The Paradox of Freedom:

Step four is the most crucial step and the one most often skipped. I see it happen all the time.   Step four is what is known as shadow work, inner child healing, emotional trauma healing, trauma healing, feel it to heal it, emotional clearing, or one of the many other names used to describe this process of cleaning up your emotional junk.   Basically, this step means going to the deepest depths of your psyche and emotional body to clear out all the garbage and baggage you have accumulated, not just in this life but in the many before this one. You must also take self-responsibility.   When seekers on the path skip step four, it is known as spiritual bypass. What does this mean? Spiritual bypass is what happens when you use spirituality or spiritual experiences as a form as escapism. We will dive more into this after we cover step four, but understand for now that when someone spiritually bypasses, their intent is to jump straight into the ethers, ignoring or bypassing the body with its uncomfortable sensations and trapped emotions that perpetuate deeply engrained subconscious beliefs.   This is typical and normal. Why? Because most find their way to spirituality and inner work because they have experienced some sort of trauma or unhappiness. And what does trauma create? Suppressed emotions that the body stores. Again, this has been scientifically proven. Check out the book, The Body Keeps the Score.   When someone has experienced an event that brought on a stress response (this is almost everyone), the natural tendency is to not want to experience it again. If they can have mystical or spiritual experiences that happen “out of the body,” they no longer have to feel anything in the body. That means they believe they have escaped their pain, trauma, and discomfort.   I saw this happen over and over again in the early spiritual community I was a part of. People would go to retreat after retreat as some sort of spiritual addiction to chase the “high” of the mystical or the “pop” that often happened at these events.   I also now see it so often in the people we work with—people who believe they are doing the inner work but who are really just trying to bypass all the discomfort that comes with being human and the human experience.   Like many others, I went through this phase.   As a former addict and someone who had been finding ways to numb and suppress her emotional pain her whole life, I was ecstatic to find something that didn’t involve an external intoxicant but that still kept me feeling “high.” Yes, going to spiritual retreats is a much better addiction than taking 10 Vicodin at a time. However, the underlying problem isn’t getting fixed. That means I would have always been on a chase.   This part of the process came as step five for me. This is why I can now see the importance of having it as step four, before step five, or at least alongside step five. More to come on that later.   Now, I am not talking about talk therapy here. Talk therapy is a great first stage of healing, but it certainly, in my experience and opinion, is not even close to the final stage.   That’s because talk therapy works only in the mind. So does meditation—mostly (except for in the case of Vipassana meditation, as described above). However, most meditation practices are intended merely to calm or focus the mind.   The problem is, you still have a body. And that body, and the emotions stored inside it, if not worked with, will continue suppressing and then projecting.   In other words, when you embark on a spiritual path or start doing the inner work, its most likely because you are experiencing some kind of discomfort or suffering.   What you are really after, and might not even realize, is complete and utter unconditional love and a feeling of connection and worthiness.   You came into this life as a baby, having those feelings and the knowingness of them as fundamental truths. However, over time, due to your interactions with the outside world and your caregivers, you built up emotions, thoughts, and untruths that covered them up.   Peace, happiness, joy, wholeness, connection, worthiness—these are elements of your natural nature. And that is what you and everyone else who begins the journey of healing are after.   Healing is just getting rid of the things that stand in the way of your natural state.   That’s why, to have LASTING happiness, you cannot skip this step. You must get to the roots and pull them up and out.