The Dreams of Artifice: Bioenergetics and Spiritual Bypassing

SPIRITUALITY IS SUPPOSED TO bring us more fully into life—into our bodies, our relationships, our grief and our joy. Spiritual bypassing is what happens when it does the opposite: when “spiritual” language, practices, or identities become a clever way to avoid the very human material that most needs contact. Bioenergetics and body psychotherapy, at their best, are an antidote to that avoidance: they insist that whatever is “higher” must pass through muscle, breath, posture, and feeling, not float above them.

This post sketches how the spiritual-bypassing literature and the bioenergetic tradition can speak to each other—and why any serious spiritual path now needs a somatic, characterological lens.

What spiritual bypassing is (and isn’t)

Welwood and Masters: transcendence as defense

Core idea: John Welwood coined spiritual bypassing to describe using spiritual beliefs and practices to sidestep unresolved psychological wounds and developmental tasks. seba.health; seba.health
Robert Augustus Masters expands this into a cultural diagnosis: spirituality becomes one more anesthetic—alongside substances, work, or romance—when it promises immunity from pain rather than deeper intimacy with it. seba.health

Across the literature cited below (Welwood, Masters, Navaneethan, Tousignant, Jastrzebski, Sherrell & Simmer-Brown, Groom, Picciotto et al., Glosoff et al.), a fairly consistent picture emerges:

Bypass is defensive: It functions like any other defense mechanism—protecting against shame, grief, terror, or unmet needs—but with spiritual rationalizations (“I’m above this,” “It’s all an illusion,” “I just need to stay positive”).
It can be subtle and socially rewarded: In many communities, the more “detached,” “non-reactive,” or “loving” you appear, the more spiritual status you gain—even if that calm is actually dissociation or fawning.
It’s not always purely pathological: Some authors (e.g., Masters, Picciotto et al.) note that a certain amount of idealization or “reaching up” can be a transitional phase—scaffolding that eventually must be dismantled if real integration is to happen. Springer; seba.health

So the question is not “spirituality: good or bad?” but: Is this practice helping me metabolize my life, or helping me avoid it?

How bypass shows up: patterns from the research

Drawing from the empirical and clinical work (Picciotto et al., Glosoff et al., Clarke et al., Sinclair et al., Vonk & Visser, Sherrell & Simmer-Brown, Jastrzebski), we can see recurring patterns.

1. Emotional and relational avoidance

Premature forgiveness and positivity: Sinclair, Hart, and Lomas show how “staying positive” in the context of domestic abuse can actually reinforce harm—minimizing danger, silencing anger, and keeping victims in unsafe situations. Positivity becomes a bypass when it erases reality instead of resourcing someone to face it. Springer
Conflict-avoidant compassion: In mindfulness and contemplative communities, Sherrell & Simmer-Brown describe a tendency to use “non-judgment,” “loving-kindness,” or “oneness” to avoid naming power, trauma, or systemic injustice. Compassion is invoked instead of boundaries.

2. Spiritual superiority and identity inflation

“More evolved than you”: Vonk & Visser’s work on spiritual superiority shows how spiritual identities can become vehicles for self-enhancement—“I’m more conscious,” “I vibrate higher,” “I’ve transcended ego.” Springer
This superiority is itself a defense against vulnerability and shame. It keeps the person above the fray, but also above genuine intimacy.

3. Characterological distortion of spirituality

Groom and others in the psychodynamic tradition describe how pre-existing character structures—narcissistic, masochistic, schizoid, etc.—shape the style of spirituality:
- Narcissistic spirituality: grandiose missions, special destinies, disdain for “ordinary” people.
- Schizoid spirituality: extreme detachment, “witness consciousness” used to avoid contact.
- Masochistic spirituality: glorifying suffering, self-erasure, and “surrender” in ways that repeat earlier abuse.

Spirituality doesn’t erase character; it expresses it—unless character is consciously worked with.

4. Clinical and pastoral implications

Counseling and MI: Clarke, Giordano, Cashwell, and Lewis propose using Motivational Interviewing to gently confront bypass—evoking the client’s own ambivalence (“Part of you wants to stay above the pain; another part knows something is unfinished”).
Pastoral work: Jastrzebski emphasizes that pastors and spiritual directors must learn to recognize spiritual immaturity and bypass—especially when piety masks unresolved trauma or rigid defenses.

Where bioenergetics enters: the body as the missing witness

Body psychotherapy—and specifically Bioenergetic Analysis—steps in where purely cognitive or verbal approaches can collude with bypass. If bypass is, at root, a way of leaving the body (or never fully arriving), then any serious response has to be somatic.

1. The bioenergetic frame

History and scope: Ulfried Geuter traces how body psychotherapy emerged from Reich’s insight that character is written into muscular patterns—chronic tensions, postures, breathing styles. Bioenergetics (Lowen and successors) extends this into a systematic practice of grounding, expressive movement, and emotional discharge. johnwelwood.com
Character and energy: In this frame, “spiritual” problems are never just in belief; they’re in how someone stands, breathes, makes eye contact, uses their voice. A “transcendent” person who is chronically ungrounded, breath-holding, and collapsed in the chest is telling a different story than their words.

2. Which body? (Klopstech)

Angela Klopstech’s question—“So which body is it?”—is crucial here. There is:

The anatomical body: muscles, fascia, nervous system.
The experiential body: felt sense, interoception, emotion.
The relational body: how the body organizes in the presence of others (attachment, shame, desire).

Spiritual bypass often lives in the gap between these bodies. Someone may have exquisite “subtle body” experiences—chakras, kundalini, light—while remaining largely cut off from their gut, their legs, their anger, or their sexuality. Bioenergetics insists that any “higher” body must be anchored in the lower ones.

3. Self-regulation and psychodynamics (Tasche)

Jens Tasche’s work on self-regulation in Bioenergetic Analysis highlights a key point: regulation is not the same as suppression.

Healthy self-regulation: the capacity to feel intense affect and stay connected—to self, body, and other.
Bypassing as pseudo-regulation: the person appears calm, but only because they’ve numbed out, dissociated, or floated into spiritual narratives.

From a bioenergetic perspective, spiritual bypass is a regulation strategy that sacrifices aliveness for control. The work is to build enough somatic capacity that the person can tolerate the feelings they’ve been escaping.

Bioenergetic markers of spiritual bypass

If we bring the bypass literature into a bioenergetic lens, certain patterns stand out. Think of these as somatic red flags that a “spiritual” presentation may be defensive:

Chronic ungrounding:
- Little contact with feet and legs; difficulty feeling weight.
- Preference for “heady” or “airy” practices; discomfort with slow, heavy, earthy movement.
Constricted breathing:
- High, shallow chest breathing; minimal belly movement.
- Spiritual narratives about “detachment” or “non-attachment” paired with an inability to cry, rage, or tremble.
Split between upper and lower body:
- Open, expressive face and hands; frozen pelvis, rigid hips, or numb genitals.
- Idealization of purity, light, or celibacy that coexists with unworked sexual shame or history of violation.
Postural spirituality:
- Upright, “noble” posture that is actually rigid; shoulders pulled back in a way that armors the heart.
- Smiling or serene facial mask that doesn’t change even when painful material is discussed.

These are not diagnoses, but invitations to ask: What is this body not allowed to feel? What would happen if it did?

Working with bypass bioenergetically

Bringing the reference set together, a bioenergetic approach to spiritual bypass might include:

1. Naming the pattern without shaming

From Picciotto et al., Masters, and the MI-informed work of Clarke et al., we learn that confrontation must be compassionate and collaborative. Springer

Curious reflection: “I notice when we get close to your anger, you move quickly into ‘it’s all perfect.’ Can we stay with what your body is doing right now?”
Linking cost and benefit: “Part of you is protected by this spiritual frame; part of you is still hurting underneath. Would you be willing to explore that tension?”

2. Grounding and containment before catharsis

Bioenergetics is sometimes caricatured as all about big emotional discharge. The more nuanced view (Geuter, Tasche, contemporary bioenergetic clinicians) emphasizes:

Grounding: standing, feeling the feet, bending the knees, working with the legs so that energy can move down as well as up.
Containment: building the capacity to hold affect in the body without exploding or dissociating.

For someone who has used spirituality to avoid feeling, the first task is often very simple: Can you feel your feet while you talk about this? Can you breathe into your belly while you remember that scene?

3. Integrating character and spirituality

Here Groom, Welwood, and Masters converge: spirituality must be personalized, not used to escape the person.

Character-informed practice: A narcissistically organized person may need practices that emphasize humility, mutuality, and listening; a masochistically organized person may need practices that emphasize agency, anger, and saying no.
Embodied prayer/meditation: Instead of meditating “above” the body, invite meditation in the body—tracking sensations, micro-movements, impulses, and emotional waves as part of the practice.

4. Relational repair

Spiritual bypass is often relationally reinforced—by teachers, communities, or doctrines that reward dissociation. Repair means:

Bringing conflict and power into the room: naming idealization, dependency, and authority dynamics.
Allowing disappointment and anger toward spiritual figures: making space for “I feel let down by my teacher/God/practice” as legitimate, not “unspiritual.”

Bioenergetically, this includes noticing how the body organizes in the presence of authority—collapsing, puffing up, freezing—and working directly with those patterns.

A different vision of “spiritual energy”

If we take both sets of literature seriously, “spiritual energy” stops being something that lifts us out of our humanity and becomes something that intensifies it.

It thickens our presence rather than thinning it.
It deepens our feeling rather than numbing it.
It grounds us more fully in our particular body, history, and relationships, rather than offering a fantasy of escape.

From a bioenergetic standpoint, the test of any spiritual path is simple and ruthless:

After years of practice, is your breath freer, your posture more alive, your legs more grounded, your heart more available, your boundaries clearer, your grief and anger more honest?

If the answer is no—if you are “higher” but not more human—then what you have may not be awakening. It may be a very elegant bypass.

References Synthesized:

Muraliselvam Navaneethan. Spiritual Bypass: A Defense Against Wholeness

Maura Tousignant. Transcendance and Its Shadow

Robert Augustus Masters. Spiritual Bypassing.

Andrzejk Jastrzebski OMI. SPIRITUAL BYPASSING: HOW TO DIAGNOSE AND ATTEND TO VARIOUS FORMS OF SPIRITUAL IMMATURITY IN PASTORAL WORK

Carla Sherrell & Judith Simmer-Brown, Naropa University. Spiritual Bypassing in the Contemporary Mindfulness Movement.

Philip B. Clarke, Amanda L. Giordano, Craig S. Cashwell, and Todd F. Lewis. The Straight Path to Healing: Using Motivational Interviewing to Address Spiritual Bypass

John Welwood. PRINCIPLES OF INNER WORK:PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL*

Ellen Sinclair, Rona Hart, and Tim Lomas. Can positivity be counterproductive when suffering domestic abuse?: A narrative review.

Vonk, R.; Visser, A. An exploration of spiritual superiority: The paradox of self-enhancement

Gabriela Picciotto, Jesse Fox & Félix Neto. A phenomenology of spiritual bypass: Causes, consequences, and implications