is like the traditional religious approach, people who are very religious in a fanatic way, those who go to church like my parents every sunday, church, church, praying.

Telling everybody: “I love you.” and then we come home and my mom gets really angry with everybody (used to) or i would see people speaking so nice and hugging each other and then as soon as we left church; gossip, trash talking the other, judging, “Oh, you see that person?” “Do you see this guy?

That’s Bullshit spirituality – it’s doing something because you think you’re good, because you’re “doing” it instead of actually making yourself a better person, making the seed of who you are flower into its full expression.

Bullshit spirituality can be anything that is done unconsciously, even practices that are aimed to raise our conscience; you can be meditating in a bullshit manner, closing your eyes, overthinking a lot, judging and then judging yourself for thinking so much during meditation.

That’s a way of bullshit spirituality – you’re not doing anything.

You’re just digging a deeper hole.

It can be; taking plant medicines, mushrooms, psychoactive substances for entertainment and thinking that because you feel lovey-dovey in that music festival or with your friends at college that something transcendental or fundamental is happening.

Nothing wrong with that, it’s entertainment, but don’t pretend that spirituality is the same as entertainment.

Bullshit spirituality is reading books and quoting a lot of things then thinking that we’re better because of that so, it is the ways in which we delude ourselves about doing the work.

Sound baths, saging, festivals, movement, things like yoga. All these things can be amazing tools towards liberation, towards making us more and more conscious of our body, of our mind, of our emotions or energies.

But it can become a way that becomes branded and marketed as: “Oh, look at her, she’s such a yogi – she burns sage and has buddha statues in her home and does very complicated poses, she might be very spiritual!

Not really! – maybe, but not really, bullshit spirituality is the person that talks or portrays a picture that they have not walked.

When I say grounded spirituality it means connected to the earth, to our body, to who we are to reality – and reality has things that are dark, ugly, that need our attention, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Bullshit spirituality is everything that we do that we think is spiritual, but that we’re doing unconsciously and that pulls us further away from actually drawing as human.

If you feel the calling to sit with Ayahuasca, in a container held by Colombian shamans at a sacred temple in the middle of the mountain forests, please check: www.ayahuascacolombia.com/retreats