The Depths & Nuances of Spirituality, Mental Health, & the Relationship Between the Two.
I remember being verbally abused by someone I worked with for not knowing how to put an IV catheter into a cat - something I hadn’t been trained or qualified to do. Afterwards, I felt awful, with feelings of hurt, shame, anger and frustration. But I quickly pushed those feelings away and told myself it was fine, just think positively, focus on loving energy, and nothing would be wrong.
I ignored what I was actually feeling, and looking back, this was a clear moment of spiritual bypassing.
Within parts of the spiritual community, I don’t often hear people talking about mental health. There can be a strong focus on “love and light,” which, while well-intentioned, can sometimes leave little room for the more difficult parts of being human.
There is a lot of spiritual bypassing happening. If you’re not familiar with the term, it was coined by John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychologist. It describes the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks”.
Put simply, spiritual bypassing dismisses difficult emotions and avoids what is uncomfortable.
It can look like:
- “It’s all in your head, just think positively.”
- “You just need to do more yoga and meditation.”
- “You’re just ascending.”
- “Eat cleaner, non-processed, vegan foods and then your mind will feel healthier.”
- Blaming the planets for a problem that was quite literally created on Earth.
While these suggestions can be helpful to some extent and in the right context, they don’t help when someone is experiencing genuine mental health struggles. Continuously telling yourself and others these things can start to feel dismissive or invalidating.
It's where I began to dismiss my own experience.
There is a fine line between using spirituality to support your mental health and using it to avoid it.
There is no shame in asking for help when you realise that the full moon has come and gone and you still feel a deep heaviness.
You are allowed to feel everything you feel, even the more negative emotions. You are a soul having a human experience, and humans experience a full spectrum of emotions, which sometimes we may need help to regulate or manage.
When people begin to struggle with their mental health, it often happens gradually, and you may not know you are even heading there until you’re already in it, which is why it can make it that much harder to get out.
And when you’re in it, positive thinking your way out doesn’t always work. Sometimes, additional support is needed, and there is no shame in that.
That support might look like:
- therapy
- stability
- medication
- rest
- structure
- connection
Practices like meditation, yoga, affirmations, sound healing, breathwork, journaling, and mindful living can be incredibly supportive for maintaining mental well-being, and in many cases, they should be encouraged.
But there is a difference between engaging in these practices to support mood and healing, and relying on them because you believe they will heal or cure you.
Spirituality is vast and deeply personal. It’s as multidimensional as the world we can and cannot perceive, with more layers than the Earth's atmosphere.
If it isn’t balanced with grounding, it can unintentionally lead people away from their human experience, especially when the mind is seen as something to transcend or quiet at all costs.
But how is this healing for the mind? If we are constantly trying to move beyond the mind, are we actually learning how to work with it?
Because mental health requires working with the mind, not dismissing it.
Spiritual bypassing can also show up in subtle ways, like:
- assigning everything to astrology or external forces
- minimising real-world experiences by reframing them spiritually
- offering spiritual explanations when practical support is needed
These perspectives aren’t inherently wrong, but context matters. And, without grounding, they can blur the line between support and avoidance.
There can also be an underlying message that you can’t be struggling mentally and be spiritual at the same time.
But why not?
Spirituality and mental health don’t need to be separate.
You can be deeply spiritual and still struggle.
You can be doing the work and still need support.
You can believe in something greater and still have a nervous system with needs.
Mental health is not something to bypass. And spirituality is not a quick-fix pill to take.
Even the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, silently meditating and suffering for seven weeks before reaching “enlightenment.”… before that, he lived a more than decent life as a wealthy prince.
You are allowed to take your time while you learn to work with your mind and not against it. You are a human after all.
As John Welwood said:
"when we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalise what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it."
But those messy parts matter. So here’s to the raw and the messy side of being human!
Make peace with the shadow parts of yourself that feel imperfect or difficult. Learn to work with your mind, not against it.
And from there, you can begin to reach for something higher, with a foundation that is centred, whole, and grounded.
