Spiritual Bypassing Is a Luxury Only Privileged People Can Afford

Earlier this week I wrote about Ezra Klein quoting Buddhist meditation after Ta-Nehisi Coates described MLK’s murder. The response was huge (well, huge for me)—clearly this hit a nerve. I’ve been having tremendous fun interacting with you in the comments. But there’s a bigger pattern underneath that moment, one that explains not just Klein’s response but a whole culture of using spiritual practices to avoid rather than engage with difficult realities.

It’s called spiritual bypassing.

Later in that same interview, when Coates asks Klein to define his role as a public intellectual in this political moment, Klein admits something revealing:

“I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question. The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime.”

Political peacetime. Let that sink in for a moment.

We’re not in political peacetime. Democracy feels genuinely at risk. Fascism is rising. People are being harmed. But Klein wants the luxury of curious exploration without the weight of moral obligation. And that fact that he is saying this, out loud, in this moment, to someone like Coates? It’s not just tone death. It’s spiritual bypassing in a nutshell.

What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

The term was coined by John Welwood, a prominent psychotherapist and Buddhist practitioner, who defined it as using “spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.”

As psychologist Ingrid Clayton explained back in 2011, spiritual bypassing is a defense mechanism. “Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose,” she wrote. It’s “more about checking out than checking in.” The shorthand? “Grasping rather than gratitude, arriving rather than being, avoiding rather than accepting.”

We use spiritual practices not to transform ourselves or engage with reality, but to rise above it, to avoid dealing with what’s actually happening. And while it might feel like enlightenment, it can be repression dressed up in spiritual language.

Here’s what’s crucial to understand: not everyone gets to spiritually bypass.

In my research on yoga and spiritual appropriation, I came across scholar Amanda Lucia’s observation that spiritual bypassing is “appealing to groups that are only minimally unfree to begin with.” As she writes, “Disenfranchised populations subordinated under oppressive structures of inequity may not find similar solace in the temporary relief of an affective experience of freedom.”

In other words, spiritual bypassing is a luxury available primarily to people with enough privilege to retreat from political reality without immediate consequences.

Klein can want “political peacetime” to explore his interests. Coates can’t. MLK couldn’t. People facing immediate threats of violence, discrimination, or oppression don’t get to bypass. They have to stay present to the reality of their situation because their survival depends on it.

Ask yourself: How would MLK have responded when asked about his role? How would Coates? Neither would say they want peacetime to explore their intellectual interests. Both understand their obligations extend beyond personal curiosity. Both know that retreat is a privilege they don’t have.

Spiritual Bypassing in Your Yoga Class

This isn’t just a mindfulness problem. Spiritual bypassing shows up across popular spiritual practices, but it’s particularly visible in yoga culture.

Many yoga teachers encourage what they frame as healthy detachment: “Empty your mind,” “Let everything go,” “Leave your problems at the door.” This feels like relief, like respite from stress. But it’s often bypassing—using spiritual practice to avoid rather than address what’s actually bothering us.

In my book Stealing My Religion I recount how journalist Tracey Anne Duncan described an upsetting example from a Zoom yoga class she attended after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. A student said she was really stressed about the state of the world. The teacher’s response? “That’s why this practice is so important right now. Fold your hands at your heart and let’s chant.”

As Duncan notes, this response “denies the material and political realities we exist in and prevents otherwise goodhearted people from becoming warriors in the fight against injustice.” Spiritual bypassing led directly to complacency toward violence affecting others. Or as Duncan puts it: “We are one” is just the yoga version of “all lives matter.”

Education scholar Funie Hsu argues that spiritual bypassing becomes particularly problematic when mindfulness and yoga programs are offered in at-risk schools. These programs, often implemented in urban, low-income, predominantly Black schools, explicitly aim to give students techniques for dealing with stress and anxiety.

But here’s the problem: the programs focus on tools of self-regulation, not on changing the systems that create the stress and anxiety in the first place. This reinforces the idea that individuals have a responsibility to “react less” to their lived experiences of discrimination.

As Hsu shows, this makes yoga and mindfulness programs in these settings into behavioral management for marginalized populations—a way to placate, prevent revolution, and maintain the status quo. It’s spiritual bypassing imposed from above, teaching oppressed communities to manage their reactions to oppression rather than resist it.

The Messiness We’re Avoiding

This is part of a bigger trend I’ve been thinking and writing about. We’re plucking techniques from religious traditions—stripping away all the messiness of their history, institutions, contexts, power dynamics, norms, and rules—and trying to layer them onto our lives to make us “happy and healthy.”

But often they’re working as a salve. A temporary numbing agent that helps us avoid dealing with what actually needs addressing.

People like to quote Marx saying religion is the opium of the masses. I actually think these extracted spiritual techniques are the real opiate—marketed as wellness but functioning as avoidance.

Here’s the thing about bypassing: it’s attractive when you’re overwhelmed by the state of the world, when you don’t know what to do or specifically what political work to engage in. It’s attractive to HR departments trying to keep workers just calm enough to be productive. And you can even pluck theological ideas from traditions to justify it.

Someone might say Buddhism focuses on life as suffering and impermanence, and those are reasons for retreating from the world. But others see that as a fundamental misreading—they point out Buddhism teaches engagement with suffering to transform it, not retreat from it to feel better.

What Adding the Messiness Back Means

Writing in Psychology Today, Diana Raab describes how Welwood observed that “many clients came to him with some impasse in their lives that their spiritual practice was unable to penetrate or help, whether a personality issue or a relationship problem.” Welwood was “always amazed by the fact that although these individuals may have practiced sophisticated spiritual practices, they often did not practice self-love.”

Raab shares an example: “One woman who was raised by a narcissistic mother claimed that for most of her life she’d swallowed her anger and just tried to be the ‘good girl.’” She used Transcendental Meditation and spiritual books to calm herself during difficult times—classic bypassing. When a friend suggested therapy, “she learned that it was much healthier to voice her opinions and not keep them bottled up inside.”

After addressing these underlying issues, she continued her spiritual practices of “meditation, prayer, yoga, healthy diet, exercise, and grounding”—but now these “modalities...supported her transformation rather than replacing it.”

That’s the crucial distinction. Spiritual practices can support difficult emotional and political work. But when we use them to avoid that work, to rise above the messiness of being human, to retreat from obligations to collective struggle—that’s bypassing.

Clayton writes that the most effective approach is to “acknowledge the emotion, sit with it, and honor it without repressing it.” To stop running from ourselves and the world, and start actually engaging with both. (Be sure to check out Clayton’s new book, Fawning, which touches on this concept as well!)

The Klein Pattern Explained

This framework helps explain Klein’s response to Coates. When confronted with the reality of racist violence, with Coates’s moral clarity about political struggle, Klein retreated into his meditation practice. Not to deepen his engagement with the horror Coates described, but to find personal equilibrium, to process it internally, to quote a practice he’s been using for 15 years to manage difficult emotions.

That’s bypassing. Using spiritual practice to sidestep the uncomfortable moral and political realities being presented. Treating meditation as a way to achieve calm in the face of injustice rather than as a practice that might deepen commitment to addressing that injustice.

And it’s a move only someone with Klein’s privilege can make. Someone who feels slightly removed and safe in the conversation, in geopolitics, in our country right now.

What’s Required Instead

I see the problem of spiritual bypassing as the same problem with spiritual practices in general when they’re extracted from religious traditions. They try to avoid the messiness—the messiness of life, the messiness of politics, the messiness of, frankly, just religion.

But what would it mean to add that messiness back in? To think about the full range of human experience, not only the good vibes but all the emotions? To recognize that spiritual practices divorced from ethical frameworks and social obligations can become tools for avoiding rather than engaging?

There are Buddhist communities that think social justice gets in the way of personal enlightenment. But there are others—engaged Buddhists like Larry Yang, Eleanor Hancock, and the practitioners at East Bay Meditation Center—who insist that all three legs of the stool must be integrated: meditation AND ethics AND service to others.

As Yang writes in Awakening Together, the practice “is not just about our own personal awakening, enlightenment, or freedom. The path is not just about personal salvation. It is about our collective journey and transformation.”

That kind of practice can’t be used for bypassing because it explicitly connects you to collective struggle. It doesn’t let you retreat into personal exploration during political crisis. It clarifies rather than obscures your obligations.

When people with privilege use spiritual practices to bypass uncomfortable realities, the cost isn’t just personal. It’s political.

It means people who could be using their resources, platforms, and safety to work for change are instead achieving personal calm. It means spiritual language gets weaponized to discourage engagement: “Let it go,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “Focus on what you can control.”

It means that while some people are fighting for their lives and basic rights, others are meditating their way to inner peace about it.

And it reinforces existing power structures by teaching oppressed communities to manage their reactions to oppression while letting privileged people off the hook for addressing the systems creating that oppression.

Spiritual bypassing isn’t just ineffective. It’s actively harmful when it becomes a tool for avoiding collective responsibility.

We don’t need more spiritual practices helping privileged people feel calm about injustice. We need practices that connect us to the messiness of being human, to collective struggle, to obligations beyond personal optimization.

That means sometimes sitting with shadow, not just chasing light. Sometimes getting activated instead of staying calm. Sometimes recognizing that your discomfort with political reality is information, not a problem to meditate away.

Klein’s admission that he doesn’t know his role anymore—that he wants peacetime for exploration—reveals what happens when spiritual practice becomes primarily about personal management rather than collective transformation.

Maybe what we actually need is less bypassing and more staying present to what’s hard, what’s uncomfortable, what demands we take sides and get involved.

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What do you think? Have you noticed spiritual bypassing in your own practice or wellness culture around you? Let’s continue this conversation in the comments—I KNOW you have thoughts.