Focusing On Joy WITHOUT Spiritual Bypassing

Hello Beauty!

In the 'shadow work/feeling your feelings/trauma processing' world - there is a BIG fear of spiritual bypassing.

And for good reason - a LOT of us have interacted with spiritual practices that asked us to discount, ignore, gloss over or otherwise use 'love and light' to pain over the very real pains, traumas and negative emotions we were carrying around - and in this we ended up really hurting ourselves.

We've been spiritually gas-lit into believing that our pain was all a matter of thought, our own perceptions, our own CHOICE to 'feel bad' and that we could simply focus on the positive, find what we're grateful for, look for how life is 'always working out for us' and that in doing so, we would find ultimate liberation.

We've discovered that the reality is, the more we connect with the pain, the more we process what we've been through, the more we embody our lives and FEEL what we've been told never to feel - the more free we actually become. The more we discover the messages in pain. The more we see what is and isn't' working and how to make life better for ourselves.

AND.

In this process of feeling our pain, being with our traumas, learning to re-parent - there's a very real possibility that we can slip into genuine hopelessness. That we can find ourselves feeling like we're never going to be processed enough, never going to have healed enough, never going to have felt enough to ACTUALLY be free of our pain. We can get to a place where we feel trapped in our feelings. Trapped in our shadow work. Always finding a new thing to dig up, work through and FEEL.

It's common in the shadow work community to see people really losing themselves to depression, losing sight of any joy, getting stuck in the trauma and even FEARING being grateful, looking for the positive, seeing what's working, thinking that this is 'ignoring reality'. We can get to a state where we RESIST pleasure because we KNOW it's going to go away - telling ourselves we won't let ourselves feel good until we're DONE processing, done healing, done integrating. We might believe that we will never feel pleasure because we know we're never going to be 'done' processing - and thus start to ask 'what's the point if I'm just going to be in pain forever?'

Today I want to dive into this - I want to talk about why feeling pleasure is SO important IN our shadow work, how to balance seeing that's working while we move through processing what isn't and why it's VITAL to learn to use pleasure as a map forward just as much as we use pain as a messenger for what's not working.

Shadow work without pleasure work is just as incomplete as 'love and light' is without processing. Let's dive into how to BALANCE the two today, so we can find the most progressive path possible.

<3