I'll admit that in the past I would indulge in spiritual bypassing to dismiss or avoid complicated emotions or issues. That's when someone distances themselves or represses their feelings by explaining them away using spiritual concepts and sayings.
I often chose to bypass when I was dealing with anger—an emotion that I still struggle to process sometimes. What spiritual bypassing would look like for me would be getting angry at someone—for good reason—but dismissing that anger by saying something like "I'm just going to let that person go with love." Letting someone go with love is a good practice, but there's a little bit of work to be done between the anger and letting-go parts.
Spiritually bypassing prevents me from acknowledging my feelings—something that in recovery we are always trying to overcome. It's a way of hiding behind spirituality or spiritual practices.
Offering up only "love and light" solutions or faking positivity to act as if our underlying feelings don't exist won't help us in the long run. I'm all for digging into the underbelly of the emotion or issue and then pulling out my spirituality card on the other side of it.
I'm becoming a lot less "love and light" and a lot more "shine the light on what's real and true" these days.