Summary of Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D.'s Spiritual Bypassing

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Spiritual bypassing is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is much more common than we might think, and it is often invisible except in its more obvious extremes. #2 Spirituality is not a high, not a rush, and not an altered state. It is something far more real, grounded, and responsible. It is radically alive and naturally integral. It is something that shakes us to our very core until we stop treating spiritual deepening as something to dabble in here and there. #3 Spiritual bypassing is the act of avoiding your pain and difficult personal issues by using spirituality as a way to escape them. To outgrow this, you must first recognize it for what it is and stop engaging in it, as well as view it with compassion. #4 The most obvious trap that can befall us when we are trying to overcome our spiritual bypassing is the belief that we should rise above our difficulties and simply embrace Oneness, even as the tendency to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower, spiritual and nonspiritous, runs wild in us.