In my teens I began to fall regularly into bouts of deep melancholy where I would cry incessantly and write maudlin, self-hating things in my journals. I would sometimes cut myself or smash my own head against the wall. My concerned parents brought me to a psychologist, who, after the usual battery of tests, pronounced me clinically depressed and mildly manic.

He said, “Not giving you antidepressants would be like not giving insulin to a diabetic.”

I took the pills for about a week, until unacceptable side effects emerged. No other drug was offered. And I did not perish without pharmaceutical help, despite the shrink’s dire prediction.

For the next decade or so I cycled through depressions and stupid-decision-fostering bouts of mild mania. For a six-month span, I tried Prozac, which, I was told by the psychiatrist who prescribed it to me, “is so safe it should be in our drinking water.”

At first, Prozac made me feel as though I’d found what had been missing my whole life. The biochemical imbalance theory seemed definitively proven. I was impervious, I was calm, my molecules were synchronized, and I was five pounds thinner.

Then I started to feel like I had bugs crawling on me. I felt a deep and disturbing restlessness. My libido disappeared. Being touched felt horrible.* Not surprisingly, my improved mood and svelter figure did not make up for the fact that I did not want my lover at the time to come anywhere near me. So I quit those too.

Something in me knew that there was some other way. And then, in the latter part of my twenties, I discovered yoga and spirituality.

With each self-help spirituality book, each new yoga teacher, each step further into spiritual practices, I found additional tools to help me bypass the road that led into the dark depths. I could just not go there. It was so simple! And so I claimed myself Cured From Intractable Depression. I had found The Way. I was becoming Enlightened!

I felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have the gumption or requisite openness to Spirit to walk this same easeful path out of torment and into bliss. It was as simple as Making The Choice. Why didn’t they see it? Oh, well, I’d just beatifically smile down on them and be as compassionate and gentle as possible while I watched them spin their wheels and make a mess of their lives and their relationships.

And yet. And still. Around the time my younger child finished preschool, I began to unravel.

Depressions did not re-emerge, but there were bouts of anxiety so severe that I went to the doctor sure I was dying. I was in fight-or-flight mode day and night. There was a feeling of being right on the edge of something dark, terrifying, furious. Kept pushing it aside and shoving it down. I had a feeling that I was living a lie, and I was less and less able to pretend I didn’t feel that way.

Right about this time, I discovered the work of psychotherapist and spiritual teacher Robert Augustus Masters. With his partner, Diane Bardwell, Masters does what he calls “intuitive integral psychotherapy” in private settings and in workshops. This work integrates traditional talk therapy with bodywork and an intuitive approach, where no formula or method trumps the living, breathing connection between skilled therapist and willing client.

I went to see them for three days of intensive counseling, trying to find answers to some big questions that had come up for me.  The experience was dramatic and revelatory, but not as much as it could have been if I’d already read Robert’s most recent book, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us From What Really Matters (North Atlantic Books, 2010).**

Now, having read this book – not so much read it as pored over it, reading and re-reading each densely wound sentence multiple times – I can see that my so-called Spiritual Awakening wasn’t really an awakening at all. It was about trying to avoid pain, anger, fear and shame that were clearly calling out to be faced, felt and acknowledged.

Our culture is, as Masters writes, “negative about negativity.” We are phobic about anger, we overemphasize the positive, we are overly tolerant and falsely nice, and have boundaries that are too weak. We delude ourselves that quick-fix, “fast-food” spirituality can transport us to some higher level of being. He compares this to taking up residence on the upper floors of a house when the lower levels have not been properly finished. Over time, without caring attention, those lower levels progressively crumble, and we at some point fall through the floor into the muck and yuck we’ve been thinking we lifted ourselves out of through the Power of Positive Thinking or the belief that We’re All One and that we should Love Everyone Without Condition.

Masters teaches that we all have deep pain, anger, fear and shame – which spring from what he calls “core wounds” – rooted in our earliest years. We all have shadow selves, parts of who we are that we would rather not embrace or admit to, that we can either choose to look at or try to ignore until they emerge in the form of bad behavior, inexplicable neuroses or poor choices. In our attempts to reject these fundamental parts of being human, we:

·          - deny them (“I don’t have anything to feel bad about! I have so much to be grateful for! It's all an illusion anyhow.”)

·         - stuff or avoid them (“I don’t have time to feel bad, and this esoteric bullshit is a total waste of my energy.”)

·        -- medicate them (“As long as I take my meds/have a couple glasses of wine/have a pint of whiskey/smoke a bowl/watch my TV programs/have sex/shop for a new outfit/get some new boobs, I’ll be fine. FINE. FINE, I TELL YOU!”)

When we use spirituality or spiritual practices to deny, avoid, stuff, or medicate our pain, when we use them to avoid taking a frank look at how our conditioning (ways we learned to get our fundamental needs met  early in life) still motivates our choices and actions at a time in life when those coping and survival mechanisms are no longer serving us, this is spiritual bypassing.

No matter what modes or methods we use to avoid facing our pain, bypassing keeps healing and wholeness at arms’ length. Masters’ work is about going through the process of recognizing and working with our core wounds, conditioning and shadow selves. Courage is marshalled to face and feel difficult emotions and to let ourselves feel them for long enough to integrate them into who we are.

If we duck into yoga class out of a life that feels like a lie and is characterized by anxiety and sadness, and we’re counting on yoga class to make us feel better enough to get through the day,  we’re using it in the same way we might use booze, drugs or sex to feel better. And there our core pain sits, unrecognized, like a neglected child.

A neglected child will do one of two things: (a) start to behave more and more badly until someone takes notice, or (b) give up and shrink into the shadows. And so it is with core pain – if we keep bypassing it, it will keep causing us to choose the wrong partners, relate to others out of pain in ways that make us unhealthily reactive, remain steeped in useless, life-energy-sucking drama, or otherwise sabotage our own lives; or, if this doesn’t happen, our spark of aliveness – our deepest mojo – might simply fizzle out.

Masters strongly recommends spiritual practices, but cautions that any spiritual path that does not acknowledge the need for individual inner work will likely support adherents in some level of spiritual bypassing.

Contrary to popular notions that we should forget our stories, cultivate non-attachment, see even an abuser’s actions toward us as something designed by the Universe to teach us more about ourselves, and to assume that everyone else is Doing the Best They Can and so we should never judge or discriminate, Masters exhorts us to “jump in, get messy, get attached, get hurt, get involved, fully participate,” and that any shortcut where we shrug our shoulders and say “It’s all an illusion!” or “All you need is love!” denies us the complexity and depth that are necessary aspects of being fully awake.

The book is dense and wry, deep and funny. Masters has a fiery, artful way of describing extremes in a way that captures the truth of the matter right in between. He skillfully intertwines the sacred and the profane: he calls spiritual bypassing “avoidance in holy drag;” he calls blind compassion “neurotic tolerance in caring’s robes.”

No other author I’ve read has quite the knack Masters has for precisely describing emotional states and ways of relating to and from them. Hatred, for example, he describes as “not just anger or hurt of a mix of the two, but rather a combination of anger and hurt darkly contracted in a situation where an offending person (or people) has become the object of our hatred” (p.16).

Instead of putting on our positivity hats and being blindly compassionate “harmony junkies,” Masters advises us to cultivate a deep intimacy with our egoic selves and our shadow selves, and to then relate TO them rather than FROM them. This is done through skilled psychotherapeutic work of the variety taught and practiced by Masters and a handful of others who have studied with him.

Masters and his partner Diane offer workshops and trainings as well as private and couples counseling primarily in Ashland, Oregon, British Columbia, Mexico and Boulder, Colorado. You can see their schedule at their Web site, http://www.masterscenter.net/, or you can search for Robert Augustus Masters’ Facebook fan page.

Doing integral psychotherapeutic work is worthwhile, but expensive. This writer would do more if she could, but has gained much insight simply from reading Spiritual Bypassing and Robert’s other writings.

My own exposure to Masters’ work has helped me to see how all pieces of the totality of myself – shadows, core wounds, as well as my brighter, shinier parts and my celebration-worthy aspects – merit acknowledgement and integration. I have begun on this path, which includes both spiritual practices and psychotherapy, and I’ll proceed with it as my financial situation allows – and I know that this will serve not only me, but also my children and the people around me by enabling me to clearly see and live out my purpose in this life.

Yes, focus on the positive is a good thing, and yes, many of the spiritual teachers now part of pop culture have valuable insights to share. But if you're leaning on their love-and-light dictums without having looked into the darker part of yourself, you're missing out. Masters' new book is a good way to start using spirituality not "as an escape from life's difficulties" but as "an embracing and illumination of them." 

Instead of dividing our lives into Spiritual and Non-Spiritual aspects, we come to see that "every situation is part of the curriculum" that teaches us to relate to others and to our own emotions in a manner that is truly mature and awake. 

* Now I know I was suffering from a side effect of SSRI drugs known as akathisia, which is an almost painful restlessness.  It is believed to be one cause of SSRI-induced suicide.

** Masters did not coin the term “spiritual bypassing.” Early in the book, Masters gives credit for this to psychotherapist, author and spiritual teacher John Welwood.