Is This Sh%t For Real – Rev. Darrell Jones
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
If our tendency as human animals is to avoid pain, then can we actually master spiritual bypassing? Maybe, maybe not. However, this is the crux of the spiritual practitioner, to lean into life to the best of our ability and practice liberating ourselves from the constraints internally and externally that keep us small, manipulated and inauthentic. This isn’t a final destination or designation rather a daily practice of revelation. Waking up and recommitting to our whole being, the human, the spiritual, the good, the bad and even the ugly. Come together this Sunday with the Cityside community to reconnect and recommit to awakening our individual and collective greatness.
SUMMARY
Rev. Darrell Jones discusses the concept of spiritual bypassing and its impact on our lives. Spiritual bypassing is the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid facing difficult emotions, psychological issues, and unfinished developmental tasks. It is a defensive psychological posture that prioritizes spiritual beliefs or experiences over psychological needs. Jones emphasizes the importance of staying present and engaged with our experiences, rather than trying to bypass or avoid them. He encourages listeners to develop a new kind of living relationship with what they are experiencing, both the positive and negative aspects, in order to heal, transform, and live more fully.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones (00:00):
Keep it going. Keep it going. Keep it going. Keep it going. Good morning everyone. Reverend Darrell Jones pronouns. He, him his, how’s everybody feeling today? It’s hot.
(00:21):
You believe there’s miracles possible? Is this shit for real? I said I was going to say it once to get the full effect. So the talk title was more or less to try to get more butts in the seats. Who’s he going to say? Trying to be some good marketing. And with what we’ve been talking about this month in the larger Centers for Spiritual Living organization, what has been talked about here at cityside, focusing on this idea of the uns status quo, which is kind of an interesting, I don’t think anyone’s ever, I’ve never used that phrase before. The uns status quo. Have you? Right? So you think about status quo, it’s like keeping it the same the way it is, the way things have always been. And that’s kind of a weird thing if you think about it, because every single day, I don’t know about you, I’m 51, my body changes every day.
(01:23):
The weather is constantly changing. I opened the door and it was like, whoa, hello, humidity. It is constantly changing. So to think that we are going to keep things, the status quo is a bit of irrational thinking, but yet that is what we do as human beings. We, we want to keep things familiar. We want to keep it easy. We want to keep it known. We want to know what to do. We want to be perfect in everything that we do. So what happens when we bump up against stuff that we don’t understand? Stuff that is not the status quo in our lives, whether it be individually or on a larger scale. Enter this month’s book, spiritual bypassing. When spirituality disconnects us from what really Matters by Robert Augustus masters Dom. Is it possible that you can put the quote back up again just because it’s a lot of words, but I’m not going to read the whole thing.
(02:26):
This is the only slide that I really had. So there’s work to be done and we already have our shoulder to the wheel. So there’s work to be done, but we’re already in the grind. Anyone else in the grind trying to figure out what the hell’s going on in their life? Not only in your own life, but what the heck is happening out in the world? What’s happening in our country? Okay, so there’s work to be done, but we’re already in it. Our steps may be small, but we are taking them and are grateful we can do, this is the sentence that I really want you to digest. No matter how much knowledge we have, we keep opening to the mystery, allowing revelation to be more than explanation. Now I’m a man and you’ve heard that term mansplaining, right? Everybody does that regardless of the gender that you identify.
(03:21):
Whether or not we all are constantly trying to explain something because we think and explaining, then all of a sudden we’re going to hit some point of like, oh, I understand it. Things are good. Guess what? Uns status quo. Wake up tomorrow. Things are going to be different. So as opposed to trying to explain everything, what if we can stay open to the mystery, open to the revelation of love of God or of spirit or the universal intelligence, whatever quality that we hold near and dear to our hearts, if we were able to stay open to that, and then the question may come into your head, is this ish for real? Can I really do that? So I want to do a little call and response here. Whenever I ask that question, there’s only one answer I want to hear, and it’s yes. So let’s practice. Is this ish for real? Is this ish for real? Yes. Okay, you got it. So the little blurb that I put out in terms of the focus of this talk is if the human tendency of human animals, which I like to refer to ourselves as animals sometimes because we get a little up in the explanation and we forget what’s beneath the neckline. That’s called a nervous system that just reacts to life. Anyone? Yeah. Okay. Just making sure. If our tendency as human animals is to avoid pain, then can we actually master spiritual bypassing?
(04:53):
Maybe? Good question. Good question. Maybe not. This is the crux of the spiritual journey and of the spiritual practitioner to lean into life. We’re already leaning in, we’re on the wheel right to lean into life, to the best of our ability and practice liberating ourselves from the constraints internally as well as externally that keep us small, manipulated and inauthentic. And here’s the thing that where we trip ourselves up, there is no destination that you are going to get to where you stop practicing being inauthentic. Sometimes some people may argue with me and we can have a debate afterwards. Is today a talk back afterwards, after talk today? Talk back. Sorry. We can get into it a little bit more after service, but I really think that part of our human experience, unless we remove ourselves and go into a cave in solitary confinement, all you have to do is open the door, answer the phone, turn on the tv, do something and interact, and we’re going to have some buttons pushed. That’s just how life is. So we’re not going to get to a destination. Think how liberating that is. If you don’t have to get to that destination of perfection, if you don’t have to get to that space where you don’t get angry anymore, we’re human animals that have nervous systems that respond. All we need to do is wake up and recommit every single day to our whole being, to our whole being to the human, to the spiritual, to the good, to the bad, and the ugly. All of it.
(06:47):
Is this ish for real? Yes. Y’all got, you had to contemplate that. Yes, for a minute. So I want to thank Reverend Linda, Reverend Jackie, Reverend Amy for the thoughts that they brought forward in these past weeks. This book is interesting. It was fun to listen to my colleagues. I even had some colleagues in from out of town. Reverend Dusty was here and she was using this book at her community in Raleigh, North Carolina. And when people get flustered, it’s good, right? This book causes a little bit of flustering. I could tell Reverend Jackie was like, oh, she was a little upset about him saying, you can’t do this work spiritually. You have to do this through therapy. And even in myself, I was just feeling like this. I was squirming a little bit in my pants. That is the beginning of the place where we get to choose. Do we stay in the room or do we start bypassing?
(07:49):
I want to go back and put a little bit of context to this because I think it might help if you’re kind of trying to wrap your head around spiritual bypassing if you weren’t here in the past few weeks. I’m going to give you a little bit of background, a little bit of definition to try to get us all on the same page. Cool. Let’s take a deep breath in and I’m going to remember to say hello as I exhale to all the people online, what’s up? Party people as always, not an opportunity to multitask. Let’s be here. So John Wellwood was a psychotherapist that coined the phrase spiritual bypass in the early eighties. And he was a Buddhist practitioner as well as a therapist. And he used that phrase to describe what he noticed himself and his clients doing when they would hit a rough patch, especially if they were deep into some sort of spiritual or religious life, they would take the principles, they would take some of the teachings and they would try to make sense of what’s going on.
(08:52):
But oftentimes they would be statements, ideas that didn’t actually get the person to deal with the ish that was in front of them. So it was a spiritual bypass, the going around, not going through. He was sitting there as a therapist and would notice people not face what they needed to face. Fast forward to today, and I don’t know if we always think about it in that context, spiritual bypass. I mean, we use this word all the time, but it’s true. It’s kind of what we do as humans. We weaponize things. So even that phrase is like, oh, they’re spiritual bypassing. And we get into this space of judgment around what someone is or isn’t doing. But I wanted to highlight, I think Reverend Amy did this at the beginning. I want to highlight again some of the behaviors or the ways that we describe spiritual bypass, just in case you’re like, well, I don’t even know what he’s talking about.
(09:49):
I don’t do that. I’m going to put my hand up on all the things. I’ve got like seven bullet points. If you hear yourself in any of this. Let’s be vulnerable together and just own, okay? So we’re going to, by a show of hands, if we’ve practiced this, whether it was this morning, yesterday, 10 years ago or longer, here’s some signs of someone that may be engaging in spiritual, bypassing exaggerated optimism, having unrealistic expectations and believing that everything has a positive side. Me overly compassionate, applying compassion inappropriately such as to avoid conflict or appearing unspiritual. That’s like my number one right there. Y’all. Emotional dissociation, having difficulty expressing emotions such as anger and maybe over intellectualizing, avoiding feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, fear, pretending that things are okay when they aren’t.
(10:56):
Spiritual superiority, believing in one’s own spiritual superiority to hide insecurities about ourself. Dang it, I’m getting a workout this morning. Detachment living in a spiritual realm and focusing on spirituality to the exclusion of what’s actually present in our life. Ignoring the negative overemphasizing the positive and avoiding the darker parts of one’s personality. And last but not least, self-righteousness being self-righteous about enlightenment. Now, there’s probably lots more ways that we practice spiritual bypass. These were just a few that in the eighties as John well run was working with clients. He’s like, oh, these are some ways that people do this. But let’s take the word spiritual out for a moment, because I think that just mucks everything up. We bypass all time, literally physically and mentally, emotionally.
(12:01):
So I think everyone had their hand up at least once. Yes, yes. If not their bypassing. So here’s what I want to invite. One of the talk titles for this month was the impact of othering. And I want to flip where most people go when they think about othering. Most of the time when we think of othering, it’s that we’re othering someone else. Oh, those people over there. But you other yourself all the time. And one of the ways that it happens in spiritual bypass is what Reverend Linda just said. Oh, that’s not me. I don’t do that. And when we do that, the impact of othering ourselves is we remove and isolate. Now, sometimes we have to do it to be safe. We can only handle what we can handle. But I want to challenge you today to stay in the room. Don’t remove and isolate yourself. Stay connected to this and just see what healing, what understanding may come into your being. So if we take out spiritual bypass, there’s something called numbing behaviors. Anyone ever heard that phrase before? Bag of potato chips gone. Numbing behavior. Why? Because I don’t want to really focus on the thing that my attention is trying to avoid. So am I being spiritual? Hell no. I’m eating a bag of potato chips, the whole thing, tilting the bag back, getting all the good MSG.
(13:37):
And I forget for a moment temporarily what I need to be focusing on. I’m bypassing. If for some reason you think still, okay, maybe I do that. I don’t know if I really spiritual bypass. Has anyone ever experienced shame in this room before? Maybe a group has shamed you? Maybe it was a family member, maybe it was a friend. Maybe it was your partner even. Or maybe you’ve shamed yourself or you’ve shamed other people. Let me tell you something. Shame ain’t no good for anybody. It doesn’t feel good to be shamed. And there’s been, when the times when I’ve shamed others, as soon as I do it, I’m like, I don’t even want to be in my skin. It does not feel good. So the reason I’m bringing that up is in the book, he talks about healthy shame. I would want to get into an argument with him.
(14:35):
I don’t think there’s anything healthy about shaming. There’s guilt. We are guilty of doing things. If you follow Brene Brown’s teachings, the difference between shame and guilt. I don’t think there’s any healthy shame. But the reason I’m bringing shame up here is that nobody really wants to experience shame. Can we agree on that? Yes. So if all of a sudden you start shaming yourself about something, or all of a sudden you see shame coming down the walkway, would you want to avoid that? Yeah, we bypass spiritual bypassing is a tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid facing difficult emotions, psychological issues, and unfinished developmental tasks. It can be a defensive psychological posture that prioritizes spiritual beliefs or experiences over psychological needs. That’s it. Let’s just be matter of fact about it. It is something that we do to protect ourselves sometime. It’s not necessarily inherently good or bad. The challenge is, is that if we are constantly spiritually bypassing, we may protect ourselves in a moment, but it’s not anything that actually allows us to meet what we need to meet. It is not a practice that allows us to heal what we need to heal. It is not a practice that allows us to transform what we may need to transform.
(16:03):
For example, someone might try to practice non-attachment by dismissing their need for love. But this can drive the need underground and cause it to be acted out in harmful ways. Take a deep breath in and out. Stay in the room. It’s all good. I see some serious looks. Some people are like ru going in and that’s good. So here’s three points I just want you to hear. One, why do we engage in bypassing or spiritual bypassing? Because we don’t like discomfort, we don’t like pain. And there’s all this judgment around spiritual bypassing. Don’t judge yourself for doing it. It’s part of being human, right? There’s not going to be a destination that you get to where you’re like, I’m done with that now. Yeah, no, it’s still going to happen. So could it be liberating to just accept I do this, we do this. This is part of our human experience, and we all engage in it to protect ourselves, and we need to in a certain way.
(17:09):
That’s it. We’re trying to care for ourselves to the best of our ability, but we can actually handle whatever it is that we’re trying to avoid, but we won’t learn to handle it unless we approach it. So think about the bypass. My parents used to live in Dayton, Ohio. My childhood home, whenever I would drive home to visit them, I’d go down 65 and I would take 8 65 around Indianapolis. Why? Because it sucked to drive through Indianapolis. It would be so much longer. So a lot of times this idea of bypassing is about time. Ain’t nobody got time for that. I don’t got time for that. I’m trying to go around so that I can get to this place, space, stage, or literal location faster than if I was to go through. But it doesn’t actually allow us to touch the things that we need to touch.
(18:05):
This is something that I see a lot in our youth as anxiety continues to go up. One of my dear friends, her daughter, intelligent, powerful, magnificent, 18-year-old, and there’s this need to know how to do everything right, is not just 18 year olds that think that way, right? Right. Okay. There’s this need for us to do everything right perfectly. Or maybe we don’t have the expectation of doing it perfectly, but we think there’s something we need to know before we can approach the thing. We don’t want to approach, right? We got to get more information. I got to take another class. I got to do more research. I got to do all this stuff. And yes, all of those things aid, but truly the only way is through, not around.
(19:00):
And here’s the thing about therapy as well as spiritual work. So John, I want to go back to John Wellwood because I think really he framed spiritual bypassing in a very different way than we hold it today. And it’s one, at least for me, it’s giving me a new relationship with the word and phrase. First off, he said that therapy was not in the end about diagnosis. It’s not about procedures or cures. It’s about developing a new kind of living relationship with what we’re experiencing. That’s the way he held therapy. Other licensed clinical social workers and CPCs may hold it differently. And ultimately, those of us that are spiritual practitioners that sit with others and help bring these spiritual principles into their lives, we’re not trying to fix them. We’re not trying to do anything other than give them some tools, whether it’s prayer, meditation, reading, something inspirational, going on a retreat.
(20:04):
All of the things that we do to help put us in relationship to what we are experiencing so that we can be with it. Because if we walk away, if we walk around it, if we check out, we’re not just missing out on that thing. We’re kind of like dumbing down our ability to experience the rest of our lives. You ever heard that idea that if you don’t allow yourself to experience anger, you’re not really fully experiencing love? If you don’t let yourself fully experience fear, you’re not letting yourself fully experience joy because it all sits in the same system. But if we are trying to bypass or push down any of that, then we’re turning down the volume on all of our living. So I don’t know what’s in your head, what’s in your heart, what’s in your life. I’m not trying to tell you to do something or not do something, but just realize there is a level of living that is possible for you, greater than you can possibly know intellectually right now. But the only way to get to it is through whatever is there right now. Does that make sense? You got to cut to the chase here at 20.
(21:16):
Therapy was not in the end about diagnosis, procedure, or cures, but about developing a new kind of living relationship with one’s experiencing spirituality is not in the end about going to heaven or hell looking good to others, curing ourselves from individual or collective history. Spirituality is intended to give us a new, more empowered relationship with what we are experiencing. Just like therapy. They work together. They go towards the same end. Who doesn’t want to live a little bit better? Not so much in terms of material things. Of course, I’ll take a couple more zeros in my checking account. Thank you very much. But regardless of that fact, who wants to be in a better relationship with their body right now?
(22:05):
Who wants to be in a better relationship with others? All the people in your life, even those people right now, we need to find a way of experiencing what we are experiencing in a better way. When we say, I’m going to not look at that, we’re stepping out, we’re bypassing, we’re diminishing the capacity for us to experience what we’re experiencing in a greater way. And it’s not just the stuff that we don’t like. It’s the stuff that we do. I want to close with a thought that came to me from St. Francis of ASI this morning. He said once, start by doing what’s necessary.
(22:52):
Then do what’s possible. And suddenly you’re doing the impossible. But most of us, we want to bypass and just do the impossible. Start by doing what’s necessary for you right now. Let that be enough and then move into what is possible and see what reveals as greater possibility in your life. Is this ish for real? Can we do this? Yes. Alright, let’s take it into prayer. A nice deep breath in. Bring your hand up to your heart. Connect to the word compassion. Compassion means nothing more than you care. So be compassionate for yourself for a moment right now. Care for the heart behind your hand. Care for the mind. Care for the life. Care for the beingness, the stuff that you like, and especially the stuff that you may not like right now. All of it sits under the same roof known as your consciousness. So what I affirm today
(24:11):
Is that our spirit, our work, our living, our praying, our meditating, our reading, our coming together in community, all of it is here to do one thing. And that is to empower us to be in relationship with our living in a greater way. There is nothing that we need to become. There is no new learning that needs to take place right here, right now, today. All we need to do is lean in and take the step that we can take, do the necessary thing today, do the necessary thing tomorrow, and lo and behold, we will be moving through all the things that we think were impossible to the side of possibility. I’m so grateful to declare this truth, to know this truth, to affirm this truth and continue to sit in the knowing, to sit in the knowing. I’m not bypassing the hardship right now. I’m just sitting in the knowing. So that intentionally we can all step into the rest of this day bringing love, bringing light, bringing wholeness, bringing possibility, bringing creativity, bringing freedom into whatever awaits us. That is what I affirm is this is real. Yes. And so it is.