Spiritual Bypassing & Quantum Phenomenon: the Dangers of New Age Healing Techniques.

We, as a society, love our quick fix schemes. 

Instant healing. Instant wealth. Instant relationship fixes. Instant manifestation. 

The only thing better than a system that promises us instant results in any one of the above mentioned areas, is a system that promises to encompass all of them in a total, instantaneous, and permanent transformation. 

Sounds too good to be true? Well that’s because it is. 

Our problems (and neuroses) do not form overnight and they cannot be disappeared with the flick of a switch, the wave of a wand, or some quantum modality. There are so many forms of bypassing involved in the attempt to do so, I don’t even know where to begin. 

So we will take a deep breath and begin with compassion. 

Of course we all want to feel better. We want happy, sexy, fulfilling relationships. We want wealth, and stuff. We want to lose twenty pounds without changing our diets, and we want peace without really doing the work. 

I mean, who wants to root around in the dark cellars of their unconscious and pull their personal and possibly ancestral skeletons out into the light? It’s scary. It’s hard. And it hurts.

Believe me, I get the appeal of the quick fix model. I get it more than many, and from different perspectives because I am an individual who once deeply believed in, and taught, such a modality. However, after several years of being quite successful, and deeply indoctrinated into the system—I walked away.

Over the years, in blogs, and on my social media pages, I have spoken, quite transparently, about my time teaching Matrix Energetics. 

On the website Matrix Energetics is described as:

a complete system of transformation that produces observable and verifiable changes which can be taught to anyone. Matrix Energetics encompasses a new state of being, a new way of experiencing the world we live in, and a more expansive way of accessing new possibilities - a consciousness shift.

There are a mix of feelings that come up when I look at this: pride, guilt, discomfort, grief, joy, confusion... all of that and more. 

Let’s start with the confusion. 

At this point in my life I do not actually know what that description means. When I read it, I feel a bit fuzzy in my head, and as if I am separating from my body. That, to me, over the years, has become an indicator of cognitive dissonance. I get similar feelings when I read any of the Abraham Hicks material. 

Modalities that are founded solely on mindset work innately lack the substance that the body requires in order to safely heal. 

Many of these New Age modalities, techniques, and schools of thought (like the Law of Attraction) would have us believe that it is enough to simply change our thoughts in order to change our lives. We may find ourselves using mantras, affirmations, or applying the power of positive thinking to situations that actually require us to be uncomfortable, apply hard boundaries, engage in deep personal work, and actually fucking feel our feelings instead of trying to wisp them away with a positivity paint brush.

Rarely do those modalities have the depth or empathic function to guide us into the heart of our discomfort. Unfortunately, what often happens is a form of gaslighting in which we are left feeling like we are failing with our spiritual progress and therefore our lives are a reflection of that. When, in fact, what is lacking is emotional support and a psychological structure that enables us to safely dismantle our coping strategies and adaptations and form new habits and constructs that encourage genuine maturity. 

The modality that I taught, practiced, and was deeply invested in is an excellent example of such processes. 

It wasn’t so much that positive thinking was lauded as the solution to all of our problems, it was more of the systemic reinforcement that things did not need to actually be faced and felt in order to change. A mere shift in perspective combined with a euphoric state of consciousness was all that was needed for rapid transformation to occur. 

In the years that I have been sorting through my own participation within this system and as a skillful perpetrator of this phenomenon, I have struggled not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water.  

The thing that I loved about being part of Matrix Energetics, and so many experiences that unfolded around it, was the connections that I made, the opportunity that it gave me to share myself, to become a potent public speaker, to touch people's hearts, and to help them heal.

I have tried to take the best parts and integrate them into my own practice now and to let the parts go that were unsafe or possibly toxic.

What I took away: 

The nature of our reality is energetic. We organize reality symbolically. We can learn anything more easily through play. (That one has been neurologically proven.) Play rewires our brain. Consciousness is organized through states—mentally, emotionally, and physically held. Reality is far more malleable than most people believe. 

Our stories do not define us, but they are important to tell. 

Things that I have left behind that have, over time and ongoing development, proven to be unsafe: 

Rapid or quantum healing of trauma. Trauma happens faster than a mind can give context to it. To attempt to apply rapid shifts to heal trauma actually creates a state known as euphoric recall. A person will remember what was good, bury (even deeper) the pain. And move forward in a state of hormonally induced dissociation. That is not healing. And that was largely what was demonstrated in Matrix Energetics as well as NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), and many other quantum healing techniques.

Our stories need to be shared, held, heard, and witnessed with compassion—not gaslit or whitelighted away.

The emphasis on performance and phenomenon (over grounded process) does not allow people to give new context to the stories (and trauma) that their bodies hold. Whereas we can shift a belief system in a moment, the energy of our emotions, and the way they are somatically held, need time to move and reconfigure. 

And then there was the utter lack of structure and safety. 

A big part of the phenomenon of this technique was called the collapse of the wave. What that looked like was people entering an altered state and, literally, hitting the floor sometimes unconscious. There were catchers for the participants and though the goal was to facilitate an experience—the playing out of that was geared towards knocking people out. I mean, what a great way to tell that something had happened. 

In a larger context these kinds of group settings (in which high phenomenon is being circulated through the individuals' and groups nervous systems) can create a kind of dependency. People came back over and over to "be in the field” because they can’t reproduce the effects when home alone. There is a component of glamorization, a high followed by a state of disillusionment, and then the comedown. Then the need emerges to re-experience it all (the music, the people, the feelings) which—just like any addiction—perpetuates the cycle of use.

When I finally quit teaching—after months of questioning myself and experiencing something which felt dark and manipulative underlying the surface—I found myself thrown into a state of recovery which was, in many ways, worse than when I had detoxed from meth. 

I lost the high. I lost my community. And I lost a large portion of my income. That was the cost of me being in integrity with myself.

Where we must leave room for some nuance is in the fact that many people, including myself, had profound healing experiences and, or, touched what can be described as nothing less than the mystical nature of reality.

I feel there was a Deep Feminine component underlying the field (of Matrix Energetics) and—as is often the case with the Feminine—there was a distortion, manipulation and narcissistic, psychic harvesting that accompanied the way the field was structured. Some of that came from the creator of the technique’s own psychological distortions. 

Regrettably, but rather reliably, wherever there are people present who are in the active process of releasing trauma: predators will be drawn. 

Many women over the years were aware of this component as well as blatant misogyny that was presented from the stage and recreated from certain members of the audience.  I, myself, wound up feeling fed off of and psychically and emotionally drained. That was the reason I eventually walked away (though I did not have the language to articulate it at the time). 

I knew it was wrong for me to continue, to pretend that all was well within my family system or that I, by a long shot, had my shit together.

As I said, the value of being part of this for me is that I met many beautiful souls over the years, some of whom I am still connected with after over a decade, some of whom are still clients and students. 

I have struggled with this, with my personal relationship with my own father (Matrix Energetics creator), and with my own role in sometimes gaslighting people around their stories—as that was what was modeled by my mentor. 

I have done my damn best to absorb what is useful, discard what is not, and to make amends. 

And for anyone who knows me (or is getting to), these are the reasons that I speak passionately about spiritual bypassing and the dangers of quantum modalities (specifically in regards to trauma healing).

All of that being said: There was genuine Grace present. We who were there felt Her.

Grace is the state that I have taken away from all of this. Grace and Her intrinsic connection with Grief, yet another state that is typically bypassed and even demonized in many New Age healing modalities.  

So it is with humility that I share this story. It is with courage that I claim my own energy and the parts I played. And it is with Grace, with willingness, and the ability to embody and transmit Her, that I offer any healing that may be conveyed through its telling.

~Justice Bartlett

To learn more about my work and the sessions and classes I offer visit www.bedheadmystic.com