19/08/2026
The Sacred Was Never a Hierarchy
I have been drawn alot lately to write about the way we measure spirituality. How long have you been doing this work? How many years have you been practising? Who taught you? What qualifications do you have? How many ceremonies have you sat in? How developed are your gifts?
Somewhere along the way, something that was once deeply sacred seems to have become another place where human beings rank themselves against one another. As though the number of years someone has consciously walked a spiritual path automatically makes them more spiritual, more gifted, more knowledgeable or even more qualified than the person beside them.
But does it?
I don’t believe time alone can determine any of those things. Experience absolutely has value. Study has value. Training has value. Teachers, elders and those who have devoted years of their lives to a particular practice can carry incredible wisdom. But longevity alone is not a qualification.
Someone can spend thirty years doing spiritual work and still lack humility, integrity, discernment, self-awareness or the ability to hold another person safely. Someone else may have consciously stepped into their spiritual work much more recently, yet carry profound lived experience, natural gifts, deep intuition, wisdom and an ability to connect with people in a way that cannot simply be measured in years.
Time can give us experience, but it does not automatically give us depth. It does not automatically make us wiser, more gifted or more capable, and it certainly does not make one soul greater than another.
We did not suddenly become spiritual the day we picked up a deck of cards, sat in meditation, trained in a modality, entered a ceremony or learnt the language to describe what we were experiencing. We were spiritual before we ever had words for it. Before the courses, before the certificates, before the titles and before anyone told us what our gifts were supposed to look like.
If we believe the soul is ancient, then surely we also have to acknowledge that none of us truly knows what another soul carries. We do not know what they have experienced before arriving at this point in their life. We do not know what has been carried through generations. We do not know what has been awakened through grief, trauma, love, loss, motherhood, survival, transformation or simply through living.
No two people arrive here carrying exactly the same story. No two people experience the world in exactly the same way. So why would we expect their spiritual gifts to look the same?
One person may hear. Another may see. Another simply knows. Someone may work through their hands, while someone else works through their words. Someone may be able to hold a room without saying anything at all. Another may have spent decades consciously developing a gift that somebody else seems to have carried naturally from childhood.
Different does not mean less. Newer does not mean less. Having more years behind you does not automatically make you more qualified to decide the validity of somebody else’s gift.
There is also an important difference between being qualified in a particular modality and being somehow more spiritual. A qualification can show that someone has completed training in a specific practice. It can be important. It can create standards. It can demonstrate knowledge. But a certificate cannot measure the depth of a person’s soul. It cannot measure compassion, integrity, intuition, lived experience or the way someone has learnt to sit beside another person in their most vulnerable moments.
And it certainly cannot give somebody ownership over the sacred.
Perhaps this is where we have become confused. Experience became authority. Authority became status. Somewhere along the way, status became hierarchy.
I find that difficult to reconcile with spirituality, because the sacred was never supposed to be a competition.
Our ancestors did not gather around fires to determine who was the most enlightened person sitting within the circle. There were roles. There were elders. There were teachers, healers, storytellers, medicine people and keepers of knowledge. Those roles deserved respect, but there was also an understanding that everyone carried something. Everyone had a place within the circle. Everyone belonged to something greater than themselves.
Perhaps that is what we are being asked to remember. Not who stands above whom, but how we stand beside one another.
Maybe spiritual maturity is not measured by how many years you have been doing this work. Maybe it is revealed in how deeply you listen, how humbly you carry what you have been given, how carefully you hold another person’s vulnerability, how willing you remain to learn and how much respect you have for what you do not know.
Maybe it is also shown in whether you can honour another person’s gifts without needing them to look like yours, and whether the people who come into your presence leave feeling smaller beneath your knowledge or more connected to the wisdom already living within themselves.
We are all individuals. We carry different stories, different gifts, different wounds, different lessons, different wisdom and different ways of remembering.
And if we truly believe that our souls are ancient, then perhaps we should be very careful about believing we can measure the depth, ability or qualification of another soul by how many years they have publicly called themselves spiritual.
Maybe some people are not beginning.
Maybe they are remembering.
And maybe what this generation of spirituality needs most is not another hierarchy. Maybe it needs a return to reverence. A return to humility. A return to integrity. A return to the understanding that these gifts are sacred, that ceremony is sacred, that wisdom is sacred, that the Earth is sacred and that the person sitting beside us is sacred too.
None of us owns the sacred. None of us sits above it.
We are simply being trusted to carry our own part of it.
Scribed by Pippa J Thomas
