I’m going to say something that might be uncomfortable to hear…

A lot of what passes for spiritual growth isn’t growth at all. It’s avoidance.

I’m not saying this to be harsh… I’m saying it because I’ve watched it happen to people for almost three decades and honestly it’s probably kept them stuck and looping for years.

Spiritual bypassing is when you use spiritual concepts, practices, and frameworks to avoid doing the actual psychological and emotional work that needs to happen – even though you think you’re doing the work.

It looks like growth, and you’re using all the right language… but underneath, all the same patterns are still running and the same wounds remain untouched.

The problem is that this can mostly be unconscious because our patterns, wounds and limitations ARE unconscious and that’s exactly why you can’t seem to get ahead and you don’t understand why.

For years I thought that inner child work, parts therapy and shadow work was all just mental stuff that I didn’t need.  I was all in to the energetics of things and that feels soooo much better than digging into your past!

But then I realised that the two go hand in hand and one doesn’t work fully without the other and you HAVE to cover both.

Your stuck patterns are hard to spot because they’ve been with you for decades so they feel normal. They feel like you…. and that’s exactly why you can’t see them and might not know you have them.

Even when you can see them, seeing them isn’t the same as healing them!

None of this makes you bad at doing the work. It just makes you human and you don’t know what you don’t know yet.

The spiritual path is genuinely seductive because it offers real glimpses of something beyond the pain, so of course you want to stay there in all of that beautiful energy!

But the path home to yourself – the real path – goes through the pain, not around it.

This is the work we do in Sanctuary. We don’t skirt around the uncomfortable stuff – we go right through the middle of it so we can fully heal and clear it. And we do it in a way that’s individual and personal, supported and sustainable.

Sometimes the discomfort you feel when you read a post like this is your inner knowing trying to inform you of something that you need to pay attention to.

Sanctuary is where the transformations happen.  The perfect blend of the mental, emotional and spiritual. Come and take a look. Find out more here