When “Feeling Good” Skips Feeling: What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

Coined by psychologist and spiritual teacher John Welwood, spiritual bypassing is the tendency to use spiritual tools to avoid dealing with unresolved emotional wounds, personal pain, or the messy aspects of our humanity. It’s a common and often unconscious coping mechanism. We all do it. It’s not bad or wrong, and it’s not something to feel ashamed of. But when we become aware of it, we can check in with ourselves so that the hard work we put into our spiritual practice actually bears fruit in our real lives. Bypassing might feel good for a moment, but it never gives us what we really want, which is to change our lives for the better.

What It Looks Like in Real Life

• Telling yourself to “just let it go” when you're actually hurting

• Repeating affirmations to override a deep feelings

• Using breathwork to escape life's challenges instead of working through them

• Dismissing your needs because you think they make you “needy” or “unspiritual”

Sometimes it sounds like wisdom. “Everything is impermanent.” “Don’t be attached.” “Forget the self.” These are often deep teachings that are misconstrued as shields to protect us from uncomfortable feelings we haven’t yet learned how to safely be with.

Why This Matters in Breathwork

Breathwork is a powerful practice. It brings us into altered states, releases emotion, opens our bodies—and yes, it can feel transcendent. But the purpose of breathwork isn’t to transcend the human experience. It’s to move through it. We have a saying in our breathwork community: "The Way Past is Always Through." To meet ourselves honestly and wholly, including the fear, grief, anger, or longing that we might usually try to avoid.

If we approach breathwork with the goal of fixing our feelings or silencing our discomfort, we risk using it to spiritually bypass. And then we miss the real healing opportunity—because healing doesn’t come from feeling better. It comes from better feeling.

Our Humanness Is Not a Problem

Most of us carry what Welwood calls a “wound of the heart”—a deep sense that we are not lovable just as we are. This wound forms in childhood when our emotional needs weren’t fully met. Breathwork can help bring this wound to light, but that’s not always comfortable.

Sometimes what surfaces during a session isn’t bliss. It’s sadness. Longing. Rage. Shame. These aren’t signs that something is wrong. They’re signs that something important in you is asking to be seen, heard, attended to, cared for.

When we allow ourselves to be present with these parts—not fix them, not analyze them, not silence them—we open the door to deep integration. This is where breathwork becomes more than a release. It becomes a return.

Breath As a Path to Wholeness

At Luminous Breathwork, we guide you through a practice that encourages not just breath, but presence. We make space for the emotional body, for the inner children, for the parts of you that are tired, overworked, and unacknowledged. We invite you to bring your whole self, not just the polished, spiritual version.

You don’t have to “rise above” your humanity to grow. In fact, true transformation happens when you root down into it. When you feel what there is to feel without story, without judgment, and without needing to rush toward resolution.

We are very careful before, during, and after the breathwork session in the way we facilitate the experience to not encourage bypassing. Rather, we encourage allowing, surrendering, and slow integration work through complementary modalities like parts work.

You’re Not Broken—You’re Becoming

If you’ve ever felt frustrated with yourself for not “getting over it,” or if your spiritual practice has started to feel like it's not bearing fruit, consider this an invitation: what if nothing’s wrong with you? What if the next step isn’t more transcendence, but more tenderness?

Breathwork can help you reclaim the parts of yourself you’ve pushed away. It can help you build emotional resilience, nervous system capacity, and a bigger window of tolerance.

And when you breathe with your pain, instead of around it, you discover something profound: that your wholeness was never in question. You were never too much. You were never not enough.

You are simply human—and healing.