Your thoughts, feelings and sensations are waves.

They come and go.

You are the sea – remember that.

Here is my take on why spiritual quotes like the one above, are an invitation to bypassing:

Because you are a sea with experiences and memories, with stored childhood trauma and survival tools – like behaviour & thinking patterns which you observed or created, in order to navigate your childhood world safely. Those old patterns run unconsciously and fuel your thinking and the way you feel about and experience the world even as an adult today. And as soon as a trigger comes along, your nervous system can quickly drop into a survival response that may be no older than your 4yr old Self.

So if we simply let our thoughts and sensations “come and go” we will actually never address the underlying unconscious trauma patterns and unsafe emotions and thus will be unable to process the way we think and experience the world. The thought-waves and sensations will just keep coming. And never mind how many coping strategies we employ, we will never be truly free.

So here is my invitation to dive deep into the ocean, to meet the unsafe. Here’s my “YES” to embodied trauma-therapy, and my “NO” to spiritual bypassing and a sea of quotes. Because once you move through deeply held unsafe emotions in a safe way, old beliefs and trauma patterns will loose their charge and actually fall away – you don’t need to let them “pass”, you don’t need to let go – instead you gain new trust, freedom and joy in living fully – like a free-flowing ocean with the whole range of  emotions – only now they are not so scary anymore, because they are not charged with old, unprocessed trauma.