Spirituality- From Soul to System

This is the deeply sad story of the transformation of Spirituality
and how it went from Soul to System

In the early story of humanity, there was no need for the word spirituality.
Why?
Because life itself was sacred.
Children were born into a world where the soul was a presence, and it was in all around them.

There was no need to “awaken” because we were already born into, raised and living, in the alignment and interconnectedness of the divine.
Already inside the sacredness of the land, of the stars, of the seasons, and all the ancestors that came before us.
There was nothing to reach for, only something to deepen into and become one with.
Not something consciously chosen, it just was.

But over time, especially later with the rise of modernity, colonization, exploatation, empire, and industrialized way of thinking and being. And spiritually, we began to drift and get lost.
And the further away we drifted from soul, from our connection to earth, from the mystery in and beyond life, from interconnectedness through us and through all …
the more we started to believe that we needed to find something outside ourselves.

Almost since beginning of spirituality in the human story, spirituality was very slow, it was very quiet, and always deeply sacred. During that time it moved through forests and later into temples, through the understanding of breath, around the sacredness of firelight, through deep grief and heartfelt songs sung by ancestors long before us.
It was not a brand and it sure was not a course.
It was never ever a timeline. Or stages. Or even thought of in these ways.
It was always a way of living.
Living, in a close relationship with the invisible world, the mysterious but deeply felt spiritual world, the world beyond this that we could not see, but could always feel, hear, and experience.
It was in the art of listening taught from birth, and then embodied through life.
It was also through remembering our place in something vast, so alive, and deeply holy, that was not only lived but also spoken of by the precense of elders, through storytelling and the profound wisdom from those before us, those who told stories long before us.

But not too long before our current time, and especially in the modern West, this deep, intimate soul-path started to change, rapidly. It became totally distorted.
Pressured and baked into the same form, like the cultural systems that we live inside.
The form of capitalism, of patriarchy, of individualism, of rationalism, and of egoism.
These systems, that is deeply ingrained in the West, have not only shaped how we live and how we destroy and exploit all around us, but also how we seek spirituality and we got lost in newly invented concepts claiming to be “spiritual”.

Spirituality, that once was rooted in devotion, in faithful surrender, and in a close bond with community, has harshly been mirrored into the very society it now is meant to awaken us from.
And so instead of deepening into being, many are now pulled into doing.
Into branding, achieving, performing, expertized, and monetizing their spirituality.
Spirituality, once lived and felt, has now been expertized, turned into a system where performance and credentials matter more than presence and soul.
For far too many today, spirituality has become something like a hobby, something to claim in conversation or in comments on social media.
It’s practiced through meditations, "clearing rituals", and invented “blockages” that must be healed in just the right way, the trendy way.
But what’s often revealed, unintentionally probably, is not soul…
It’s ego.
And it is loud.

Capitalism - Turning the deeply Sacred into Product and Profit

Capitalism's fingerprints are all over the modern spiritual world. The sacred has been commodified, turned into numerous workshops, digital programs, coaching packages, personal brands, and social media content, to mention a few examples. In a capitalist structure, everything becomes a product, everyone becomes a seller, and everyone a consumer.
À la Capitalism.
À la Consumerism.

What used to be an inward journey toward meaning has become an external performance of success.
How many followers you have, how aesthetic your altar looks, how many "clients" you've helped, what titles you have, and how high your vibration supposedly is.

This system rewards fast results and clear outcomes, so ancient truths that once took decades, lifetimes, to integrate are now reduced to "5 steps to healing" or "3 secrets to manifesting your dream life."
The mystery is gone.
The messiness is hidden.
Depth is often replaced with digestibility.
And manifesting is things, not alignment.

From Embodiment to “Awakening”

Now, we speak of “awakening” like it’s an achievement. A lever reached.
Like it's something we weren't already born with.

It’s not awakening in the sense of gaining something new.
It’s the ego awakening to the presence of the divine Soul. A presence that was always there, but now felt in the very space where the ego once believed it was alone.

We are not asleep. We are numb. We are overstimulated. Driven by ego systems.
It is constant performing, crazy way of consuming, of branding, of exploiting (eachother for our brands sake), in the name of spirituality.

The soul has never been absent.
It has always been here. Quietly witnessing, always recording, experiencing, waiting. The Soul way. The natural Soul way of being. But we’ve become so much of ego-centered individuals in systems that reward disconnection. Even in the sacred.
Capitalism put a price tag on worth.
Patriarchy silenced intuition and sacred slowness.
Individualism severed us from community, ritual, and lineage.
Rationalism made us ashamed of our knowing unless it could be measured. And assured by someone else.

So, we didn’t fall asleep.
We turned away.
We, turned away.
And now we speak of “awakening” because deep down, some feel that all this is not right, that something essential was lost and buried under all this noise, inside all these systems of separation and false teachings.

But the soul…
The soul never left. We left our path. We left our place, among all else. We separated.

So now, in this spiritual age of marketing and performance, we have to pause and take a step back, only because we were conditioned to forget.

Patriarchy - Silencing the Feminine

Alongside capitalism, patriarchy has shaped spirituality into a hierarchy, where certain voices are elevated as experts, some kind of authorities, or in different ways ascended ones, and others are diminished or dismissed. Feminine spirituality, the true kind that is cyclical, deeply emotional, very slow, embodied and intuitive, has always been threatening to structures built on control.

The feminine, in its true form, cannot be packaged. It cannot be rushed. It does not fit inside limited marketing boxes. It asks us to slow down, to grieve what has to be grieved, to listen to our womb, our hearts, our breath, our sorrow, our wounds. And so, instead, it is replaced with a performance of feminine spirituality. Flowy dresses, moon rituals, cute altars filled with consumerism items from deeply exploiting and harming companies and with curated vulnerability, all within a commercial created and made-up framework.

True feminine spiritual power is resisted because it threatens the foundation of branded spirituality. It cannot be controlled. It does not seek to sell. It returns us to what is real. And real is not sellable or made to be consumed.

Individualism - The Rise of the Branded Self

Modern spirituality has become so deeply ego-centered, it is almost hard to find a way out of it. The soul is no longer a mystery to be humbly walked with, but instead it is a project to be improved on the right branded meditation cushion, listening to the loudest spiritual titled person, it should be displayed, and then sold. Social media platforms have amplified this, encouraging seekers to turn themselves into personal brands, or to become followers to the loudest personal brands, and encourages people to become "insert title here" and other kinds of self made up personas. Even as alien personas. It tells you to research all kinds of things, become experts, and to know any kind of concept that pops up. Now, even "spiritual guides" and "teams of spiritual guides" are sold as a thing, as a truth.

In these spaces, the question is not "Am I becoming more whole?" but "How am I perceived?"

Instead of elders and spiritual guides who’ve spent lifetimes in devotion, we now have influencers who’ve completed a weekend course and call themselves "frequency workers" or "activation coaches." Depth is replaced by shallow image. Longevity by performance. And truth with noisy, made-up, falsehood.

And in many spiritual communities today, people are literally paying to be moderators or inner circle members, which gives them status in the group and access to authority. This creates a false hierarchy where visibility is mistaken for wisdom, and new seekers are guided by those who have simply bought their way into the role of "expert."

The danger here is subtle but very, very, real. Seekers stop listening to themselves. Instead of cultivating their inner knowing, they learn to mimic the language and tone of those they admire. Instead of waiting for true insight, true learning, true teachings, true healing, they chase validations and external affirmations.

The Soul’s Resistance

And yet, for many of us, the soul resists. It tells us, this is not right. That way feels wrong.

Our soul does not want to be marketed. It does not want anything, just for us to become aligned with Soul. It does not need to be liked, because Soul has no concept of being liked or not because it is pure love. Our souls are not here in this body to grow our brand. The soul is just to be real. To become real. To become love. Soul path invites us to sit with our grief, our fear, our doubt, our wounds, our joy, our happiness. To rest in mystery. To stop pretending we’re healed when we’re still bleeding. To stop pretending to be high frequency, or positive only, because that is what you are being told to be. To stop searching for enlightenment because Soul is enlightened already, we just need to quiet our ego to become aligned. Maybe not this lifetime, not next, maybe not the next thousand, we become when we do.

True Soul work will always resist systems that try to shrink it. Feminine truth will always rise, again and again, from the roots, from the body, from the places no algorithm can reach, and from the ashes.

There is a quiet small revolution happening. A returning. Some people are seeing through this nonsense, and it is not into the illusion of "high vibe success," but into the sacred slowness of true being. The real Soul Journey. They are remembering that healing is not a product. That not knowing is holy. That no one can do your soul work for you.

And in that remembering, the old soul wisdom breathes again.

Not fast. Not via concepts of modernity.

But real.

And enough.

The Grief of It All

This is the heartbreak.

That what was once given freely, the connection, the belonging to a community, the mystery, the natural rhythm,
now has to be learned again. But not learned the real way, but instead bought, branded, and explained by an expert.
We speak of “raising our vibration” when all we truly need is to stop all the bypassing and return to our rootedness.

This grief is very sacred. Because it’s real.
And if this resonates within you, it means you remember.
It means you still carry the echo of the old ways inside you, ways that were once as natural as a breath.

So, What Now?

So the call now is not to create more systems, but to unravel the ones we inherited, to unravel the systems of society that programmed us, and then the systems of ego-spirituality.
To stop reaching for the stars and start listening to the sacred soil beneath our feets.
To grieve what’s been lost, what we have been fooled to believe, the personas we created, to reclaim what’s still alive,
and to walk the path. Not to ascend, not to become enlightened, but to return.