I’ve studied spiritual texts for years. I know what they mean. I know exactly what I need to do. I know how to apply them, and yet when the time comes to actually do it, I find myself making a resolve that this is how I’m going to be, and it would last a few hours, maybe a day, maybe a few days, and then eventually it would all fail.
If you have ever known something to be spiritually true, but you still couldn’t live it, this one is for you.
The Pattern I Couldn’t Break
A few weeks ago, my husband and I got into this pattern of arguing every single day. Both our kids were sick. They were not sleeping at all through the night. We were sleep-deprived, bone-tired. There were other stressors in our life, and we just somehow could not end the day without getting into an argument. I was noticing this pattern very clearly, and theoretically, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I know that the physical reality mirrors my inner reality. What I’m expecting on the inside is going to unfold on the outside. If I am continuing to prime myself to see my husband’s flaws, then that’s what I will see. But if I primed myself to see all the things that he was getting right, then that’s what I would see too. Ultimately, if I focused on the positive in him, my experience of him would shift. I knew all this theoretically. But I just couldn’t get myself to do it.
Every day I would resolve: keep that positive mindset, remember how the world works, do not take the bait, and just keep living based on this spiritual principle that your consciousness, your mind, is creating your reality. Such a great idea, and for a little bit, everything would seem great. And then the argument would come back. And underneath that argument, I would find all this rage. I would feel like, why do I have to do all this inner work? Why can’t he step up and do it? And then I’d feel so righteously angry at him. And then I would try to remember how it works, make that resolve again, and the loop would continue. I kept circling through that without ever making a real change. I was beating up myself for it, I’ll be honest. But I realized that what was happening to me happens to every single person across civilizations, across centuries, no matter where you are, because this world is designed with Maya.
What Maya Actually Does
Maya is the word for the cosmic veil of ignorance. Maya is what tells us that this external reality, the one I’m seeing out through my window, is the real reality, and what’s going on inside of me is happening in response to this external reality. But this is flipped. In actuality, my inner reality is creating my outer, my external experience. Had it not been for Maya, this world would be so boring. Can you imagine if all of us knew that we’re spiritual beings, we just create everything, there’s no conflict, we know our true nature at all times? Maya is here by design. It is to make us forget who we truly are, to see if we can find it again through our adventures and obstacles and all the things we have to go through in this lifetime.
And I’ve spent years studying these concepts. I understand what Maya is. I totally know how it plays, how it fools us, and yet I’m not immune to falling for the same trap that it creates for everyone else. Just because you’ve read about Maya and you’ve understood Maya doesn’t mean that you can live in a way that Maya does not throw your life off track. The gap between what we know and what we live is where our real work lies.
The Mind Cannot Be Skipped
The reason you can’t just implement a spiritual principle and make it stick is because the work that lies in getting there, the map to get there, is the most important part. In the Patanjali Yoga Sutras, yoga is defined as chitta vritti nirodha, which means cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. You can’t just tell your mind to stop. You have to allow it to come to a stop. You can’t just make a decision. You follow the map and the practices that eventually get you to that end state. And it’s tireless work. It is so tempting to take a shortcut.
Spiritual Bypass and Its Many Forms
This shortcut is what is called spiritual bypass. John Welwood, a transpersonal psychologist based in San Francisco, came up with this term because he would see people trying to reach for these spiritual ideals without having done the right inner work first to get to that end state. When I found this term, it explained everything that I had been doing. And even though I know about it, I still continue to fall for those traps over and over again, because Maya.
I was reflecting on all the ways in which I have taken these shortcuts and bypassed the work in my own life, and I came up with five.
Intellectualizing is the first one. Instead of actually doing the work, I explain to myself what is going on in the situation, and that is enough. Oh, now that I understand it, it’s going to be better. I might even get very specific about it: I’m getting triggered by my husband because he’s putting forth this treatment for our sick kids that runs against my all-natural persona. I get that theoretically, but it doesn’t mean that I have done the work to get over that trigger, the work that would make that trigger go away from my body and take all the psychological arousal that comes with it. Just because I can explain to myself that this is shadow projection and this is what is going on doesn’t mean that I’ve conquered it.
The next one is compartmentalization. I grew up in a society where we would get these conflicting messages about how spirituality and our divine nature and God is everything, but also you have to study really hard, work really hard, and achieve career success. So I had created this bifurcation where I’m going after all the same things that everyone’s going after, but then when I take time off or on the weekends, I’m going for spiritual retreats and doing ten-day Vipassanas or thirty-day yoga courses in the Himalayas. There was this sense that spirituality happens in your free time, and you don’t really have time in day-to-day life to implement these spiritual principles, and that’s another way of avoiding the work. When you’re triggered by somebody at work, you’re like, I’ll save that for when I go for meditation on Sunday.
Then there’s postponement, and I did this so much. There was always the next hurdle to cross. Gotta finish the education, gotta get the job, gotta get settled, buy that house, do that thing. And you keep telling yourself that you will live by spiritual principles truly and in an embodied way when you’re older, when you’ve retired, when this or that thing is done. In the meantime, theoretical knowledge is sufficient. But there is never a right time to do it. The right time to do the work is always in the moment, in the here and now.
The next one I would call the inner tantrum. It would involve diverting the attention from my work to someone else’s work. I would tell myself, why should I be the one doing all this work? If we’re having these arguments, why isn’t my husband doing the work that he needs to do? Maybe he needs to do more inner work instead of me. And I would have this shift of focus away from my inner experience to what the other person is or isn’t doing.
Finally, there’s the bargain: just taking the easy way out, telling myself that if I just have the right intentions and I live in this good, positive vibe energy, then everything will fall into place, that there is no need to do that hardcore inner work. This is something I tell all my clients not to do, and I am prone to falling for the same trap myself. If setting intentions was enough, you wouldn’t need the work at all. It definitely isn’t. It’s the same end state aspiration and the bypassing of walking the path toward that end state. All these shortcuts never solved anything for me.
Pema Chödrön says, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught you everything you need to know.” So these arguments were not going away.
What the Myths Understood
I was feeling absolutely stuck. And whenever I feel stuck, I’m trying to build this habit of looking at ancient myths and stories to figure my way out of that stuckness. I’m living a story that many humans have lived before. So there must be something way back in our ancestors’ lives, way back in our myths, that will give me wisdom to figure out what to do next. And sure enough, I found plenty of myths that explained the psychological work that goes into reaching these spiritual end states that I was aspiring for.
First is the Bhagavad Gita. When Arjuna asked Krishna for his counsel as he’s trying to navigate this complex battlefield and fight his own flesh and blood, Krishna doesn’t just straight away give him the Vishwarupa or the Virat Rupa, showing that all beings in the world were coming into him and leaving him, and there was no separation between who was dead and who was alive. Krishna first began by explaining to him the nature of the mind, the different paths of yoga that one can take to get to this spiritually realized state. He primed his mind, brought him along before he exposed him to the greater truth that he could then embody.
And then there’s the story of the Samudra Manthan, in which the demons and the gods churn the ocean to reveal this nectar of immortality. But before the nectar comes out, the most toxic poison that you can imagine, with the power to destruct the whole world, and that has to be dealt with first before they can enjoy the immortal nectar.
And then there’s the Roman myth of Psyche and Eros. Psyche is madly in love with Eros, but to unite with him, she needs to complete four nearly impossible tasks. She cannot skip any of them. They all must be completed, and doing each of them undoes her completely. These tasks are the way.
So I’ve been telling myself to embrace the way. It’s the path, it’s the map to get to where I want to go. Instead of pretending to be enlightened, why don’t I just do the work? Ram Dass had a beautiful phrase about this: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” And he couldn’t be more right. Our loved ones have a way of bringing up so many things in us and revealing all the rough edges that we need to smoothen on this journey.
How I Actually Bring My Mind Along
For me, mostly it has been through writing and conversation. It’s like a big ball of yarn with lots of loose ends, and I try to untangle it by writing about it or by speaking about it to someone I trust who can hold space for me. And what I’ve been trying to do of late is also to just sit in the space of the discomfort. Jung said that holding the tension of opposites is key to transcending whatever pain we are experiencing to a third, hopefully more enlightened state. I think of it as spiritual strength training. You gotta keep doing the reps until you get that spiritual strength.
Your Invitation
Look at the gap between where in life you’re trying to be spiritual and where you actually are. This gap is your invitation to do the work you need to do. No more fake it till you make it. The map is accurate. The destination is real. And the path between here and there runs through your own mind, with all its resistance and grief and righteous anger and bargaining. That is not an obstacle to the journey. That is the journey itself.
