Scrubbing a circle of dried candle wax off a hardwood floor at two in the morning is a specific kind of prayer.

Maya’s knees ached against the grain of the wood, the rhythmic scrape of the plastic putty knife providing the only soundtrack to a house that had, only three hours ago, been vibrating with the collective grief of 11 women. She had held the space, brewed the hibiscus tea, orchestrated the transitions between silence and screaming, and ensured that every one of those 11 souls left feeling lighter than when they arrived.

Her own lightness, however, was currently pinned to the floor by the stubborn residue of a cheap tea light.

He had posted a single sentence: “Silence is the only door that doesn’t creak.” Underneath that cryptic, arguably nonsensical phrase, there were 41,001 likes and over 801 shares. The comments were a sea of “Deep,” “Powerful,” and “Masterful.”

Maya looked at her own hands, still slightly stained by the charcoal she had used to help those 11 women draw their demons. She hadn’t posted anything. She was too busy doing the laundry from the retreat and answering 21 emails from participants who needed an extra bit of grounding.

She realized, with a clarity that stung more than the wax-burns on her fingers, that the entire architecture of modern spirituality is a house built by women and owned by men who only show up to cut the ribbon.

The Prestige Paradox

We are living in an era where the labor of the soul has been almost entirely feminized in its execution but remains stubbornly patriarchal in its prestige. It is a strange, bitter irony. You can walk into any wellness center, yoga studio, or meditation hall from Portland to Prague and find that 91 percent of the people doing the heavy lifting are women.

Yet, when we look for the “authorities,” the ones whose books are stacked by the bedside or whose quotes are tattooed on forearms, we are still looking at the same narrow demographic of men who have the luxury of sitting in silence because a woman is outside the door making sure no one interrupts them.

I discovered my own version of this disconnect recently. I had set my phone to mute, tucked away in a drawer, because I wanted to achieve a state of “pure creative flow” while writing about this very imbalance. I was chasing the masculine ideal of the solitary genius.

When I finally emerged, feeling quite holy and self-important, I found I had missed 11 calls. Three were from my mother, two were from a friend in crisis, and the rest were logistical fires that had started because I had removed myself from the “lower” world of communication.

My pursuit of spiritual focus had created a vacuum of labor that someone else-likely a woman-was going to have to fill. My “flow” was someone else’s “flood.”

This is the hidden tax of the spiritual world. We credit the man on the mountain for his perspective, but we forget the woman at the base of the mountain who packed his bag, dried his meat, and is currently raising the children he left behind to find himself.

The Lesson of the Lighthouse

Finn P., a man I once knew who spent 21 years as a lighthouse keeper on a jagged stretch of the Atlantic coast, understood this better than most. Finn wasn’t a spiritual teacher by trade, but he lived a life that many would call contemplative.

“Everyone wants to be the light. Nobody wants to be the rag.”

– Finn P., Lighthouse Keeper

Finn used to say that the light was the least important part of the job. The most important part was the brass polishing. If you didn’t polish the brass reflectors and the giant Fresnel lens every single day, the light would eventually become a dull orange smudge that couldn’t save a rowboat, let alone a tanker.

In the wellness ecosystem, women are the rags. They are the ones cleaning the glass so the light can get through. They are the ones doing the “brass polishing” of the human spirit-the repetitive, unglamorous, often invisible work of emotional maintenance.

And yet, the spiritual marketplace treats this labor as an infinite, free resource. It’s like the air; you only notice it when it’s gone, but you never think to pay for it or cite it as an inspiration.

The Citation Gap

Consider the citation gap. In a survey of spiritual and self-help literature from the last 111 years, the ratio of male-to-female authors cited as primary authorities is staggeringly lopsided. A man can write a book about “The Art of Presence” and cite 31 other men-monks, philosophers, physicists-and it is treated as a rigorous intellectual work.

A woman writes a book about the exact same topic, citing her lived experience and the wisdom of her community, and it is categorized as “lifestyle” or “memoir.”

This disparity isn’t just about ego; it’s about the very way we define “spiritual truth.” We have been conditioned to believe that truth is something that is “dropped” from a height, rather than something that is “grown” from the ground.

Because women are traditionally the ones with their hands in the dirt-metaphorically and literally-their wisdom is seen as common, mundane, or “merely” emotional.

The Economy of Extraction

The financial reality reflects this as well. I’ve seen workshops where a male “thought leader” charges $501 for a weekend of lecturing to a room of 201 people. Those same women will then go back to their communities and offer one-on-one sessions for $41 an hour, or often for free.

The man sells the map; the women are the ones who have to walk the participants through the actual forest, holding their hands when they trip over a root. It is a form of spiritual gaslighting. We tell women that their power lies in their “receptivity” and their “nurturing nature,” which is essentially a way of telling them that their labor is its own reward.

We have reached a point where the “divine feminine” has been co-opted as a marketing slogan, used to sell $121 leggings and $71 crystals, while the actual women embodying those principles are burnt out and broke.

Vision vs. Stewardship

I remember talking to a woman who ran a large spiritual retreat center for 11 years. She handled the plumbing, the payroll, the personality clashes, and the frantic midnight calls. When she finally stepped down, the board replaced her with a male “visionary” who didn’t know how to use the industrial dishwasher but had a very popular podcast.

Within 31 weeks, the center was in debt, the staff had quit, and the “vision” was a pile of unwashed sheets. He had the “light,” but he didn’t have the rag.

The problem is that we have separated “spirit” from “stewardship.” We think they are different categories. We think the person who thinks the big thoughts is more spiritual than the person who ensures the environment is safe enough for those thoughts to be thought.

But you cannot have a revelation in a room where you don’t feel safe, and safety is a product of labor. Safety is something that is built, minute by minute, by people who are paying attention to the details that the “visionary” considers beneath him.

Naming this imbalance is uncomfortable. It feels “unspiritual” to talk about credit. We are taught that the ego is the enemy, so demanding recognition feels like a step backward. But there is a difference between ego and equity.

When we allow a system to consistently erase the contributions of 91 percent of its workers, we aren’t being “egoless”-we are being complicit in a theft.

The Heartbeat of the Spirit

Maya eventually got the wax off the floor. She stood up, her joints popping in the silence of the 3:01 AM air. She didn’t post a viral quote. She didn’t seek 41,001 likes. She went to bed, but she did so with a new kind of resolve.

She realized that her labor wasn’t “secondary” to the spiritual experience-it was the spiritual experience. The tea, the cleaning, the listening, the 11 emails-these weren’t the “logistics” that got in the way of the spirit; they were the heartbeat of it.

If we are ever going to see a true shift in the “consciousness” of our culture, it won’t come from a new male guru with a better microphone. It will come when we start citing the Mayas of the world.

The next time you find yourself moved by a profound insight or a viral spiritual “truth,” take a moment to look at the infrastructure that allowed that insight to reach you. Who built the platform? Who organized the event? Who edited the book?

Most likely, it was a woman whose name you don’t know, doing labor she wasn’t credited for, for a mission she believes in more than herself.

I’m turning my phone back on now. There are 11 people I need to call back. Not because I have a “vision” to share with them, but because they are part of my circle, and the circle doesn’t hold itself together.

It takes work. It takes the kind of work that doesn’t always look like a prayer, but is the only thing that keeps the world from falling apart. If that isn’t spiritual, I don’t know what is.