What’s The Baby In The Spiritual Bypassing Bathwater?

Deconstructing Indoctrinated Belief Systems To Find What's True, Self-led, & Loving

Part of my own spiritual bypassing recovery has required deconstructing some of the narcissistic nonsense that’s built into a lot of New Age thought. I didn’t grow up exposed to this kind of programming, but after I wrote Mind Over Medicine and was suddenly surrounded by Hay House people, this way of thinking was all around me. Mind Over Medicine didn’t subscribe to those belief systems, but many people who practiced the law of attraction or believed they could control their lives with thoughts alone glommed onto it and overlaid their beliefs onto it. I didn’t really understand that way of thinking, but I definitely got influenced by it.

Most of the New Age indoctrination failed to “take” very much in my psyche, largely because of how grounded my family is, how much of a scientific critical thinker I am, and how much my family made fun of my attempts to try on a new belief system like a fashionable outfit. But some damaging beliefs did begin to take root, causing me to harm some people, as I described here.

It took me quite some time to really see the dangers built into those indoctrinated belief systems, much of what I shared in great detail in three online courses I taught during the pandemic. Spiritual Bypassing 101 and Spiritual Bypassing 2.0 featured the teachers I discerned to be “spiritual” but without spiritual bypassing, spiritual teachers and authors who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid of spiritual bypassing and right wing radicalization during the pandemic. I also taught Spirituality Without Spiritual Bypassing (co-taught with IFS founder Dick Schwartz), as a way to explore what’s left and what’s truly sacred and beautiful when we deconstruct religious and New Age spiritual beliefs and remove the colonizing and oppression built into many of these belief systems.

Did everything need to go when we throw out the anti-oppressive beliefs and teachings? Did we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Or was there some baby worth keeping?

*For the historically curious, “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” is often credited to Thomas Carlyle, who adapted the concept in an 1849 essay on slavery:

And if true, it is important for us, in reference to this Negro Question and some others. The Germans say, "you must empty-out the bathing-tub, but not the baby along with it." Fling-out your dirty water with all zeal, and set it careening down the kennels; but try if you can keep the little child!

According to Wikipedia, Carlyle was apparently urging his readers to join in the struggle to end slavery, but he also encouraged them to be mindful of the need to try to avoid harming the slaves in the process.

Much of what is taught in New Age spirituality is the opposite of anti-slavery, and if you unpack it with an anti-racism lens, you’ll find that New Age spirituality is full of some muddy ass bathwater. But is it all worthless and dangerous? Is there any baby worth saving, protecting, and practicing in our spiritual lives?

I attempted to answer that question for myself, in humble inquiry with people like Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands, IFS founder Dick Schwartz, and my partner Jeffrey Rediger, who trained with Harvard medical school and also went to seminary at Princeton. I published my conclusions in my unpublished manuscript, Love Bigger, which the following is excepted from. Here are my thoughts on what’s the baby and what’s the bathwater.

But please, do yourself the honor of your own deconstruction process. This process of deconstructing indoctrinated beliefs and figuring out what to keep as part of your spiritual life and what to throw out is extremely personal. You’re welcome to use my deconstruction process as food for thought, but feel free to disagree with me here.