In ‘'Grounded Spirituality'’, I critically review Eckhart Tolle’s book, ‘The Power of Now’. It is my personal view that it is a first stage awakening manual, one that mistakenly calls itself “A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment.” It begins with Tolle’s story of years of shifting from suicidal depression to his “true nature” in the course of a single night. In this article Tolle endeavors to make a distinction between “spiritual bypassing” and “avoidance.” It doesn’t work. Because spiritual bypassing IS self-avoidance masquerading as awakening. I do understand that there is value in aspects of his teachings—moments of relief, the gaining of perspective, the developing of an inner witness—but what concerns me most is where they take someone if they become a habitual way of being. This is particularly worrisome for many trauma survivors because they are drawn to teachings that invite them to transcend their lived experience. And yet, if they don’t consciously return to their bodies at some point in time, they often come crashing down to earth. I first became quite interested in the subject of bypassing while making my documentary ‘Karmageddon’. My interest went to the next level when a friend suicided after getting immersed in the ‘New Cage Movement’ for far too long. Now certain that her emotions were an illusion and her personal story misidentified, she went further down her new habit hole and stopped healing her wounds altogether. As often happens, those bypassed wounds came back to the surface and eventually took her life. I respond to some of Mr. Tolle’s claims from the article in the critique below:
Tolle: Awareness or presence is never avoidance. In awareness, you allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you feel; you do not repress it in any way. Do you sense unresolved pain within? How are you going to resolve the pain except by allowing yourself to feel it?
Brown: Actually, awareness/presence can be AVOIDANCE, if the motivation of our quest for it is primarily to avoid elements of the human experience that are painful and uncomfortable, or if the techniques employed prevent a true access to all that we are holding emotionally/energetically. An emotionally blocked person’s experience of presence is not the same as one whose entire being is energetically fluid and present. We may believe we are “present”, but we cannot be fully present if we are not able to access- somatically, energetically, emotionally- our unhealed traumas. If we have spent years burying our stuff somatically, and trying to rise above it with an addiction to witnessing and meditation, then we are not fully present. We are actually quite the opposite. We are trapped inside the witnessing mind (and confusing that head-tripping game with presence), and somewhat or altogether dissociated from the world of feeling. Only through deep, enlivened, embodied feeling can we open the gate to presence.
Presence is a whole-being experience, and it’s also a full-energy experience. In PON, Tolle says, “silence is an even more potent carrier of presence”. This idea is very common in the patriarchal spiritual traditions, as is the suggestion that our ego, the mind, our ‘stories,’ our feelings, somehow prevent us from being present. In truth, we cannot be fully present if all of our aspects aren't welcome. Nor can we be fully present if we confine ourselves to silence or stillness alone. Those states only access some threads of the human experience. Others arise through sound, energy, vitality, activity. We can understand why some bypassers and trauma-survivors would choose to elevate silence as the path. It may be less triggering for them, particularly if they were wounded by word and tone. It’s a way to control their environment, so that the triggers momentarily subside. But its only accessing one level of presence. Because we are built to move, and to sound, and to shout, and to also access feeling in these ways. To put it simply, most of us cannot access the true and inclusive “power of now”, because we are still ruled- individually and collectively- by the “power of then.” If we want to be truly present, we must come back to life in all regards and clear our emotional debris. Detachment is a tool- it’s not a life.
Tolle: I believe it was Carl Jung who said, “The fundamental problems are never solved but they are outgrown,” which means you reach a different level of consciousness and there the problem is no longer that important. You grow out of it.
Many problems cannot really be solved. Psychoanalysis tries to solve all the unresolved issues in your life, but you can go on and on with that because the more you delve into it, the more things you’ll discover and at some point you have to step into another state of consciousness that is simply awareness. And then, those things are transcended. You don’t suppress; they’re no longer that important. And some things will subside and dissolve.
Brown: It is true that some problems cannot be solved, and that psychoanalysis is not the solution to many problems. Because excessive analysis perpetuates emotional paralysis. But the answer is not to ‘transcend’ our issues, nor is it to ‘turn around’ our stories. It’s to go deeper into them, through feeling-based practices- in the hopes of healing and transforming them. Repressed emotions are unactualized spiritual lessons. If we don’t work through our material, we can’t actually grow as spiritual beings. Because emotional and spiritual maturity are synonymous. We can’t grow or become more truly present if we keep ‘rising above’ our stuff. We can't become fully "aware", if we limit our range of e-motion to silence and stillness. What he is talking about is what I call the “transcendence bypass”, which I define as so: The tendency to bypass reality through ‘transcendent’ means: a rising above, a ‘heightened’ quest, an ungrounded flight of fancy. Common amongst those who identify themselves as “spiritual,” the transcendence bypasser has abandoned healthy detachment, floating off into the dissociative abyss until reality brings them back to the ground. The great irony is that transcendence bypassers are actually the ones most controlled by earthly matters. Their addiction to the above is driven by their unresolved issues down below. They have actually trance-ended nothing. It’s all still waiting for them here on Mother Earth.
Tolle: Whatever it is you need to understand about your unresolved issues will come into the light of awareness when you allow yourself to feel what you feel. You may occasionally get an insight into something that happened in the past or that caused the pain. The important thing is that you don’t perpetuate or add to the muddle of painful feelings within through mind-identification and further thinking so that your emotions begin to use your mind.
Brown: Yes, but we can’t ‘feel what we feel’, if we don’t engage in body-centered practices that access/open the holdings. Simply sitting in silent stillness will not bring us into contact with all of our unresolved issues and feelings. Some of it, perhaps, but not all. It’s too controlled and contained to activate many of the holdings. This is why I believe that body-centered psychotherapies like bioenergetics and core energetics are actually spiritual practices that support a full-bodied experience of presence. Because they make us aware of what we are holding within the body, itself. And they provide techniques to excavate the memories, the feelings, the unsaid words, the aliveness (presence) that got buried with the traumas. Most of us are graveyards of trauma, and transcendence practices can provide us much needed relief, but they will not bring us fully back to life or save our species. Because we are not automatons- we are beings of deep feeling. We have to go down into the body, and bring ourselves back to life through healing and enlivening practices. As for the backwards idea that “mind-identification” is the issue, it is not. The primary cause of our unhappiness is not our thoughts. The monkey mind is not the source of our anxiety. It’s a symptom of it. Forget the monkey mind. The mind is not the enemy—unhealed pain is. Men have been blaming the mind for their neuroses for centuries, while deftly avoiding that which sources its maladies—somatic constrictions, and unprocessed emotions stored in the body itself. It’s like losing your keys somewhere in the house, and looking for them in the car. Useless, useless, useless. Until they stop blaming the mind—and recognize that its neuroses stem from the unresolved emotional body—there will be no liberation. Shifting out of unhappiness is not a cerebral process—that’s just another ineffective band-aid. It is a visceral full-body experience. It’s the “monkey heart” that’s the issue: the state of inner turbulence and agitation that emanates from an unclear heart. The more repressed your emotional body, the more repetitive your thoughts. Flooded with unhealed emotions and unexpressed truths, the monkey heart jumps from tree-top to tree-top, emoting without grounding, dancing in its confusion. Often misinterpreted as a monkey mind, the monkey heart is reflected in repetitive thinking, perpetual anxiety, and negative imaginings. All of which are emanating from the emotional body.
Bottom line is that you cannot heal and resolve your emotional material with your mind. Knowing our issues is not the same as healing our issues. Your emotional material does not evaporate because you watch it. I have known many who could watch and name their patterns and issues—as if they were scientists, researching their own consciousness—but nothing fundamentally changed, because they refused to come back down into their bodies and move their feelings through to transformation. It’s safe up there, above the fray, witnessing the heartache without actually engaging it. Yes, you may be able to get so skilled at a witnessing consciousness that you can overpower your triggers. But that’s not presence. Real presence comes through the open heart. The key to the transformation of challenging patterns and wounds is to heal them from the inside out. Not to analyze them, not to watch them like an astronomer staring at a faraway planet through a telescope, but to jump right into the heart of them, encouraging their expression and release, stitching them into new possibilities with the thread of love. You want to live a holy life? Heal your heart. That’s the best meditation of all.
Tolle: You can’t achieve absolute perfection on the level of form. There will always be certain limitations here and there, things that have been around and lived inside you perhaps, since childhood. They may continue. So it’s only really through transcendence that you go beyond whatever is there that is unresolved but still carried around within you. If you don’t add to the pain within, then it gradually subsides and dissolves in the light of presence.
Brown: NO. Backwards again. First of all, we are not here to become perfect. We are here to become real… truly fiercely heartfully human. Second, we are ONLY form. The bashing of the allegedly imperfect nature of form is fundamental to patriarchal spiritualities, because they are in so much pain that they elevate formlessness, as though we can actually become that. We can’t become that, until we die. Until then, we are in-form and we must work to heal and integrate all of our aspects. Third, what he is saying is that if you float above your humanness for long enough, your pain will simply fade away. This is patently untrue. What actually happens is that it actually concretizes and solidifies, and turns inward against the self in the form of emotional and physical disease. And, again, we cannot taste true presence with so many layers of emotional armor and repressed pain clogging up our psycho-emotional, energetic, and somatic structures. What he is describing is not a true presence. He is talking about a meditative stupor that seeks to dissociate from the pain we hold. He is inviting us to rise above our humanness. We can’t. We’re not birds. We’re human, and there is no complete experience of the “now”, if we seek to transcend it. Presence is a whole-being experience.
THE ABANDONMENT WOUND HEALING COURSE
I know the abandonment wound well. It is my primary nexus wound, one that has found its way into every part of my life. That’s the thing about the abandonment wound. We can imagine it something very specific, a singular issue in and of itself, but it is often so much more than that. It is often a self-perpetuating way of being, one that cuts so deep, and was felt so early in our lives, that it often influences every part of our lives: our thinking, our emotional body, our physical well-being, our notions of meaning and directionality, our relationship choices and behaviors, our sense of security in our own skin and in the world itself. In short, there is very little in our lives that cannot be impacted by an unresolved abandonment wound.
I didn’t have words for it at first. The wound arrived in the form of a strangely jealous response at a teenage party. My friend was having a conversation with my teenage dream girl at a party and I was all spun out from it. It was so uncomfortable that I had to leave the party. It wasn’t just that they were chatting. It was also the fact that he had the same first name as one of my brothers. When that brother arrived, I had felt betrayed by my mother. She had already been relationally aloof and now she was even more distant. I believe that this is where the abandonment wound was born. It was so early and so primal that it went deep into my bones. And so when my friend connected with the object of my affection, and he had the same name, I was plummeted back into those early feelings of abandonment. And not just abandonment—betrayal and jealousy as well. They were all wrapped up together, in a gnarly little bow. (I would later name this nexus wound… ‘J.A.B.: The Jealousy, Abandonment, and Betrayal Trigger’).
When I began to explore it therapeutically later in life, I found very few therapists that understood it. It’s not that they didn’t have abandonment wound issues—nearly everybody does—but rather, that it went so deep that it was out of bounds. Even bringing it up seemed to make an assortment of therapists uncomfortable. And I understood this. When the wound is activated, it is all you can do to manage your daily life. When its not activated, the last thing you want to do is touch it. As a result, there were very few resources out there to support my process. There were resources for a variety of other unresolved issues—attachment patterns, anxiety disorders, agoraphobia, depression—but not abandonment.
So I created a course. I wrote and recorded it during the pandemic, when my wound splintered through to the surface. I was just triggered enough to write it, but not so triggered that I was awash in primal discomfort. In other words, I could think straight 😊. There is no perfect antidote for a wound that requires ongoing maintenance, but I believe that the course makes a solid contribution to healing and understanding it. If you too struggle with an abandonment wound, here is the link to the download course: