What a Piece of Rock Can Teach You About the One Thing No Retreat, Ritual, or Routine Ever Will
Why I’m Writing This
I’ve been sitting with a small poem for a few weeks now.
Just two lines, really:
A stone steps into a temple once and becomes God.
A human keeps going back, again and again and still can’t become human.
The first time I read it, I smiled.
The second time, it made me uncomfortable.
The third time, I recognized someone in it.
Maybe a few people.
Maybe myself, sometimes.
This blog is not about religion. It’s not telling you to stop meditating, stop praying, or stop going to the places that feel sacred to you.
It’s about something quieter and more unsettling:
The possibility that the very effort we put into becoming better might be the thing keeping us from it.
By the time you finish reading this, I want one idea to stay with you:
There is a difference between performing growth and actually undergoing it.
And most of us including me have spent a lot of time doing the former while believing we were doing the latter.
John and Liza
I know two people: John and Liza.
John is the one you’d call “spiritual.”
He meditates every morning. He reads philosophy. He talks about presence, awareness, and growth. His bookshelf is filled with underlined passages and folded pages. He attends retreats, seminars, and sessions.
He is always working on himself.
And yet John is exhausting to be around.
There’s a subtle defensiveness in him. A way of turning every conversation back to his journey. When something goes wrong, he explains it beautifully, spiritually, correctly.
But he never actually feels it.
John is performing transformation rather than undergoing it.
Liza is different.
She doesn’t talk about growth. She forgets to journal. She has no structured routine.
She has been through real pain, loss, failure, the kind that breaks people.
She didn’t come out of it glowing with lessons.
She just came out of it…
quieter,
more real,
more present.
And something happened to Liza that never quite happens to John no matter how many temples he visits.
Even the stone—unchiseled, ordinary, silent understands what that something is.
The Psychology Behind It: Spiritual Bypassing
In the 1980s, psychologist John Welwood introduced the term:
Spiritual Bypassing
Using spiritual practice not to transform yourself -but to avoid transformation.
It sounds contradictory.
How can someone work so hard on growth and still avoid it?
Because the ego is clever.
When real change approaches – the kind that asks you to feel something painful, admit something uncomfortable, or let go of an identity – it offers a substitute:
- A ritual
- A framework
- A performance of growth
Something that looks sincere… but keeps the real work at a distance.
John learns the language of healing. He can describe his wounds perfectly.
But:
Describing a wound and moving through it are not the same thing.
And often, the description becomes a way of staying stuck.
The Loop Most People Don’t Notice
- The retreat feels like progress
- The journal entry feels like resolution
- The meditation feels like arrival
All of it is real. All of it is sincere.
And yet
Tuesday morning comes.
The same reactions return.
The same defenses rise.
Because underneath it all is a quiet transaction:
“I am doing this so I can become something.”
And that very agenda is what blocks the transformation.
What the Bhagavad Gita Already Knew
This isn’t a new insight.
It was written thousands of years ago in the Bhagavad Gita.
In Chapter 2, Verse 47, Krishna says to Arjuna:
“You have a right to perform your duties, but not to the fruits of your actions.”
This is Nishkama Karma: action without attachment to outcome.
And it is exactly what the stone represents.
The stone does not enter the temple thinking:
- “I will become sacred.”
- “I will be worshipped.”
- “This will transform me.”
It simply exists.
John, on the other hand, practices for something:
- Peace
- Growth
- A better version of himself
And that “for” is the problem.
Attachment to outcome makes even sincere action hollow.
Liza had no such agenda.
Life didn’t give her that option.
She simply had to be in her experience fully, without negotiation.
And that’s what changed her.
Why the Stone Doesn’t Struggle
The stone has no ego to protect.
It doesn’t ask:
- “Am I doing this right?”
- “Do I look spiritual?”
- “What will I gain from this?”
It simply arrives.
No gap between itself and the moment.
That’s the whole secret.
Liza reached that same place not through effort, but through honesty.
At some point in her pain, she stopped managing it.
She entered it.
Fully.
Without performance.
And that one unguarded moment did more than years of structured effort ever could.
The Way Out of the Loop
Spiritual bypassing is not a failure. It’s human.
Even John Welwood emphasized that.
And the Gita agrees.
Krishna doesn’t tell Arjuna to stop acting.
He tells him to act differently:
- Without self-monitoring
- Without scorekeeping
- Without attachment
The Shift That Changes Everything
Instead of asking:
“What am I getting from this?”
Ask:
“What am I avoiding by doing this?”
Go to the temple but without an agenda.
Practice but without a transaction.
Show up without watching yourself show up.
Drop the audience.
That is the stone’s posture.
What You’ve Actually Learned
Let’s make it clear:
- Repetition without surrender is just rehearsal
- Spiritual bypassing hides inside sincere effort
- Nishkama Karma is action without ego attachment
- Real transformation happens when performance stops
John is not wrong.
He’s just… not arriving.
Liza didn’t try to transform.
She stopped resisting what was already happening.
And that made all the difference.
What I Keep Thinking About
John is sincere.
That’s what makes it difficult.
Because sincerity alone doesn’t guarantee truth.
The stone didn’t seek.
It was placed and that was enough.
Liza didn’t seek either.
Life placed her somewhere difficult, and she stayed long enough to be changed by it.
The Bhagavad Gita says:
Do your duty. Release the outcome.
The poem says:
The stone stepped in once and became God.
They are saying the same thing thousands of years apart.
Final Thought
The temple was never somewhere else.
The door was never locked.
We were just too busy planning the visit to realize we were already there.
