What Is Spiritual Bypassing? 3 Power Leaks Keeping You Stuck in Prey Mode

I don’t scroll social media (though I do love to watch doggie rescue videos and men in the kitchen on YouTube, so maybe that counts?).

So I rely a lot on email to stay in touch with certain brands and people.

The emails I’ve been getting for the past 18 months from spiritual people or women modeling “feminine leadership” have been predictable. They model to a “T” the primary power leaks and distractions I’m going to outline here.

What is spiritual bypassing? It’s exactly this: using spiritual language and feminine leadership branding to avoid feeling what’s actually happening in your body. Here’s where it starts, and how it quietly drains you dry.

3 Spiritual Bypassing Examples to Watch For

They are (in order of the domino effect)…

Power Leak #1: Enmeshing With the Collective

This is where it all begins.

It looks like this….

THE NEWS! ALL THE TIME! FROM EVERY CORNER OF THE EARTH! WITH PHOTOS! WITH VIDEO! EVERYONE ELSE’S PERSONAL REACTION TO IT! I’M ALSO BOTHERED! MY WHOLE LIFE IS FALLING APART! I CAN HARDLY FUNCTION! MAKE IT STOP!

When people are overly consuming headlines, media and the world’s drama, they think it’s an act of caring. But it’s not.

It is literally impossible to “hold” the collective, process for the collective, or enact your will on the collective. It’s the equivalent of a single flower, planted in concrete, trying to hold up a skyscraper and wondering Why do I feel so powerless and overwhelmed?

It’s because when you are “processing for the collective,” you are not oriented to where you are and what you are, which includes your blessed mortal limitations.

As this metaphor shows, this flower attempting to keep the skyscraper from toppling is a losing game. That’s not its job. It’s not what it was designed to do. It literally cannot have the strength, capacity and resource to accomplish that task. What a waste of a life. Because it does have innate strength, capacity and resource, just not for holding up falling skyscrapers.

“Processing for the collective” is above your pay grade. It’s not your job. It’s also literally not possible. Unless you’re a fully enlightened master (and even then… the processing isn’t for the entire collective but usually specific exchanges).

What’s happening to someone else… isn’t actually happening to you.

Responding as if it is… both diminishes their experience and also disempowers you to be of service and influence within the domain you are actually in with the responsibilities that are actually yours. Said differently, people are so oriented to, enmeshed with, “the collective” that they are distracted from being all the way lit up in service and mission where they actually are, with whom they are actually with. They are staying in relation in the abstract rather than in the tangible. The tangible actually asks something of you. The abstract, conveniently, does not, feeding the sense of powerlessness, helplessness and vague distress.

What You Could Do Instead

Honor your actual limits. You are not a Marvel superhero with the fate of the world resting on your shoulders. It’s literally not resting on your shoulders. And, even if it were (which it isn’t), Iron Man has limits, too. Being of service, living your vocation, bringing through your creative destiny can only happen if you are planted pleasurably within your limitations as a mere mortal. What is ONE thing you can do really well, with your whole heart? Who can you actually Love and take care of (not in the abstract) really well? With the amount of hours, money, time and desire you actually have? Do that. Once you’ve got that down and have leftover reserve, call me back. This is what energetic boundaries for empaths actually look like: not a wall, just an honest edge around what’s really yours to carry.

Power Leak #2: Hyper-Attuning to Prey and Pain

Mainstream overculture, in its default position, conditions you to be prey (especially if you’re a woman). All of the “good girl” behavior and paradigms are my shorthand way of saying “you be stuck in maiden mode, victim mode and prey mode.” For some people experiencing acute trauma, this mode is accurate. For most people, they’re just stuck here and not sure what else to call the nagging sense they could feel a lot better.

Prey animals have a vast range of intelligences and skills to be honored with mad respect, but they are not the only intelligences available. A healthy, functioning, powerful, leader nervous system must have access to the range of predator intelligences and skills. (Note : predator is not to be confused with perpetrator. Lotsa people get stuck here). This is the difference between a nervous system stuck in survival and one that’s actually feminine and powerful: access to both softness and teeth.

Prey is always nervously looking around for safety. Predator prowls the jungle like it’s their domain (because it is) and manages the ecosystem of their domain like it’s their responsibility (which it is). Predator isn’t asking permission to eat breakfast or wondering if it hurts someone’s feelings if they’re looking strong today. Predator isn’t looking to anyone else to make them feel safe.

What people think they’re doing after taking on way more than their system can handle, is being compassionate for those who are injured. What they’re actually doing is obsessing over an experience as if it actually happened to them, which it didn’t. Feeling injured and responding as if it happened to them, which it didn’t. Making you, once again, feel like a victim, a prey —scared, alone and looking for safety in whatever ways you’ve got established grooves for doing that. Learning how to stop absorbing other people’s emotions starts right here, in recognizing that borrowed pain isn’t the same thing as care.

This reinforces all of your patterns of hypervigilance, overwhelm, anxiety, freezing, fawning, frustration, depression and collapse. It steals all of your presence and capacity for the life you have and what is yours to do. And if you don’t have presence, what is it you can even do that would matter? Presence is the most important gem you’re in charge of. Without presence, your life is happening, but you aren’t tasting it. There’s a garden but it’s not thriving. Separated from pleasure, your presence is drained and numb. Separated from power, your presence is incoherent with who you truly are. So even when there is a call you could answer, you can’t, or you’re distracted, so you don’t.

What You Could Do Instead

If you’re enmeshing with the collective (plus primarily enmeshing with victim experiences), you are stuck reacting, not creating. You are actively maintaining a comfort zone of wounding. You are losing your power to a bottomless pit until you choose to heal it and stop the leak. Real nervous system healing happens when you stop confusing everyone else’s experiences as yours and taking them on as your personal responsibility to “fix.” While it feels like compassion, it’s actually childlike empathy and over-identification. Like I teach inside my MA membership, true compassion can only emerge from a foundation of wholeness, power and passion. So this over-identification with other people’s (victim) experiences is actually blocking the way to what you need to be compassionate.

Power Leak #3: Offering Outrage (As If It’s an Act of Service)

And finally… my personal favorite…

So if you’ve been enmeshing with the collective and over-identifying with other people’s pain/prey experiences en masse as if they are personally yours … OF COURSE, you’re going to feel like shit.

You’re going to feel powerless, small, like you’re not doing enough, incredibly anxious and when your system attempts to recover (because you need power to survive), it comes out as outrage. Or if you’re in spiritual circles it’s… “sacred” rage (more on that in a future article). Right now, though, it’s worth naming directly: this is spiritual bypassing in real time, a system that is wildly dysregulated and dressed up as devotion. Once the rage is catharted, your system collapses into sadness, shutdown and maybe even sickness. If you’ve been quietly wondering how to stop feeling powerless, this cycle right here, rage then collapse then repeat, is the mirror. It’s not a character flaw. It’s an unregulated nervous system looking for relief in the only place it knows.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again :

Your obligation is not your vocation.

Expressing your wounding is not your creative destiny.

Your botheredness is not an act of service.

Yet, for a lot of people, if we were to take the sense of obligation (guilt), wounding and botheredness away… there wouldn’t be anything left to give (that they’re yet aware of). And that is what most people need to be sitting with.

I have yet to see a single enlightened master or mistress whose legacy was outrage and being bothered by reality. Even the “wrathful deities” — when they’re coming for someone, they’re not coming for the person bothering you. They’re coming for your ego, which loves to be outraged. Mary Magdalene’s legacy could easily have been “fuck the patriarchy for murdering my sacred Lover for no good reason.” But She didn’t. Instead, She left a legacy that said : this is how reality works. She left a legacy of repose, passion, compassion and peace that can only come when you get, on a cellular level, that Love is stronger than death.

Back to the upsetness offerings. My favorite metric for whether something is worth your time and energy or not : the deathbed.

Tell me… who on their deathbed anticipates their top 3 reflections including the following : Wow, I wish I had spent more time dysregulated, upset and numbed out by the world. If only I had shared more upsetness with my followers. If only the already deceased perpetrators had read my post about how upset I was!

Literally no one is going to have this in their top 3 (or top 50).

But you know what will be? Regardless of what decade it is, what century it is, or what the news says?

How well you loved what was yours to love. How well you stewarded the land you touch, the beings in your life. How much you kissed your partner. How much time you spent with your kids. How much deliciousness you savored. How present you were with all that was in your life. All the sensations. All the flowers and sunsets. All those breezes blowing across your face and the taste of your favorite warm beverage. How well you allowed yourself to be filled, full, overflowing. How much you expressed your innate creativity. How well you merged your heart’s desire with your choices. How much you touched the ground, smelled the roses. How much you sang, reveled, lingered and touched that personal bliss you can only feel when you’re in your body. And this… this kind of life is a gift to everyone.

What You Could Do Instead

Get very curious… Make it a living contemplation, for a while…. Get quiet around this prompt and listen : If you weren’t offering your botheredness, offense and outrage, what would you be creating or offering instead? If you didn’t have to sidestep the crater of brokenness at the center of your being, who would you have the energy to become? What would you have the energy to hold? If outrage and offense weren’t the center of your daily experience or your mission, what would be left? What could arise?

You may not know the answer right now. And that’s okay. Rather than rushing to fill it. Sit with the emptiness, the silence, the lack of reactivity, rushing and response. For as long as it takes. What arises from this place is what is true.

If processing for the collective, enmeshing with other people’s experience and being upset isn’t actually your job… what’s left? 

Your own becoming. Your own presence. Your own ecosystem. This asks a lot more of you than any of these power leaks. However, what it asks of you will also be fulfillment, meaning, devotion and worthy of a life’s work.

To be centered in your vocation, you must be centered in your presence, your experience, your body.

To be a leader of anything new (rather than just rearranging the existing matrix), you need a tree trunk and an antenna sensitive enough, strong enough, to reach above and below today’s weather.

To be in the fullness of your creative gifts and destiny, you need to become the listening at eye of the storm (not getting cycloned around the tornado).

To be a lover (and enjoy it), you need to be having a good enough time that your partner doesn’t feel like they have to resolve the entire world’s pain and suffering every time they touch you.

For all of these, you need to locate, heal and develop your ancestral, evolutionary predator system in your body. You must turn it on. This is somatic healing at its root: not a technique, but a turning toward what you’ve been taught to leak instead of hold. This is more than a solely somatic act. It is an initiatory transformation that includes your body, but also your soul, your destiny, nature and relationship with spirit.

You don’t take your power back. You grow it up. You turn it on. That’s the real alternative to spiritual bypassing: not more insight, not more processing for the collective, just an honest return to the body you actually live in.

If that all sounds super easy breezy and you’ve got it down… check, check, check. Wonderful. 

But…

If that all sounds good and you don’t know how to begin, where to start, you don’t want to do it alone or figure it all out by yourself, let me give you your next easy step:

3 Keys to the Soul is a short, free email series to get back into your own soul when the noise of the collective has gotten louder than your own signal. I made it for deeply feeling humans just like you. Take what’s useful. Leave what isn’t. 🖤