Facing Feelings Without Fear

If “good vibes only” has ever left you feeling worse, you’re not alone. We dig into spiritual bypass—the habit of reaching for positivity to avoid discomfort—and show how it quietly amplifies stress, anger, and grief. Instead of shoving hard feelings away, we walk through a grounded, mindful approach that helps you feel safely, learn from what your body is saying, and move forward with clear action.

We start by naming what bypass looks like in everyday life: focusing on peace and acceptance while ignoring the messy, human emotions that keep surfacing. From there, we unpack why judgment and shame make emotions stick, and how the simple act of noticing and breathing can soften the charge. You’ll hear how anger can signal a threatened value, how impatience can mask unmet needs, and why “what we resist persists” is more than a quote—it’s a somatic reality. Along the way, we explore the good–bad trap, the “two wolves” story reframed through compassion, and the difference between processing and performing calm.

You’ll leave with a practical flow you can use today: notice what’s here, sense it in your body, breathe with it, and gauge the intensity. If the energy softens, shift into updating beliefs and behaviors. If it spikes, bookmark it and return when you have time and safety to tend with care. We also offer cues for resourcing—longer exhales, gentle attention, and support—so you can stay present without getting overwhelmed. This is not about wallowing; it’s about integrating emotion, aligning with values, and choosing wise action.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to help others find these tools. What emotion are you ready to feel—and release—today?

Chapters

• 1:40 What Spiritual Bypass Looks Like
• 4:11 Why Resisted Emotions Persist
• 7:18 Mindfulness As A Way To Feel And Release
• 9:59 Values, Shame, And The Good–Bad Trap

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:50

Can you say more about spiritual bypass? Yeah, so a lot of and I'm I was guilty of this too. I don't mean to use the word guilty, but I did this for a long time. And and I still do it from time to time too. It's very common to kind of focus on the pleasantness of life, on the beauties and the wonders and the goodness of life. And, you know, that's that's beautiful and it feels good. And you know, it's fine to do that. There's nothing wrong with experiencing the joys of life, or to hang out with a sense of peace, or to, you know, work on acceptance and care and all these things that are quite pleasant and also true. Unfortunately, you know, as human beings, we also experience stress, disappointments, sadness, sometimes anger. You know, there's a realm of emotions that are natural to all of us. I don't care who you are, like a hundred percent of us have these emotions naturally. And it's okay to have these emotions. So it's important not to sweep them under the rug or ignore them or resist them or exaggerate them, or to pretend that they're not there, or to think that we shouldn't feel them. You know, so a lot of us will judge these, say, unpleasant emotions, or what some people call negative emotions, as being bad or wrong. And usually that judgment is born out of a sense of shame. And so, therefore, like a lot of us will bypass those emotions or you know, ignore them, judge them. It's like I want to focus on the good instead. I want to focus on how I should be feeling, I want to focus on feeling better, I want to focus on getting over this, I want to focus on bypassing this. You know, I don't want to feel this. So whenever we bypass like this the natural tensions and stressors of life, that those energies will still live in the body. What we resist persists. What we ignore will usually come back to bite us 10 times harder later. It will usually lead to a breakdown because we're not open to being with the reality of these energies. One of the beauties of mindfulness is that we can notice the arising of, say, stress, the arising of sadness. We can sense the arising of anger, we can sense the arising of all these things in real time and allow them to come, but also like allow them to pass. We offer them the space to arise. We don't have to like act on them per se, but we can witness them with gentleness, saying, Oh, yes, this too is a part of this human experience. We can be with them without needing to resist them or escape them to in order to feel something else. We can be with these emotions, these stressors of life, and allow them to go, allow them to be processed, and we can learn from them. Oh, yes, there's a little bit of anger here because I I want to act and protect this person, or because my values feel threatened. Oh, yes, okay. So how can I align with my values? Or, you know, this tension is arising because I have a fear that someone's walking all over me or taking an advantage of me, or maybe I need to drink more water, eat something, or I'm not feeling like I'm able to do all the things I wanted to do today. So I can understand what's happening and why it's coming up, but I can also like when I when I'm present with it, I'm allowing it to be here and then I'm allowing it to go. But if I bypass it, it usually stays stuck in here because we're inherently like resisting being with it. What we resist persists. And when we resist just being aware of something, it will stay there until we acknowledge it without judging it. So when we judge it to be bad or wrong, that's a form of resistance and it sticks around and usually it gets stronger. And you know, most of us do it a lot, it can be very subtle sometimes, but it's really important for us to notice when we're doing it. Because with mindfulness, we the the goal is really just to be present for all of life, not just like the fun stuff, but the fun stuff and the sticky stuff. But again, it's it's important to note that it's not about good or bad, right or wrong. That the more we get caught in this paradigm of you know everything being good or right, or it being bad or wrong, is usually an indication of how we feel about ourselves. And so it can, you know, start to point to like, is there a sense of shame that I'm masking or avoiding? And I know this is a really touchy topic, but it's really important and to allow ourselves to be with these underlying judgments, saying, okay, like what what's here? Like, why are there these forms of reactivity in a sense of like deeming things a certain way? And what does that speak to and relationship to how I feel about me? And with shame, like me being good or bad, as if we're one or the other, which is, I argue, not the case. Like what feels real on a day-to-day? So we have these two wolves, the wolf of hate and the wolf of love. And I I don't think there's like people who are inherently say evil or bad people per se. I think we do have a sense of like goodness in all of us, but you know, we all have our tricky moments, our difficult sides, our patterns that we go into. And so can we meet ourselves with this sense of compassion for, you know, not being quote unquote perfect, whatever that is, or ideal. We're all human and it's a messy life, it's a messy world. And the more that we can embrace the messiness without judging it, the more we can connect with ourselves as loving, lovable people, and the more we can connect to others as you know, them being lovable people instead of you know deeming each person to be good or bad people. That's my take. Diana said, yes, it does. I'm judging my own anger today, my own impatience, wanting it to go away, and hearing these reminders is helpful. Yeah, it's okay to feel anger, and it's okay to feel impatient. That's okay. You know, if we can kind of sit with it, breathe with it, feel into it a little bit with gentleness. Oh yes, impatience is here, anger's here. Can I be with it with gentleness? Uh, Reiki Wellness says yes, that makes sense. I've just wondered if using tools that help quickly transform the old reaction pattern, associated beliefs, feelings, etc., not suppress them is a bypass. It's important to act, it's important to cultivate, you know, behaviors and beliefs and you know, changing our state and you know, not succumbing to things or not feeling overwhelmed by things or not navel gazing, or you know, it's important to not get carried away with like just feeling everything all the time. The recommended steps are to like to to to notice it's here, to sense into it, to breathe with it. And you know, if if there is a reaction to like jump out of it and just do or get rid of it, notice the reactivity, the impatience, and to breathe a little bit more with it, and to kind of sense into like how reactive does this feel? And that will usually give you the indication for how long to stay with it. So if you're if you're able to like be with the stressors or the grief or the anger or whatever, and it starts to feel like it's kind of softening, subsiding, moving, you're able to breathe, you're able to kind of feel it with some form of spaciousness, some perspective, you can feel it without getting too riled up or too overwhelmed, you know, like if the energy of it is kind of dissipating over time, then you can kind of then segue into work with beliefs and actions and new patterns and things like that. But if you're if you kind of just barely touch the surface of the energy of it and it feels strong, you don't want to then bypass it or quickly move into something else. I mean, you can, but you can't get away with doing that very often. You're gonna want to find an appropriate time and an appropriate space and an appropriate place where you feel safe enough to then tend to it. So you don't always have to tend to it like right now, but you do want to make sure to like bookmark it and find the space and time to tend to it with gentleness and tend to the you know intensity of it with gentleness until it doesn't feel as intense. You don't want to like quickly get through it, you just want to like offer it some space and time for you to kind of feel it, breathe with it and investigate it and explore it and breathe and listen to it and accept it and feel it. And then when the energy isn't as asn't intense, isn't as intense, then you know, I think it's safer to then work with states and patterns and behaviors and beliefs. So I hope that's helpful.