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Start building your big picture mind & support the global emergence of Integral consciousness
“Integral Life is the most important and globally-relevant platform for the leading edge of Integral consciousness evolution”
– Eugene P.
Many of us do deep inner work and still find ourselves stuck, exhausted, or strangely unchanged. This conversation explores why — revealing how spiritual, developmental, and shadow work can quietly turn into forms of bypassing, and what helps growth become integrated and alive again.
Perspective Shift:
- Development can’t be rushed. If you don’t fully inhabit and enrich the stage(s) you’re currently in, you won’t create the conditions that allow new growth to emerge. Development doesn’t respond to striving; it unfolds when the current stage is lived fully and healthily.
- Later-stage maturity looks more like range than “height”. Health at later developmental stages isn’t about being “above” others. It’s about being able to move fluidly across stages — playing with a child, loving a conformist partner, engaging complexity without contempt. If earlier stages feel irritating or “beneath you”, something has likely not yet been fully integrated.
- Shadow work can itself become a bypass. Staring endlessly into the darkness isn’t “depth”, it’s avoidance of the light. Real shadow integration doesn’t trap you in trauma; it liberates energy into peace or aliveness. If healing happens and you immediately rush back to the next wound, you may be afraid of your own radiance and shine.
- Attachment patterns shape how development unfolds. Some attachment styles cling to stages and resist growth. Others chase novelty, leaping forward only to collapse when familiarity arises. Development isn’t just cognitive—it’s relational, emotional, and embodied.
In this wide-ranging and deeply integrative conversation, Integral Life host Kimberley is joined by Terri O’Fallon and Kim Barta to explore one of the most subtle—and consequential—patterns on the spiritual path: bypassing.
Often reduced to “spiritual bypassing,” bypassing is revealed here as something far more pervasive. It occurs anytime one legitimate domain of growth is used to avoid another—when meditation replaces difficult conversations, when shadow work substitutes for responsibility, or when developmental theory becomes a way to feel superior rather than more whole. The conversation reframes bypassing not as moral failure, but as misdirected intelligence: an imbalance among the three essential strands of human development—waking up (states), growing up (stages), and cleaning up (shadow).
Drawing on decades of research and clinical experience, the speakers unpack how bypassing shows up at different phases of development. They explore why profound spiritual realizations can occur without corresponding psychological maturity, how shadow work itself can become a form of avoidance, and why trying to “rush” development actually limits later growth. A recurring theme is balance: each stage of development must be fully inhabited and integrated, not transcended prematurely, in order to become a stable foundation for what comes next.
The dialogue also challenges common assumptions about trauma and healing. Contrary to popular belief, effective shadow integration does not require reliving or re-experiencing trauma. In fact, lingering too long in painful material can reinforce the very patterns one hopes to heal. True integration happens when insight is embodied—when awareness translates into lasting changes in the nervous system, relationships, and daily life.
At later stages of development, the conversation turns toward what maturity actually looks like. Rather than altitude or superiority, genuine late-stage health expresses itself as range: the ability to relate skillfully across developmental levels, to move fluidly between depth and simplicity, and to meet others with compassion rather than judgment. When transcendence naturally expresses itself as care, love, and responsibility, integration is underway; when it is used defensively, bypassing is close at hand.
Set against the backdrop of a Terri, Kim, and Kimberley’s upcoming retreat in Maui, this episode offers both a diagnostic lens and a hopeful invitation: to bring spirituality, psychology, and development into a single, living practice—one that supports real embodiment, relational integrity, and human flourishing in a complex and rapidly changing world.
If this conversation resonates, you’re invited to join Kimberley, Terri O’Fallon, and Kim Barta for a live, in-person retreat in Maui, where we’ll explore these themes experientially and in depth. This gathering is designed for those who sense that inner work, awakening, or development has stalled — not because something is wrong, but because something essential is asking to be included. Through guided inquiry, dialogue, and embodied practice, we’ll work with spiritual, developmental, and shadow dimensions together, creating the conditions for real integration to occur. Details and registration can be found at stagesinternational.com/the-gathering.
Key Questions
Here are some questions you can contemplate while listening to this discussion. We suggest you take some time to use these as journaling prompts.
- Where in my life might I be using one form of growth to avoid another? Am I leaning on meditation to avoid difficult conversations, using psychological insight to avoid responsibility, or using developmental language to protect a sense of superiority?
- What parts of my shadow am I repeatedly “working on” without allowing myself to enjoy the healing? After a breakthrough, do I slow down enough to embody and live from the new capacity — or do I immediately search for the next wound? What might it feel like to trust the light that has already emerged?
- Which developmental stage(s) in my life might I still be rushing through, or subtly rejecting? Where do I feel impatient to be “later,” “more evolved,” or “beyond” something? What richness, wisdom, or stability might I be missing by not fully inhabiting the stage I’m in now?
- Where do I feel disproportionately triggered, irritated, or judgmental? What might these reactions be revealing about unconscious adaptations, unresolved attachments, or disowned capacities in me?
- What would it mean to trust the pace of my own unfolding? If I stopped trying to arrive somewhere else, how might my growth reorganize itself naturally? What becomes possible when I allow development to emerge rather than be forced?
Previous Episodes of Evolving Spirit
Become a member to access the full episode
Start building your big picture mind & support the global emergence of Integral consciousness
“Integral Life is the most important and globally-relevant platform for the leading edge of Integral consciousness evolution”
– Eugene P.
About Terri O'Fallon
Terri O’Fallon, PhD is an Integral scholar whose research spans 40 years, including eleven research studies conducted in various colleges, public schools, and private research venues. Her most recent theory, and the culmination of a lifetime of work, is the STAGES model of human development. STAGES integrates several developmental models and is informed by Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and Terri’s own research, to form a robust and predictive map that is being used by numerous scholars, practitioners, and leaders throughout the world.
About Kim Barta
Kim Barta is an internationally recognized psychotherapist, award winning lecturer, writer and workshop creator. Kim possesses a golden combination of deep compassion, skillful application, decades of deep embedded experience, clarity of presence, and international recognition with rave reviews.
About Kimberley Lafferty
Kimberley Theresa Lafferty is a seasoned teacher-practitioner specializing in constructive developmental psychology and Indo-Tibetan Vajrayana. She leads multi-year, private spiritual education cohorts with the Confluence Experience. Kimberley co-leads, with Terri O’Fallon, the penultimate Minds I year-long developmental course of Stages International. She is an active Board member for the Association for Spiritual Integrity. Kimberley is also a wife and mother to a young son, living in a remote valley of the North Cascades of North America which deeply impacts her worldview and practice.
