V. The potential arrogance of committing to your healing journey.
Committing to a healing journey, or to an alternative spiritual path can make you, at least at first, feel “better than". We might think, deep down, “I'm better than all these other people because I've chosen this spiritual path, instead of following a religion that has tons of rules and dogma, or instead of floundering around haphazard in the world of people who don't have a spiritual practice.” Often people will have a rejection reaction towards a particular other spiritual belief system (usually Christianity) and spend a bunch of time verbally bashing it and considering how much better their chosen path is. The favourite thing among pagans, for instance, is to point out how all of the Christian holidays have pagan origins, based on this or that Goddess, etc.
This reaction does usually tone down over time, but where I find it becomes pathological is where the clinging to this version of spiritual practice as being the perfect one prevents the person from doing the deeper work of self-connection and healing. The words and concepts of new-agey, pagany-ness are good at making us believe that we are doing our deeper work when really all we are doing is scratching the surface. It's like repainting the living room when the foundation of your house is crumbling from water damage and thinking that will fix it.
The real work happens at the level of our emotions and our bodies and our real, experienced lives, rather than at the level of the conceptual or abstract world. It’s not good enough to know 34 different asanas but still be carrying around the unspoken, unlooked-at burden of childhood abuse, for instance. Use those asanas and that spiritual and body-based practice to dive deep into yourself one step at a time.