For a long time, I have been postponing writing an article on my website in which to recommend an exceptionally important and valuable reading: the interview-article by John Welwood, “Human Nature, Buddha Nature,” with the subtitle “On Spiritual Bypassing, Relationships, and the Dharma.” And since I do not know how much longer the agony of postponement will trouble me, I have decided at least to pass on its message about the dangers on the path of the spiritual seeker and their relation to mental health.
The author of the article, John Welwood, is a well-known transpersonal psychotherapist, a popular author of numerous books, and an established trainer of psychotherapists in what he calls “psychotherapy in a spiritual context.” The main point he makes in his interview with Tina Fossella is that there are many people who use spiritual practices in order to avoid unresolved personal problems—and that, sooner or later, unresolved issues in relationships with others inevitably rise to the surface.
This has happened both to him personally and to the many people with whom his profession as a psychotherapist has brought him into contact. In order to name the patterns he observed through his experience, he introduced the concept of “spiritual bypassing.” Another key concept is the “relational wound”—the wound of the heart caused by our relationships with other people.
I agree with every word of this wise text. It corresponds fully with my own observations as a psychotherapist exploring the spiritual dimensions of human suffering and the ways in which it can be healed or transformed. And although there are additional things I would gladly add from my own experience, since I do not know when that might happen, I now recommend this article to everyone who has seriously committed themselves to spiritual growth. Let such a person know that:
The greatest danger facing the Western individual who seeks spiritual fulfillment through Eastern practices is the danger of covering over the “wound of the heart” instead of healing it. Human relationships are the remedy for this wound. Or, more precisely, they are the knife that first wounds and then heals—but only if a person gives birth within themselves to understanding and wisdom.
Here is what Welwood says:
“Trying to move beyond our psychological and emotional issues by sidestepping them is dangerous. It sets up a debilitating split between the buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite: Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal, emptiness over form, transcendence over embodiment, and detachment over feeling. One might, for example, try to practice nonattachment by dismissing one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, so that it often becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and possibly harmful ways instead.”
You can read the full article also here, at the following link.
Enjoy your reading!
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
