Women's Sacred Space

A call to tending the spiritual flame of the home

Women's History Month | Starseed Interiors

As we round off Women's History Month, I felt the need to share my recent experience — over the past two months of witnessing a number of women who, through various independent groups, do not have what we would in current times call a sacred space for self.

I heard stories from accomplished, conscious, deeply spiritually aware women — discussing how to create a physical, intimate, personal kind of space. The kind of space that is yours alone. A space one comes to contemplate. A corner. A room. A chair by a window that no one else sits in.

One by one, I heard the same story told in different words. "My daughter has my home office now." "My husband took over the spare room when he started working from home." "I don't even know where I would put myself."

"I have no space." This is one that got me — as I realised how often this statement is declared. And recognising its sheer reflection of how a person feels inside.

A level of quiet sadness arose as it dawned on me — if I'm hearing this from a number of women all around the same time, surely this must be the case on a wider scale. I asked inside: if women are not taking up space within their own homes, how does this affect them taking up space within the world — and what are the consequences?

One thing is for sure — space is not just a luxury for women. It is a lifeline.

I wanted to take a look at this over the course of history and what it had to say about women and sacred space. Was there any documented evidence, or was this just something I felt the need to call in for our current times? It turns out history has a great deal to share on this subject.

This Women's History Month, I want to take you on a journey. From the ancient hearths that women have tended for millennia, to the quiet epidemic of displacement happening inside modern homes right now, to the revolutionary, soul-nourishing vision of what is possible when a woman finally, unapologetically, claims her space.

She Has Always Been the Keeper of Sacred Space

Let's begin at the beginning — because this is one of the oldest stories in human history.

Before churches. Before temples. Before any formal religion had raised its first wall — the first sacred space was the hearth. Home of fire. The great light at the centre of life.

And across culture after culture, continent after continent, real women — ordinary women — stood at its heart.

We know this because archaeologists have dug it up.

In ancient Egypt, excavations of the New Kingdom workers' village at Deir el-Medina — home to ordinary families, not royalty — found that houses contained niches where images of deceased relatives and household deities were venerated. These domestic altars were maintained by women. They held statues of the personal deity of the family and home, images of their ancestors, and offerings of libations, flowers, and food. Egyptologist Gay Robins, in her foundational study Women in Ancient Egypt, documented that household rituals "suggest that women of the family had an important part to play." (Robins, G., Women in Ancient Egypt, 1993) This was not temple worship conducted by priests in distant sanctuaries. People held private ceremonies and rituals in their houses. The sacred space was in the home. And the woman was its keeper.

In Zulu tradition, the hearth — umuzi — was the ritual and spiritual centre of family life, its fire tended by women and bound to ancestral lineage. Anthropologist Eileen Jensen Krige, in her landmark 1936 study The Social System of the Zulus, documented how the central hut hearth carried profound ritual significance — a living connection between the family, their ancestors, and the forces governing everyday life. (Krige, E.J., The Social System of the Zulus, 1936)

Among the Yoruba people of Nigeria, female priestesses — Ìyálòrìṣà — maintained sacred shrines as part of daily life, tending the ritual elements of fire, light and offering that kept families spiritually anchored. Devotion to Oshun and Oya — both powerfully feminine forces — was led by women whose role as keepers of sacred space was woven into the very fabric of community life. (Idowu, B., Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief; Bascom, W., The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria).

In Zimbabwe, spirit mediums — svikiro — frequently women, presided over ritual spaces and ceremonies as channels between the living and their ancestors. (Lan, D., Guns and Rain, 1985)

Across African cosmologies broadly, as theologian John Mbiti observed, fire and the hearth symbolise life force and ancestral presence — with women as their consistent guardians. (Mbiti, J., African Religions and Philosophy).

And then there is this: in southeastern Australia, archaeologists excavating Cloggs Cave at the invitation of GunaiKurnai Aboriginal Elders discovered 12,000-year-old miniature fireplaces matching the configuration of ritual installations documented in nineteenth-century ethnography — maintained by Aboriginal medicine women known as mulla-mullung. Twelve thousand years. Five hundred generations. Women tending sacred fire, in an unbroken line.

The evidence is there. In the soil. In the ash. In the niches of excavated homes on every continent. Real women, in real homes, tending real sacred spaces — and understanding themselves as spiritual guardians of the families they held.

Every culture. Every tradition. The same truth held:

The woman in her home was holding spiritual space for everyone within it. And she knew it.

The Slow Erasure — When the Keeper Lost Her Space

So what happened?

The short answer: centuries of institutional religion moving the sacred out of the home and into structures built by men.

The hearth-keeper's role — once the most spiritually powerful in any household — was gradually reframed as merely domestic. In the West particularly, women's spiritual authority was transferred out of their hands. Altars were cleared. Rituals were labelled superstition. The sacred became institutional. And women moved from being its priestesses to its congregation — or simply its servants.

Virginia Woolf understood this with painful clarity. In 1929 she wrote that a woman must have money and a room of her own to write fiction. But she was talking about far more than writing. She was talking about the freedom to think. To exist as a full human being. She described women as having "served all these centuries as looking-glasses" — mirrors reflecting men back at twice their natural size. Space-givers. Never space-holders.

What I see when I look at this history is that women lost more than physical space. They lost the entire concept of their interior life mattering. The idea that a woman might need stillness — a threshold she crossed alone — became culturally illegible.

And that erasure has had a cost. One we are still paying today.

The Numbers Don't Lie: What Happens When Women Have No Space

This is where history becomes personal. And measurable.

75% of women report experiencing burnout, compared to 58% of men. Women in the workforce are 8 percentage points more likely than men to say they are struggling or in crisis. Female burnout rates are rising as male burnout rates decline. In 2024, women accounted for 71% of all mental health-related workplace absences.

A 2024 Gallup survey of over 4,000 women found that more than six in ten say it is hard to prioritise their own health. Half of all women name their mental and emotional wellbeing as their primary concern — and yet it is the very thing they are least able to address.

The barriers they name? Feeling overwhelmed. Caring for others first. Running out of time.

Every single one of these is a space issue. A threshold issue. A boundary issue.

And I want to be clear — this is not a problem with modern origins. The modern world has amplified a wound that goes back centuries. The erasure of women's sacred space began long before the pandemic collapsed every boundary between work, rest, family and self. Long before children took over spare rooms. Long before working from home made the very concept of a threshold disappear.

What is modern is the acuity of it. Women are being displaced from even the small corners they had quietly carved out. And the impact — on how they show up in their families, their work, their relationships, their own souls — is something I witness directly. It is profound. And it is urgent.

The disappearance of a woman's space is a spiritual emergency. And it deserves to be treated as one.

You Were Always Meant to Hold the Flame and Be Warmed By It

The hearth was the centre of the home — and it was their centre too. It was the axis around which their own spiritual life revolved. Their rituals, their prayers, their daily communion with the divine — these happened at the same fire they used to nourish everyone else. They were at the heart of it.

What modernity did — what centuries of cultural diminishment did — was to sever that connection. Women kept giving heat without being warmed. Kept tending the flame without being allowed to sit beside it.

The women I sat with in that circle were operating in a system that had never been designed to include their own replenishment. And the very spiritual intelligence they carry — the instinct to nourish, to tend, to create sanctuary — had been so thoroughly directed outward that it was now working against them.

A woman who cannot come home to herself cannot truly come home to anyone else.

This is ancient wisdom, backed by every culture on earth that had the wisdom to honour its hearth-keepers.

Reclaiming the Threshold: Creating Your Sacred Space

So what does this look like in practice? What does it mean to reclaim your space — not one day when the children leave home, not when you finally deserve it, not when someone gives you permission — but now, in the home you actually live in?

This is not about size. I created my first sacred space on a bedside table — and I can tell you it became a powerhouse of a space as the energy built over the years. That space was as potent as any meditation room I have ever designed.

What makes a space sacred is intention. It is the act of saying — and meaning, in your body and your bones — this is mine. This is where I come to remember myself.

It begins with the smallest act of claiming.

Start with a threshold. Even if it is only a cushion on the floor, a chair facing a window, or a corner of your bedroom with a small altar — mark it. Define it. Tell the people you live with that when you are there, you are unavailable. Sacred. Unavailable in the way that a person in prayer is unavailable. Temporarily held by something more important than the to-do list.

Tend it like the ancients tended their hearths. Light a candle when you enter. Across every culture we have explored, the flame was the signal: the sacred is present here. A flame lit by your own hand says the same.

Choose your objects with intention. The women of antiquity filled their altars with meaningful objects — offerings, symbols, tools of their spiritual practice. Your space might hold crystals, a sound bowl, oracle cards, a piece of nature brought in from the garden, a photograph, a piece of writing that moves you. Every object should earn its place by meaning something. Clutter is the enemy of the sacred. Intention is its architecture.

Use it. This may sound obvious. It isn't. I have worked with many women who created a beautiful space and then didn't use it — because sitting down to be still felt self-indulgent, or because someone always needed something, or because the act of being cared for by space they created for themselves felt foreign and slightly uncomfortable. The discomfort is the indicator of how much you need it. Sit in it anyway.

The Vision: What Becomes Possible

Now I want to take you somewhere bigger. Because I don't just work in the realm of the practical. I work in the realm of the possible. And the vision of what a woman's sacred space can become — and what it can do for every person it touches — is breathtaking.

Imagine a room. Not a spare room pressed into duty. A room that was designed for this — for return, for restoration, for the kind of deep listening that makes every other act of your life more alive.

Picture crystalline alchemy bowls arranged in careful relationship with one another, each tuned to a different frequency, each able to move energy in the body in ways that words cannot reach. The light in this room shifts — dawn-soft in the morning, golden in the afternoon, deep amber in the evening. The walls hold texture that invites touch. There are scents — perhaps frankincense, perhaps cedar, perhaps the quiet green of something living. The chair or the cushion or the low platform where you sit is the most considered piece of furniture in the house. The most intentional.

And this room becomes — this is what moves me most — the energetic centre of the home. The children come to sit in it. A family member who is grieving finds themselves there. A conversation that needed to happen happens there, because the space creates the conditions for honesty and softness. A family member who is anxious sits in it and their nervous system shifts, because the room has been calibrated — by your presence, your practice, your intention — to hold people rather than demand things of them.

This is the vision of the hearth-keeper, restored. A woman so rooted in her own sacred centre that her home becomes a sanctuary for every person who enters it — including herself.

This is what I build. This is what I believe in with every cell of my body. And this is what I know you are capable of creating, whether you begin with a reclaimed cupboard or a room redesigned from the ground up.

For the Women in the Circle — and the Ones Who Weren't

I want to end by coming back to where I began.

Those women in the circle — each one of them — left that conversation with something they hadn't had when they arrived. Not a plan. Not a budget. Not a room.

They left with permission.

The kind of permission that no one else can give you, but that sometimes requires hearing reflected back by people who understand what is at stake. The kind that says: your need for sacred space is a spiritual inheritance. A biological necessity. An act of leadership — because a woman who tends the flame of her own inner life will always have more warmth to give.

The women of Deir el-Medina knew it. The Zulu women who tended the umuzi knew it. The mulla-mullung of the GunaiKurnai knew it. Your grandmother, in whatever small ritual she kept that no one fully understood, knew it.

And now it is your turn.

Claim your space. Tend your flame. Come home to yourself.

The sacred has always been waiting for you there.

Ready to begin? Whether you're working with a single shelf or a whole room, I'd love to help you create a space that truly holds you.

And if this piece spoke to you — share it with a woman who needs to hear it today.

Written in celebration of Women's History Month © Starseed Interiors

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