Thank you for this, Caitlin. This piece really resonates with me and is very useful. For the past decade or so I've really struggled with this paradox, and it has also made finding community a bit tricky! The spiritual bypass, or the cumulative sink into cynicism and bitterness when you pay attention to the world. It's also a dance between personal action and acceptance.

The personal struggle is my utopian intuition and hope about how things should be, crashing headlong into the reality of so much suffering on this planet, and waking up to find things are WORSE than I thought and definitely not turning into a giant hippy festival, seeing the illusion that things appear fine because some many people are numb and can't care. Now I feel more revolutionary minded, but the conflict and soul heaviness it isn't healthy.

It's good to have a reminder to balance between those things by not being defensive to feeling. My own sense is that we should have a lot of forgiveness for ourselves because the transition to greater feeling and less defensiveness takes a while and is very difficult.