As a new thought practitioner, I believe that everything happens for a reason and that we have the power to influence our reality. Those are short, simple statements and alone they leave a lot open for interpretation. Many people hear these statements and automatically associate them with spiritual bypassing.
Spiritual bypassing means to use your spirituality as a distraction or excuse for not dealing with reality as it is. For example, focusing only on the positive aspects in life and ignoring the negative in hopes it will just go away and it will never have to be dealt with. In a blog titled Beware Spiritual Bypassing (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/emotional-sobriety/201110/beware-spiritual-bypass), Ingrid Clayton Ph.D. writes, “The shorthand for spiritual bypass is grasping rather than gratitude, arriving rather than being, avoiding rather than accepting.” She describes spiritual bypassing as a defense mechanism. I can see why some people get confused.
On the surface, it may sound that New Thought principles encourage spiritual bypassing with their use of affirmative language and emotion to create a better life. It sounds too simple. Think good things, feel good feelings, be thankful, expect only the best, and only the best will come to you. It sounds really rosy, doesn’t it? The idea is not to avoid dealing with negativity though, it is just a way of using the natural law of attraction to our advantage.
While we do not want to focus all of our energy on our negative emotions, and certainly do not want to draw our creative energy from them, we do not want to repress them either. That is not what my faith teaches me to believe. Our negative experiences play an important part in our life. They are necessary to our ability to create the life we want, because without them, we have no perspective to know what it is we really want. We learn what we want and what we do not want through the contrast of negative and positive feelings we experience in various situations. Also, we cannot fully experience enjoyment without knowing the contrast of discomfort.
The key to manifesting a good life with positive thinking and emotions, is not to spiritually bypass our negative thoughts and emotions. The key is to use those negative thoughts and emotions in our efforts. When we feel negatively about something, it is an opportunity to learn more about ourselves. We can take the time to examine why we feel negatively and to make adjustments in our life to fix those feelings. We can learn from them what we want and what we do not want. We can gain motivation from them to take positive action. We just do not want to focus in on the negative and wallow in it and let it take over our existence.
I believe that the reason behind everything that happens is to offer the contrast we need to tell the difference between what it is we want and don't want so that we can get our thoughts right and follow by getting our actions right so that we can end up with what we want...only to have more contrasting experiences to keep us moving forward. We cannot truly experience light or have the proper motivation to create it without having accepted that the darkness is there.
Creating your own reality is a multi-step process. It begins with right thought, which is that rosy sounding, think and feel positive step. When we practice right thought we examine and explore our negative thoughts and feelings, learn from them what we really want, then take our focus off of the things we don’t want or that are causing us feel badly and put it on things that we do want and that make us feel good. We then think happy thoughts and we let ourselves feel the happy feelings associated with what we want, even if they do not match our current circumstances. This helps us to come into alignment with the things we desire. This does not mean repressing negative feelings or emotions or pretending that they do not exist. It is a process of recognizing and using those negatives to help us choose our positives.
Right thought then has to be followed by right action. Right action is taking the necessary steps to bring to fruition those happy thoughts and feelings. Right action is what takes us from here to there, but if it does not begin with right-thought, we may not end up where we want to be.
Think of jumping in the car because you know you do not want to be where you are, but you don't really know where you do want to be, so you just drive. While you are driving, all you think about is the place you do not want to be. Before you know it, you are right back where you started because that was the only destination your mind was focused on.
Right thought, or positive thinking, sets our destination. Like entering an address into GPS. We are stating to the Universe where it is we want to be, rather than stating where we are. Once we get our thoughts right, focusing on where we want to be and aligning ourselves with it, we send that signal out to the Universe and the Universal Law of Attraction sets into motion to guide us there. Following that guidance by paying attention to all the opportunities that come to us, listening to our inner urges, and taking appropriate steps to get from where we are to where we want, is right action.
Spiritual bypassing occurs when rather than examining, accepting, and learning from the contrast of our negative feelings and experiences to get us to the ones we want to have, we attempt to repress them or pretend they do not exist, we try to replace them with positive thoughts and feelings we don’t really believe, and then fail to take right-action steps.