Conversations with the Masters

Robert Augustus Masters

Author of 11 books, including “Spiritual Bypassing:
When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters”
and “TransformationThrough Intimacy:
The Journey Towards Mature Monogamy”

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* Are you on a spiritual path?

* Do you want to learn how to recognize and transform the obstacles keeping you from living life fully?

* Are you ready to be brutally honest with yourself -- and get out of your own way?

During these interviews we'll explore:

* The common practice of Spiritual Bypassing and How It's Disconnecting Us From What Matters Most.

* How Diving Into Pain Is More Effective Than Positive Thinking.

* Why Boundaries Make Freedom Possible.

* From Disembodied Spirituality to Embodied Being: What Ignoring The Body Is Costing Us.

* How We Use Sex, Romance, Blind Compassion, and Spiritual Short-Cuts To Avoid Our Deeper Work.

* When Nondual Teaching Are Not Non-dual.

* Why We Want To Bring Shame Out Of The Shadows.

* What is Radical Intimacy and how we can co-create it in our lives.

* What’s right about what’s wrong in relationships?

* States and stages in the Evolution of Relationship and how sex complements or hinders our growth.

* The importance of expanding our emotional literacy.

* How to navigate reactivity, conflict, jealousy, and power struggles in relationship.

* How shame, guilt, anger, and fear are sabotaging our relationships, and what we can do about it.

* Exactly what is needed to create safety and deepen trust with your beloved.

* And so much more...

Note from Life Coach Mary:

It has been a while since my "spiritual edges" have been challenged so delightfully. In recent years, I've felt certain "spiritual teachings" were more like candy than grounded wisdom, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. Now I understand why. I started reading "Spiritual Bypassing" just a few short weeks ago, at the recommendation of a trusted colleague. I immediately felt "busted" since it was easy to recognize the various ways I've stunted my growth by engaging in common "spiritual bypassing" practices (a term you will soon become familiar with!) Sadly enough, there are countless teachers distracting true seekers by feeding them "candy." Not only is the book useful in illustrating ways people sabotage their path through "spiritual bypassing," Masters inspires fresh looking at some of the most challenging topics -- including boundaries, shame, sex, shadow and violent emotions like anger. The book is must read for anyone on a serious spiritual path, who desires genuine inner freedom.

I couldn't wait to finish the book before asking Robert to be my guest on "Conversations with the Masters."

After our first call together I quickly realized we needed another hour solely focused on the topic of, “Transformation Through Intimacy.” This conversation got me thinking about what was possible in my relationship with John. So, for our 5 year wedding anniversary, we decided to fly to Ashland, OR for a private, intensive weekend with Robert and his wife Diane. It was an extraordinary experience, which has allowed my husband and I to connect on deeper and deeper levels.

About Robert Augustus Masters:

Robert Augustus Masters, Ph.D., is the author of 11 books, including Spiritual Bypassing and Darkness Shining Wild. He holds a doctorate in psychology, and is a highly experienced psychotherapist, trainer of psychotherapists, and teacher of spiritual deepening.

His integral, intuitive work, developed over the past 33 years, dynamically blends the psychological and physical with the spiritual, emphasizing embodiment, authenticity, deep shadow work, emotional openness and literacy, and the development of relational maturity.

Those who work with him are taught, among other things, how to turn toward and enter their pain so that they might pass through it, rather than rising above or otherwise avoiding it. At essence his work is about becoming more intimate with all that we are — dark and light, high and low, shallow and deep, neurotic and transcendent, dying and undying.

He and his wife Diane work and teach in very close conjunction, doing all their groups, sessions, and trainings together.

About Diane Masters:

Diane Bardwell Masters is an intuitive healer and highly skilled psychotherapist, as well as a longtime songwriter and professional singer. She brings great heart and insight to the work she shares with Robert. Six years ago she began bringing her music into the psychospiritual work she and Robert share, finding that her singing and words greatly benefited their clients. Soon it became clear that when they were actively singing with her, moving sound through their bodies and minds, and at the same time letting the meaning of the words permeate them, they benefited much more; this way, the words became their own. Out of this arose Emergence, Diane’s latest CD (contemporary original chants in English) fulfilling her dream of creating music that truly heals and awakens.

Spiritual Bypassing: Avoidance in Holy Drag

Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984, is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is much more common than we might think and, in fact, is so pervasive as to go largely unnoticed, except in its more obvious extremes.

Part of the reason for this is that we tend not to have very much tolerance, both personally and collectively, for facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring pain-numbing “solutions,” regardless of how much suffering such “remedies” may catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely subtle.

Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many ways, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow elements, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.

The explosion of interest in spirituality, especially Eastern spirituality, since the mid-1960s has been accompanied by a corresponding interest and immersion in spiritual bypassing—which has, however, not very often been named, let alone viewed, as such. It has been easier to frame spiritual bypassing as a religion-transcending, spiritually advanced practice/perspective, especially in the facile fast-food spirituality epitomized by faddish phenomena like The Secret. Some of the more glaringly plastic features of this, such as its drive-through servings of reheated wisdom like “Don’t take it personally” or “Whatever bothers you about someone is really only about you” or “It’s all just an illusion,” are available for consumption and parroting by just about anyone.

Happily, the honeymoon with false or superficial notions of spirituality is starting to wane. Enough bubbles have been burst; enough spiritual teachers, Eastern and Western, have been caught with pants or halo down; enough cults have come and gone; enough time has been spent with spiritual baubles, credentials, energy transmissions, and gurucentrism to sense deeper treasures. But valuable as the desire for a more authentic spirituality is, such change will not occur on any significant scale and really take root until spiritual bypassing is outgrown, and that is not as easy as it might sound, for it asks that we cease turning away from our pain, numbing ourselves, and expecting spirituality to make us feel better.

True spirituality is not a high, not a rush, not an altered state. It has been fine to romance it for a while, but our times call for something far more real, grounded, and responsible; something radically alive and naturally integral; something that shakes us to our very core until we stop treating spiritual deepening as a something to dabble in here and there. Authentic spirituality is not some little flicker or buzz of knowingness, not a psychedelic blast-through or a mellow hanging-out on some exalted plane of consciousness, not a bubble of immunity, but a vast fire of liberation, an exquisitely fitting crucible and sanctuary, providing both heat and light for what must be done.

Most of the time when we’re immersed in spiritual bypassing, we like the light but not the heat, doing whatever we can to distance ourselves from the flames.

And when we’re caught up in the grosser forms of spiritual bypassing, we’d usually much rather theorize about the frontiers of consciousness than actually go there, sedating the fire rather than breathing it even more alive, espousing the ideal of unconditional love while not permitting love to show up in its more challenging, personal dimensions. To do so would be too hot, too scary, and too out-of-control, bringing things to the surface that we have long disowned or suppressed.

But if we really want the light, we cannot afford to flee the heat. As Victor Frankl said, “What gives light must endure burning.” And being with the fire’s heat doesn’t just mean sitting with the difficult stuff in meditation, but also going into it, trekking to its core, facing and entering and getting intimate with whatever is there, however scary or traumatic or sad or raw.

We have had quite an affair with Eastern spiritual pathways, but now it is time to go deeper. We must do this not only to get more intimate with the essence of these wisdom traditions beyond ritual and belief and dogma but also to make room for the healthy evolution, not just the necessary Westernization, of these traditions so that their presentation ceases encouraging spiritual bypassing (however indirectly) and, in fact, consciously and actively ceases giving it soil to flower. These changes won’t happen to any significant degree, however, unless we work in-depth and integratively with our physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and social dimensions to generate an ever-deeper sense of wholeness, vitality, and basic sanity.

Any spiritual path, Eastern or Western, that does not deal in real depth with psychological issues, and deal with these in more than just spiritual contexts, is setting itself up for an abundance of spiritual bypassing. If there is not sufficient encouragement and support from spiritual teachers and teachings for their students to engage in significant depth in psychoemotional work, and if those students who really need such work don’t then do it, they’ll be left trying to work out their psychoemotional issues, traumatic and otherwise, only through the spiritual practices they have been given, as if doing so is somehow superior to—or a “higher” activity than—engaging in quality psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is often viewed as an inferior undertaking relative to spiritual practice, perhaps even something we “shouldn’t” have to do. When our spiritual bypassing is more subtle, the idea of psychotherapy may be considered more acceptable but we will still shy away from a full-blooded investigation of our core wounds.

Spiritual bypassing is largely occupied, at least in its New Age forms, by the idea of wholeness and the innate unity of Being—“Oneness” being perhaps its favorite bumper sticker—but actually generates and reinforces fragmentation by separating out from and rejecting what is painful, distressed, and unhealed; all the far-from-flattering aspects of being human. By consistently keeping these in the dark, “down below” (when we’re locked into our headquarters, our body and feelings seem to be below us), they tend to behave badly when let out, much like animals that have spent too long in cages. Our neglect here of these aspects of ourselves, however gently framed, is akin to that of otherwise caring parents who leave their children without sufficient food, clothing, or care.

The trappings of spiritual bypassing can look good, particularly when they seem to promise freedom from life’s fuss and fury, but this supposed serenity and detachment is often little more than metaphysical valium, especially for those who have made too much of a virtue out of being and looking positive.

A common telltale sign of spiritual bypassing is a lack of grounding and in-the-body experience that tends to keep us either spacily afloat in how we relate to the world or too rigidly tethered to a spiritual system that provides the solidity we lack. We also may fall into premature forgiveness and emotional dissociation, and confuse anger with aggression and ill will, which leaves us disempowered, riddled with weak boundaries. The overdone niceness that often characterizes spiritual bypassing strands it from emotional depth and authenticity; and its underlying grief—mostly unspoken, untouched, unacknowledged—keeps it marooned from the very caring that would unwrap and undo it, like a baby being readied for a bath by a loving parent.

Spiritual bypassing distances us not only from our pain and difficult personal issues but also from our own authentic spirituality, stranding us in a metaphysical limbo, a zone of exaggerated gentleness, niceness, and superficiality. Its frequently disconnected nature keeps it adrift, clinging to the weight of its self-conferred spiritual credentials. As such, it maroons us from embodying our full humanity.

But let us not be too hard on spiritual bypassing, for every one of us who has entered into the spiritual has engaged in spiritual bypassing, at least to some degree, having for years used other means to make ourselves feel better or more secure. Why would we not also approach spirituality, particularly at first, with much the same expectation that it make us feel better or more secure?

To truly outgrow spiritual bypassing—which in part means releasing spirituality (and everything else!) from the obligation to make us feel better or more secure or more whole—we must not only see it for what it is and cease engaging in it but also view it with genuine compassion, however fiery that might be or need to be. The spiritual bypasser in us needs not censure nor shaming but rather to be consciously and caringly included in our awareness without being allowed to run the show. Becoming intimate with our own capacity for spiritual bypassing allows us to keep it in healthy perspective.

I have worked with many clients who described themselves as being on a spiritual path, particularly as meditators. Most were preoccupied, at least initially, with being nice, trying to be positive and nonjudgmental, while impaling themselves on various spiritual “shoulds,” such as “I should not show anger” or “I should be more loving” or “I should be more open after all the time I’ve put into my spiritual practice.” Fleeing their darker (or “less spiritual”) emotions, impulses, and intentions, they had, to varying degrees, trapped themselves within the very practices (and beliefs) that they had hoped might liberate them, or at least make them feel better.

Even the most exquisitely designed spiritual methodologies can become traps, leading not to freedom but only to reinforcement, however subtle, of the very “I” that wants to be a somebody who has attained or realized freedom (the very same “I” that doesn’t realize there are no Oscars for awakening). The most obvious potential traps-in-waiting include the belief that we should rise above our difficulties and simply embrace Oneness, even as the tendency to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower, spiritual and nonspiritual, runs wild in us. Subtler traps-in-waiting, less densely populated with metaphysical lullabies and ascension metaphors and far more discerning, teach non-aversion through cultivating a capacity for dispassionate witnessing and/or various devotional rituals. Subtler still are those that emphasize meeting everything with acceptance and compassion. Each approach has its own value, if only to eventually propel us into an even deeper direction, and each is far from immune to being possessed by spiritual bypassing, especially when we are still hoping, whatever our depth of spiritual practice, to reach a state of immunity to suffering (both personally and collectively).

As my spiritually inclined clients become more intimate with their pain and difficulties, coming to understand the origins of their troubles with a more open ear and heart, they either abandon their misguided spiritual practices and reenter a more fitting version of them with less submissiveness and more integrity and creativity or find new practices that better suit their needs, coming to recognize more deeply that everything—everything!—can serve their healing and awakening.

In the facing and outgrowing of spiritual bypassing, we enter a deeper life—a life of full-blooded integrity, depth, love, and sanity; a life of authenticity on every level; a life in which the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal are all honored and lived to the fullest.

“The Evolution of Intimate Relationship”

by Robert Augustus Masters

Intimate relationship has over the last four or five decades evolved so far from its long-established ways — mutating in diverse directions — that its very nature and structuring, once a largely unquestioned given, is clearly up for some deep questioning and reformulating.

Reformulating, revisioning, restructuring, reinventing — how we tend to look at intimate relationship is changing almost as rapidly as intimate relationship itself.

One result of this is that many of us do not have a particularly clear view of intimate relationship and its possibilities. Nonetheless, we have to admit that something is different about intimate relationship now. We look back just two generations, and it seems as if we’re looking back many hundreds of years. Things are shifting that fast.

For a very long time, intimate relationship was viewed and lived, with few exceptions, as an alternative — and not necessarily an equivalent alternative! — to spiritual life. There was the householder, and there was the spiritual seeker, and there wasn’t much overlap between them. As wide as this split was for men, it was even wider for women. Intimate relationship was something you did — or endured — until there was cultural permission to do something “deeper.”

Now there not only is a significant amount of cultural permission  — small by conventional standards yet substantial enough to register on societal radar screens — for something “deeper” to happen within intimate relationship, but also an increasing pull toward it. So intimate relationship has, at its leading edge, become less a prelude to spiritual opening and awakening, and more a catalyst or crucible for it.

This is nothing less than great news. Relational intimacy, especially in the form of mature monogamy, is then not something we have to get past or outgrow in order to spiritually evolve,  but something that serves that evolution — and our journey toward wholeness — without any need to bypass or marginalize our humanity.

Grounding our spirituality in the raw material and inevitable difficulties of daily life — as are amply supplied by intimate relationship — is much needed, leaving us more present, more aware, more vitally whole. Spirituality directly lived in the context of ordinary life is spirituality that can have a great impact on the quality of life. Staying plugged into our spirituality during our relationship’s bumpier times provides us with a much needed perspective, greatly increasing the odds that we won’t sweat over what’s not worth sweating over.

If we can access our spirituality — and access it at a deeper level than that of belief — during the inevitable trials and challenges of intimate relationship, we can probably access it just about anywhere.

Intimate relationship is perhaps the ashram of the 21st Century — a place especially ripe with transformational possibility, a combination crucible and sanctuary for the deepest sort of healing and awakening, through which the full integration of our physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions is more than possible.

Intimate relationship as a crucible and sanctuary for our healing and awakening — sounds good, doesn’t it? But once our honeymoon with this is over, the real labor begins. The path is not neatly laid out for us, in part because we, through our very relatedness with our intimate other, are co-creating that path, that relational unfolding, as we go, feeling our way — more often than not in far-from-straight lines — toward what really matters. In this, we travel together not only through adventures spawned by our mutual conditioning, but also, as we will see, take up residence in deeper stages of intimate relatedness.

These are exciting — excitingly alive and excitingly unstable — times for intimate relationship. The playing field for men and women has, in far more ways than not, been leveled, making possible encounters and openings not generally available when women were second-class citizens or worse, cut off from their own voice and power. Now men and women have far more of an opportunity to meet eye to eye, belly to belly, heart to heart, without the disempowering ethics of earlier times. A meeting of true partners no longer has to be such a rarity.

However, a level playing field is not without its own perils, for it’s easy to reduce it to a flatland of force-fed equality. Once that women had more rights and a more inclusive cultural context in which to live, they began leaving men, in trickles at first, then in droves — which brought more and more men to psychotherapy or at least to their knees — and men then began to realize that they would have to do more than flash some bucks, be nice for a while, or raise a fist to keep women with them. Many relationships became arenas of negotiation, wherein equality between the partners did not liberate, but rather only fed the status quo.

Neurotic egalitarianism seized the helm, declaring an across-the-board equality that not only increased comfort and apparent security, but simultaneously dulled and deadened. The husbands typically depicted on television sitcoms — sexless, inept, and often spectacularly unattractive — reflected and reinforced the notion that for men marriage was, whatever its trappings, a trap. And so on.

Intimate relationship shifted for many from barbaric to bland, infecting more than a few with nostalgia for the barbaric, because at least that had some juice, especially for the men. Affairs multiplied. Pornography infiltrated the mainstream, attracting refugees from the wastelands of conventional marriage.

There had — and very much needed — to be a move away from the banality and stagnation of such widespread conventionality, but it mostly went backward instead of forward, while often acting as if it were indeed moving forward (as exemplified by “open” marriage and multiple-partnering practices and their accompanying rationalizations). Monogamy started to take more and more heat, getting overassociated with the deadening of passion.

Nevertheless, amidst all this relational upheaval there was something else starting to emerge, something neither barbaric nor bland, something at once deeply passionate, caring, awakened, and rooted in integrity and love — a stage of intimate relationship that I call awakened monogamy (and have elsewhere referred to as mature monogamy). The territory between immature monogamy and awakened monogamy, an ever-shifting yet ever-fertile zone of potential relational evolution, features a remarkably rich mix of landscapes, emotional and otherwise, and can seem overwhelming in its complexity and overlapping concerns.

Awakened monogamy may sound wonderful, but how do we get there? After all, we can’t just read about it and then go live it. Much has to be done before this stage of monogamy is significantly available to us. For starters, we need to expose, face, and directly work — and not just cognitively! — with whatever is immature in us. We can’t, for example, remain emotionally illiterate or morally stunted if we want to be in a truly intimate relationship.

The passage from me-centered to we-centered to being-centered monogamy is not just a journey of ripening intimacy with a beloved other, but also a journey into and through zones of ourselves that may be very difficult to navigate, let alone get intimate with and integrate with the rest of our being.

The deep longing for a being-centered relationship, the aching for a passionately awakened partnership with our beloved, is our primary guide when it is openly felt and welcomed, providing incentive and inspiration for exploring places and patterns in ourselves that we otherwise would likely avoid or only superficially visit.

And it is into these places and patterns, these areas of darkness, pain, and heavy wounding, that we must go if we are to be truly ready for awakened monogamy. This is not some kind of romanticized shadow-work, but rather an odyssey that, asking everything of us, ripens us for a life big enough to include awakened monogamy.

In short, moving toward awakened monogamy awakens and matures us.

Awakened monogamy, if it is significantly awakened, does not look down upon immature monogamy, but instead cultivates intimacy with its qualities, however lowly, dense, or dark those may be. Everything has its place. Egocentric impulses, for example, are not banished or subjected to spiritual ambition’s ego-eradicating programs, but rather are approached with sufficient depth and clarity to divest them of any power to threaten or otherwise undermine our relationship, leaving them — like the rest of our “lower” qualities — as no more than colorful, functionally peripheral threadings that simply enrich the weave of our relationship.

So in the spirit of intimacy with all that we are, including knowing that we’ll be aligned with our heart’s deepest longing when we stop avoiding the work that needs to be done, let us together deeply explore the anatomy, evolution, and transformational power of intimate relationship. We are worth it.