Spiritual Hierarchy: When Inner Experience Becomes Authority

In my last post, I wrote about how “conscious” language can sometimes be used to dismiss or override what someone is actually feeling.

There is another, closely related pattern I keep bumping into in spiritual and relational spaces. It’s quieter, subtler, and in some ways even more slippery.

It’s when inner experience - or insight, or “knowing” - silently gets promoted to authority.

Let me say this clearly. I love spirituality. I love meaning-making. I love the weird, subtle, unprovable layers of being human.

Inner experiences are, by nature, subjective. They don’t need to be compared, proven, or supported with footnotes.

You can feel energy move. You can receive intuitions, images, insights, or a strong sense of “I know what’s going on here.” You can experience something that feels bigger, deeper, or more mysterious than your grocery list. (Or feel like your grocery list is a download from other-worldly beings.)

All good.

The trouble doesn’t start with having these experiences. It starts when inner experience - or spiritual language, or the language of “understanding,” “seeing the bigger picture,” or “let me explain what’s really happening here” - is used in a very specific way: to step gently, politely, and very 'consciously' over someone else’s experience.

It can sound like: “I know this is what you’re feeling, but my intuition is telling me something else.” Or: “I hear your doubt, but I can see what the energy, the real dynamic, is doing here.” Or: “This is what I’m being shown, so this is what we should do.”

And maybe that really is what someone is experiencing. They might genuinely feel guided, connected to something bigger, or convinced they see the bigger picture. They might even be getting angel memos every full moon.

Great.

But that still doesn’t make the other person’s experience disappear.

Maybe the other person’s experience isn’t mystical at all. Maybe it’s plain and ordinary. Maybe it’s just a grounded, very human sense of something being off.

That experience is not less intelligent, less evolved, or less worthy of influencing what happens next.

A relationship is a meeting between two inner worlds, not one overriding the other.

When one inner world keeps getting placed above the other, spirituality quietly turns into hierarchy. Hierarchy with incense.

This is especially tricky in empathic, self-reflective, good-hearted communities; the kind where people genuinely try to be fair, conscious, and kind.

So they start doubting themselves. Maybe I just don’t see it yet. Maybe my body is just scared. Maybe they’re simply more aware than I am.

Sometimes that’s true. And sometimes it’s just a polite way of abandoning yourself.

And then there’s the extra-spicy version of this dynamic: authority!

Teachers. Guides. Facilitators. In other words, people like me, who speak in coherent sentences and sometimes even sound wise.

Whether the language is mystical, psychological, or deeply embodied, the question remains beautifully simple: does this resonate with what I’m also sensing, or am I using their confidence to override my own perception?

And now comes the slightly awkward, self-aware part.

I’m a facilitator myself.

So please don’t believe a word of this just because I wrote it.

I’m laughing, and I’m also serious.

Feel into it. Notice where your body goes yes. Notice where it goes meh. Notice where it goes nice story, Lore.

You can practice exactly what I’m talking about right here, with me.

Because I am also perfectly capable of telling a very good story that accidentally makes someone doubt themselves. It happens.

If this work is about anything, to me, it’s this: staying in relationship with your own perception. Especially in the presence of confidence or spiritual certainty.

Especially when you admire someone.

(They’re probably not more enlightened than you.)

A podcast episode on this is coming out soon. #SpiritualHierarchyWhenInnerExperienceBecomesAuthority