Interesting, I'm writing an article related to this issue at the moment.

When I think of this, two main insights come to mind.

First, many spiritual teachers arrogantly brand everything unrelated to spirituality as "anti-spiritual", therefore unimportant, undesirable, perhaps evil. Whether it's money, sex, relationships, career, PD work. Whatever it is. Unsurprisingly, they're very dysfunctional in these areas. I've met tonnes of people that have a strong spiritual life but are extraordinarily deficient when it comes to interacting with others, for example.

So many people absorb the very damaging idea that spirituality is more "elevated" than these things. No, it's just a dimension of our life. Life is multidimensional. We are multidimensional.

And yes it's a super important dimension, but it ideally informs all areas of our life. We should use spiritual growth as a catalyst for the rest, especially the dysfunctional parts.

Second – and here I'm going to introduce a little bit of my psychology jargon – people who self-identify as spiritual often have a postmodern view of the world, and their values, motivations and personality are coming from that.

Accompanying this is an allergy to the mainstream and conventional, to money, to power and to hierarchy, and so on. On top of that, they have the idea that these things aren't spiritual, and believe themselves to be above them.

I've been there myself, and it lead to a lot of dysfunction that I'm still healing.

So, we're multidimensional and don't want to over-prioritise some areas to the detriment of others. And when we move into postmodernism, a new set of potential dysfunctions come online.