Is it bypass to focus on the body? Listener question
MAR 16, 2023
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I spent years doing a method where I would question thoughts/beliefs. It served me to see that "I" was making a choice and that if I wanted to feel happier then I could choose to believe something else. It was powerful to discover that my thoughts created my reality. After 15 years of this approach, I entered the coaching world and found an infinite number of approaches to feeling happier, content, grounded including meditation, 3Ps, falling into the space of who/what I really am, etc.

When I came across your work and had the mind-blowing realization that "I/ME" was an accumulation of thoughts, stories - a spinning mental narrative projecting an external world of childhood wounds, traumas, insecurities - I was excited because I knew it was true. "I" was a story. 

Even with that knowledge, every morning, I wake up into a fear-based, identified mind e.g. terror, low-level anxiety, worry, out-of-control imagination of bad things happening to me and my loved ones, etc and when I engage with those thoughts, I notice the same themes of lack, control, wrongness, trying to be safe, resistance, etc. This experience feels real, feels like ME, who I am. Intellectually, I know that isn't true but it's experienced as true, real. 

I've heard you say to question the mind's narrative, get curious, parent the child/survival mind. . .but I end up caught in the negative mental loop. And I've heard you say - get sane, present - go into the body. When I do the latter, I can feel the levels of fear, discomfort. I can get beneath them to feel sensations and often quiet is experienced. But nothing else. 

Isn't this a form of spiritual bypass? I know I'm not using spiritual superiority as a way to hide from insecurities but I'm "avoiding" the mental narrative by going into the body. I'm not experiencing the fear or anger or upset. I'm not "facing" the stories of lack, examining the childhood wounds, questioning them nor understanding them. 

Any more thoughts on this would be helpful. 



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