The Line Between Presence and Escape
I used to think stillness was always healing and I’ve had to unlearn that.
There’s a version of spiritual practice that softens us, opens us, gives us room to breathe. And there’s a version that does something else entirely. It doesn’t announce itself. It just starts, slowly, to become a place to go instead of a place to look.
A hard feeling rises. Instead of staying with it, there’s a reach for language that makes it smaller. “I’m just releasing this.” “This is old energy passing through.” “Everything happens for a reason.” None of these phrases are lies. I’ve reached for every one of them myself, more than once. They can be true. They can also be a way of ending a feeling before it’s had the chance to fully arrive.
Why does this happen so easily? Because looking directly at pain takes something out of us. Spiritual language offers a different route in, a way to approach something painful without quite touching it. And because that language belongs to the vocabulary of healing, it can feel like healing is already underway, even when nothing underneath has actually shifted.
I notice this in myself. I notice it in the people I sit with. A calm that holds steady but doesn’t lead anywhere new. A stillness that repeats, practice after practice, year after year, without much movement underneath it.
None of this means the practice was wasted. Presence is real. Awareness is real. But awareness can sit beside a feeling for a long time without ever fully moving it through the body. The two aren’t the same thing, even though they can look identical from the outside.
I don’t think the answer is walking away from spiritual practice, or treating every calm moment as suspect. The invitation is smaller than that. It’s checking in every so often. Asking what a practice is actually doing with the feeling underneath it, rather than assuming stillness always means something is being resolved.
And here’s where I’ve had to slow down myself, because it isn’t as simple as I first believed.
There’s been a growing cultural push against any kind of bypassing, spiritual or emotional, as though avoidance is always the wrong move. Psychologist Ethan Kross challenges that idea in his 2025 book Shift. He’s spent his career studying emotion regulation, and his research points to something more nuanced: bypassing our emotions, in the right circumstances, can genuinely serve us.
I think about this often. A few years ago, I went through a series of medical exams and spent days waiting on results. I watched comedies. I lost myself in small, undemanding tasks. Sitting down to examine every ounce of that fear, to work with parts, to track sensation through my body, would have been the wrong move for me in that moment. What I needed was distance, not depth.
This is the part that took me longest to accept: the art of spiritual bypass is more nuanced than most of us are taught. Sometimes presence is exactly what a moment is asking for. Sometimes “things happen for a reason,” or picturing emotions as clouds passing through a wide sky, is precisely the thought that carries someone through a hard hour. There’s no single rule that applies to every moment or every person.
Talking with someone who has walked this path themselves, and learned how to navigate it, can make a real diference. It often makes sorting through this balance far easier than trying to work it out alone.
The art is letting stillness reach our emotions and noticing the moment stillness turns into a place to stay.
For more, please visit my Subtack “Beyond Words” https://substack.com/@davilahealing