According to some Personal Development gurus, self-help would lead to self-destruction if spirituality were to be implemented in the incorrect manner.
In a recent edition of the LA Times, motivational speaker Danielle LaPorte revealed 4 clear signs for when self-help was becoming self-destructive. In a run up for the release of her new book “White Hot Truth”, the report explains how attractive the self-help scene has become today, but also points out how often the case is now that people just end up replacing one addiction for another, especially if the correct support is not given for getting through the psychological pain barrier.
The term "Spiritual bypassing" was thought up by psychologist John Welwood, who has defined it as people using spiritual practices or beliefs for avoiding or dealing with painful inner feelings and deep unresolved psychological wounds. The report claims that sometimes people are doing the right things for the wrong reasons, so they are required to examine their own motives as they journey down their new spiritual path by spending some time with self-reflection and asking themselves what they´re really looking for and why.
LaPorte went on to make a comparison for people being able to find spiritual practice and the path to self-help to someone finding their own beliefs soon after leaving a small, single church town. She said that people just needed to learn how to think for themselves, as well as being able to break away from any form of spirituality, just so they could really get to grips with what was actually helping them achieve their goals.
One popular personal development system called Saltori, currently being used by people coming from virtually 140 different countries, has claimed that it is not aligned with any form of religion. System creator Andy Shaw says on his website that Saltori has simply taken wisdom from many great and wonderful spirituality teachers often associated with religion, and putting their wisdom into easily understandable thinking structures.
In a recent interview Saltori´s official spokesperson Peter Halm explained that the idea of Saltori was not actually for teaching people what to think, but rather for teaching the mind how to think. He said: "Saltori is more like an everyday language, so just as we are now making use of the English language to communicate, Saltori works in the exact same way, but only in our mind." He also explained that the Saltori thinking system allowed people to dismiss negative thoughts like feeling anxious or being stressed without any effort whatsoever. He added: "Basically Saltori is just what any of those wonderful spiritual teachers had ever wanted to teach their followers. So should any negative or unnatural thought pattern ever return to a person´s mind, the Saltori structured thinking state just won´t allow them to stay and they can be easily removed with no effort at all, just the power of thought."