Is status a barrier to spirituality?

Any bodily designation is a barrier to spirituality. Any station in life - natinality, social status, rich or poor, young or old, educated or uneducated, man or woman, etc. refers to the body only.

Thus, there is nothing spiritual about anything in relation to the body and its culture. To become spiritual, one must become fee from all bodily designations - sarvopadhi-vinirmuktam

For the soul, however, there is only one status - to be the eternal servant of Krishna. To be spiritual one must realize oneself beyond the body and its culture.

Srila Prabhupada says:

Devotional service is defined in the Narada Pancaratra as follows:

sarvopadhi-vinirmuktam / tat-paratvena nirmalam

hrsikena hrsikesa-/ sevanam bhaktir ucyate

"Bhakti, or devotional service, means engaging all our senses in the service of the Lord, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the master of all the senses. When the spirit soul renders service unto the Supreme, there are two side effects. One is freed from all material designations, and one's senses are purified simply by being employed in the service of the Lord.”

Originally, since all the senses are produced of the Lord's reservoir of senses, the sensual activities of the material world are to be purified by the process of devotional service, and thus the perfection of life can be attained simply by purifying the present position of our material activities.

And the purifying process begins from the stage of being liberated from the conception of different designations. Every living entity is engaged in some sort of service, either for the self, or for the family, or for the society, country, etc., but, unfortunately, all such services are rendered due to material attachment.

The attachments of the material affinity may be simply changed to the service of the Lord, and thus the treatment for becoming freed from material attachment begins automatically. The process of liberation is therefore easier through devotional service than by any other method, for in the Bhagavad-gita (12.5) it is said that one is subjected to various kinds of tribulations if one is impersonally attached: kleso 'dhikataras tesam avyaktasakta-cetasam