Spiritual practice, including the seeing of life from a more objective perspective, is one of the most life transforming things that a person can commit to. But like anything, it can be misused. When it is misused, is does a lot of damage to yourself and to others. And one of the most common ways that spirituality is misused is as a tool of nullification. Unfortunately, this is one of the most common ways that people use spirituality. 

Let’s meet Daniel. Daniel came from rough beginnings. His mother, who was a single mother, was a meth addict. He and his siblings were taken away by the state and put into foster care for a few years before they were placed with his grandmother. He loved his grandmother. But in the middle of the night one night, his mother showed up, stole Daniel and his siblings back and crossed the Mexico border with them all. There, she proceeded to use meth again. Daniel had to raise his siblings in a really rough environment in Mexico until he felt they were old enough to take care of themselves. And then, he crossed back over the border alone. In his late twenties, having always felt drawn to spirituality, he decided to find a teacher. He landed at an Ashram in Taos, New Mexico. Daniel spent years learning from the resident teacher there until he was invited to go to India to learn from the teacher’s teacher. He became a yogi and a very talented acupuncturist. For Daniel, spirituality is not a hobby. It is a day in and day out lifestyle. And in many, many ways, he is a truly transformed person. His spiritual practice is very much in alignment. Except for one thing… Daniel uses it to nullify his pain and anything that might cause him pain. And he uses it to nullify anything that causes other people pain. When Daniel describes his childhood, he does so with an air of total emotional detachment. He says things like “But I know that I chose that experience so I could learn to master my own internal alignment, instead of relying on other people to make me happy.” And “At the end of the day, it was better she kind of left us there on our own because if my younger brother had been raised by her, he would have been an addict too and instead, I got him into meditation.” And “I wouldn’t have it any other way because without that experience, I wouldn’t be who I am today. And I love who I am today.” 

Daniel has a very painful relationship history as well; he was married three times. The first time, his wife ran away with his best friend. The second time, his wife died in a car accident. And the third time, his wife got cancer and the chemo therapy caused near debilitating peripheral neuropathy as well as infertility, which was a big deal because Daniel wanted to be a father. But he uses spirituality to nullify this pain too. He tells himself that his relationship with his first wife, was karmic. That the reason for it was so that he could purify himself of the residual attachments he had. Also, so that she would reconnect with her birth mother, something she would never have done had it not been for him pressuring her to do so. And they are very close now. With his second wife, he will tell you that he knew from the very beginning in his soul that she would not be his partner forever, that it had an end date. He just didn’t know when that would be, or how the ending would come about. Daniel says that he married her (as well as the next woman) because that kind of thing really did matter to them, and he does what matters for his partners. As for him, he doesn’t need a marriage to be committed to something. He says that the accident was the universe clearing the space for him to be with his next wife, whom he had already met through a local breathwork group. He says that without the accident, he would have never gone into that relationship. Relative to his third marriage, he says that his wife’s cancer is every bit as much his teacher as it is hers. That it has taught him the value of just sitting still and that the universe has decided that he should not have children because of how much that would weigh him down and make it so he can’t help other people. He knows he is meant to be a tool of the universe and the universe has decided that he is best used healing people and showing people how to heal themselves. Also, he will tell you that his wife being homebound has freed him up to connect better with the friends he meets on his journeys when he is away from home. If she were with him all the time, he would not be able to give them his full presence and attention. He will also tell you that each time he works with his anger about feeling limited by her, he becomes more and more free. 

Unfortunately, some people look at Daniel with respect because of this way of being. To them, he seems almost enlightened and above it all. He seems enviably resilient. But Daniel is simply using spirituality as a tool to nullify his pain. He is using it to nullify the negative. He is using it to nullify thoughts that could cause him pain, situations that could cause him pain, truths that could cause him pain and feelings that could cause him pain. He is using it to re-write reality in a way that causes him to feel only good feelings.  

Even though it is easily mistaken as a kind of enlightened optimism, spiritual nullification is a form of toxic positivity. And it is easy to recognize because people who do it, will always put a positive spiritual spin on everything. Everything they have experienced and are experiencing and everything you have experienced and are experiencing.         

People use spiritual tools and spiritual awareness to nullify, negate and cancel out all kinds of things that cause them to feel pain, so that they don’t feel the pain and don’t experience anything unwanted. When spirituality is used like this, it is being used as a tool of resistance and avoidance. And it is in fact a form of spiritual bypassing. To learn more about spiritual bypassing, you can watch two of my videos titled: Spiritual Bypassing and Novocaine Spirituality. The reason that it is so hard to recognize, is because often when people use spirituality as a nullification tool, they often use TRUE things, such as universal truths, or truths about their choice to incarnate or truths about a situation they are in etc. to negate other true things. 

The thing is, when a person is truly awakened and integrated, things become an AND, rather than a negation, a nullification or a cancelling out. Using our example, it becomes “I feel very limited by my wife’s condition and very alone in the world. And at the very same time, I recognize that it allows me to be more present with other people I meet when I travel and it has forced me to confront my own relationship with physical limitations so as to free myself in certain other ways.” Not “I am able to be more present with people when I travel as well as work through my own self-imposed limitations, so I am now a very free person.” As if that negates the negative and the unwanted part of reality. Spiritual nullification is a problem for several reasons. 

1. It causes you to never see the reality of things and therefore prevents true awakening. Something that is very hard for people to accept is that two contradictory things can be simultaneously true. Something like: There is no death and there is death. The reason both is true, is because we live in a multi-dimensional universe. Things are true at a higher dimensional level that are not true at a physical level. This means, existence is very different for the non-physical self than it is for the physical self. People use the truths, observations, awareness, perspectives, laws and principles at a non-physical level to negate, deny and nullify truths at a physical, human level. They so often see spiritual reality as the only thing that is real and true. There are many different truths that make up reality. The spiritual truths are simply one truth within a system of truths. Contrary to popular opinion, they are not superior to all and they do not trump everything. Rather they need to be incorporated and integrated. Because spiritual nullification pulls you out of the full picture of reality, it pulls you out of your axis of power and you can’t actually make the right decisions and take the right actions. Just like all forms of denial and bypassing do. One part of reality does not cancel out another. To be truly awakened, you need to master the art of complexity and holding dichotomy, which is very, very hard to do. And which requires you to be able to hold pain, not just spend your life using spiritual practice to not be in pain. 

2. It causes you to push away your temporal, human self. You are two points of perspective. Your non-physical aspect and your physical, human aspect. One of the main points of spiritual mastery is to integrate the two. Unfortunately, a great many spiritual traditions ascribe all negative, unwanted things to the temporal. To that which is human. And teach that the point of awakening is to transcend beyond the temporal and human (most especially the ego), so that you are above it all and unaffected. If you ascribe all negative, all pain and all unwanted to the temporal and then use spirituality as a tool of nullification, you are splitting yourself off from, denying and disowning your temporal self, i.e.: your human self. You have effectively rejected and abandoned a major part of yourself and justified it by saying “that is not the real me. That is an illusion.” 

3. I want you to imagine going up to a little boy or girl who has just been sexually abused by their father and saying something like “you know, you chose this experience because every person in your family doesn’t know any better than to do to their child, what was done to them. You chose to take on this pattern and be the one in the family to change it.” Guess what? This may be true. But that truth does not erase and negate the hell of the experience itself. And if it is used to do this, which it so often is in the spiritual field, it is deeply abusive. When you are experiencing something negative, unwanted or painful, that is a part of you that is observing the negative and experiencing that pain. That is a part of reality and it needs to be acknowledged, seen as important, cared for, worked with and integrated. Not invalidated, suppressed, disconnected from, negated, pushed away, denied, disowned or bypassed. It does not need to be stuffed under the floor boards. To use spirituality to nullify pain is to use spirituality as a tool of emotional abuse disguised as loving, divine assistance from above. 

4. When you approach yourself or others with spiritual nullification, the appearance of something being healed, being in alignment and being empowered is false. In actually, you’ve negated, denied, suppressed, invalidated, disowned and disconnected from what needs to be healed. This means, it’s going to take you much longer to heal, actually be in alignment and find genuine empowerment. The negative and the pain and the unwanted will just keep coming back. In fact, it will keep escalating, keeping you in a loop. It is like injecting Novocain into a gangrenous wound. That’s not going to go well for you. 

5. When you use the spiritual to nullify the negative, the pain and the unwanted, you start to expect yourself to hold a standard of no pain. This means, should you inevitably end up in pain, you suddenly lose self-esteem. It’s akin to sinning in a religion. You are not spiritual enough or enlightened enough and you are failing in some way. If you spiritually nullify, you also hold others to a standard of no pain. And if they are in pain, it immediately causes you to demote them in terms of your estimation of their level of consciousness. It causes you to see them as less than, un-awakened, limited, less evolved, out of reality, having lost touch with the bigger picture and temporarily succumb to an infantile rather “human” state of consciousness. Today’s spirituality looks to get rid of human-ness. In the exact same way that religions have looked to get rid of human-ness for thousands of years. So, congratulations, if you use spirituality to nullify, you are a deeply traditionally religious person, your religion simply got a makeover called spirituality.    

It is time for spiritual people to stop using spirituality as a coping mechanism and as a tool of emotional escapism. For this to happen, people have to start recognizing when spiritual nullification is happening and stop mistaking it for a form of enlightenment.