Spiritual Bypass in Everyday Ramblings

I took this on Tuesday when I went down to get my new glasses. It is raining now and will for maybe four days so not so conducive to taking pictures, at least outside.

Besides working and teaching and generally being back in the swing of things after my blissful four days away I am trying to squeeze in listening to presentations from the Sounds True Psychotherapy & Spirituality Summit.

As I move into teaching in a slightly more spiritual way I am open to guidance and ideas and role models.

Some of you who have been reading here for a long long time might remember that early in my time with Mr. Finch I started practicing yoga seriously and it became apparent that I was also struggling with chronic persistent low grade depression. My doctor gave me drugs and I took them for a year or so and particularly the anti-anxiety component was quite helpful but I didn’t want to keep taking them if possible.

I had seen a therapist in San Francisco for a number of years to help me deal originally with my older brother who was very much in my life and quite dysfunctional. (He just turned 65 and I saw him a few days ago, as he stays with Kes and Most Honorable’s cats when we go away.) Anyway I had experience with therapy.

Someone recommended a therapist here that was also a Zen teacher. I loved the idea of spiritually based therapy. This teacher had taken vows as a Zen monk and was a close assistant to a Japanese Roshi in L.A. who turned out to have a pretty serious alcohol problem and that Zendo broke up in scandal.

My therapist then went on to get a degree in psychotherapy and got married (to another therapist) and had a son.

As I was seeing him, he bought with his wife a new small energy efficient building across town where they had their offices and a lovely meditation hall (that could be used as a basketball court for the son in off hours).

After a time I started formal practice at the Zendo as well as seeing him and continuing with my yogic studies. My yoga teacher Olga’s studio at the time was a half a block away. All of this immersion was quite helpful in helping me cope with the depression and the deep challenge of my life with Mr. Finch and our life together in poetry. I was able to go off the meds after a year.

Then this truly bizarre dynamic developed between Mr. Finch, my therapist and me.

It wasn’t just transference, although there was an element of that, my therapist was actively participating and he told me he loved me. It was all very heady, I was writing a lot of poetry, good poetry and immersed in a whole heck of a lot of drama with our weekly poetry reading.

This went on for about a year or 18 months. Then Olga moved studio and things started feeling truly uncomfortable and I was seriously getting a distorted sense of my own importance while still feeling profoundly insecure.

Then he (my therapist) told me he wanted to kiss me and I am like, umm, no. Although steeped in romantic tragic fantasies growing up I admit that I had a strong desire to have him leave his wife for me. He told me throughout that he thought I had a natural gift as a spiritual teacher and thought I might be a reincarnate one.

He never touched me. After the kiss remark I decided to stop seeing him. I was deeply disturbed by it all and talked to a number of professionals, all female, except for one, about how to handle this. The consensus was to protect myself, grieve for the loss of the deep connection we had as if it were a relationship gone bad and over time let it go.

I did that.

I have seen him maybe four times since then, all in regards to specifically spiritual issues and have kept in light touch with the Zendo community.

The last time was about four months ago and things seemed different, the connection more distant, even a sense of irritability or not-there-ness.

And then a couple of months ago he sent out this amazing email to that community saying that he was leaving his wife for another woman and that they would probably have to sell the building that houses the sittings and retreats and change up his role as teacher.

My first thought when I read it?
Thank God it wasn’t me!!!

Many of the presentations in the Summit are about how this sort of thing can happen, this idea of spiritual bypass. That teachers can get pretty far down the path of enlightenment and yet have all these shadow issues left to deal with.

This all also helps explain all this horrid behavior we see in our world right now in the name of religion.

As I move towards teaching this material myself I pray that I will be able to hold an awareness and work with my own shadow side so that I never (or at least to the best of my ability don’t) create the kind of confusion and suffering my former therapist and teacher engendered in me and based on the response from the community to his apology his other students as well.

Last updated November 03, 2017