Coaching Hidden Dimensions™ addresses Bypass.
Bypass is the act of using people, places and concepts to avoid dealing with reality, emotional processing and often pain (past or present) or deny the impact. Anything can be used in a willful way to distract and escape from the shadow which is an honest and necessary part of wholeness. A Bypass gives the ego a way out from fear, pain and shame and accountability.
- Performative Bypass – acting as if we are ok even when we are not; repressing our inner world and moving to higher states of performance (sometimes using work, relationships or substances) to numb out and stay in a performative or nothing affects me persona.
- Intellectual Bypass – constantly reading through new concepts, watching online talks and acquiring knowledge without addressing and being with the feelings of our inner self. Ironically, over doing self-help, courses and programs keeps one stuck and the ego more rigidly fixated and identified with the answers constantly out there.
- Spiritual Bypass – first introduced by John Welwood, Buddhist Teacher and Psychotherapist in the 1980s is a way to avoid facing our pain using spirituality. This is where the outer dogma and hunger for spiritual experiences overrides the inner experience and growth. The ego gets over identified with spiritual constructs and foregoes the hidden diamond in the dark.
All types of Bypass reinforce the persona/mask/adapted ego and distract moving toward the authentic self. The developmental journey toward the authentic self requires differentiating and letting go of social, performative and spiritual constructs and returning back to self-inquiry. Pretending the shadow doesn’t exist is at the root of bypass.
Coaching Hidden Dimensions™ is learning to listen and sit with ourselves with great love and compassion.
A few Coaching Hidden Dimensions questions to consider:
- What do you tend to distract with?
- What do you tend to avoid?
- When you are angry, afraid or uncomfortably sad – where do you go?
- What if you didn’t reach for anything (including self-help/self-care) and just sat with it, observed and let it be without judgement?
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