Who are advanced souls? In my work, I often use the terms sensitive soul, highly sensitive person and advanced soul interchangeably. In my experience, an incarnated advanced soul has a more expanded energy field, vaster soul-level experience and greater awareness of the subtle realms. This makes a person more sensitive to energy.
You may ask, what’s the purpose of being so advanced, if one can’t do well in life because of all the sensitivity? I hope at least part of the answer is where my own work comes in. I have been doing energy healing work with advanced souls for a decade, precisely to help them ground and clear blocks to their power.
Part of an advanced soul’s mission is to integrate previous karmic and ancestral experience and transmute it into spiritual power. An advanced soul is called to do the Great Work of a magician, to be a spiritual alchemist transmuting separation into Union, grief into power, fear into victory.
It is not an easy path, because it calls for walking both with darkness and light, deep joy and deep grief, awareness of spiritual highs and experience of deep lows. Perhaps it is not so surprising that advanced souls often find manifesting and abundance to be one of the most challenging areas in life.
Why do so many advanced souls struggle with abundance?
1. Experiences from Other Lifetimes
Advanced souls carry a baggage of lifetimes riddled with violence, poverty and abuse of power. These can be ancestral and entangled lifetimes that they are connected to. Very often, these souls choose to incarnate in difficult lineages with a lot of pain, loss and persecution to transform. Much like a physical trauma would affect the body, emotional trauma may affect the soul beyond one single lifetime.
Because of this soul-level trauma, advanced souls often have a complex relationship with power. Often, when I tell my clients their mission in life is to work with personal power, they either have no idea what I am talking about, or feel triggered for reasons they can’t explain. Power? What does it mean, power? To be a big guy, to be a seductress, to be the boss — what is power??
Their souls want to play it safe, avoiding power to make sure they never hurt anyone again – or get hurt. This fear of power is a soul-level issue, outside conscious awareness. And yet it is one of the major blocks to abundance. Until it is dealt with, no amount of affirmations or positive thinking will go deep enough to have any effect.
2. Difficulty Grounding
Most advanced souls tend to “ground up”, having too much energy in the upper chakras, and avoiding their lower energy centers. This translates into struggling with practical aspects of life here on Earth. Things such as making money, getting an education, living a stable life seem meaningless. These souls tend to have other interests and priorities which do not always align with what is considered a successful life by society’s standards.
There is nothing wrong with having spiritual priorities. In fact, that is exactly the gift of advanced souls that they bring into this world.
But it is also useful to turn this around and ask ourselves, what would the world be like if spiritual people had access to more resources? If they could buy land and property that could be shared and put to sustainable use? If they could channel their finances into healing, helping and transforming the world?
Wouldn’t we all want that? To build a retreat center where we can gather with our community, work the land and grow food together? Or create a space where artists can express themselves? Healers spend years in apprenticeship? If not us, who?
The power of advanced souls is not about using others or manipulating them. True power means having the capacity to choose the most spiritually productive response in any situation. We can be wealthy and spiritual. We just need the bandwidth to hold more abundance.
3. Misconceptions about Spirituality and Abundance
Abundance is not the same as getting anything you want. In fact, the universe doesn’t owe you anything.
I remember a time in my life when I had everything I thought I ever wanted — a good apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a family, a permanent stable job that paid the bills, long holidays and ability to travel around the world.
I remember running into an old friend who said — I would have given so much to live a life like yours, you are living a dream! And I understood, intellectually, that she was right. But I wasn’t happy with my life at all. I would have given it all up in an instant if something better came up. What this “better” was, I wasn’t sure at the time.
I felt I wasn’t living my life. I was living someone else’s life, ticking off someone else’s boxes of what success was about. Apartment, marriage, job, pension, safe, done. Underneath it all, I had no idea what abundance was. I thought I had to buy more stuff and travel more.
And there would come a time when I felt I was much happier living in a hostel with no stable income and no knowledge of what the future would bring. Heck, I’d be happier living out of dumpster than going back to my old life!
Of course, I found balance and a new wave of the spiral after my travels and explorations of a different way of being. But my point is, abundance is not just money and stuff. Abundance is a state of mind. If our minds are not abundant, we will never have enough. If our hearts are suffering from a sense of lack, we will forever be jealous or controlling. If we think there is not enough love to go round, we will grasp at every relationship like it were our last chance.
4. Advanced Souls are Old Souls
The gist of the soul age theory is that young souls are learning basic survival skills, whereas more mature souls are working on family and relationships. The life lessons of even older souls are centered around leadership and power (here is that magic word again!).
Finally, advanced souls are at the stage of evolution where they can work on their spiritual connection to the Divine. They are now becoming someone who is a co-creator of their life. They are beginning to realize the Divine within. It’s a linear theory, but it explains in broad brushstrokes why advanced souls may struggle with abundance.
Many younger souls tend to have a much easier time manifesting. Their mission is directly tied to learning everything they can about functioning in the material world, they have less obstructions, less karma. Remember how easy it was to judge the world in black and white when you were a teenager? And how you thought you knew everything and could take on the world when you just got out of high school?
One of the reasons advanced souls struggle with abundance is soul-level trauma which often manifests as self-sabotage. It may feel like constantly going upstream and witnessing the destruction of what was built up with so much effort, over and over again.
A good example of this struggle is past life vows. For example, if we had many lifetimes as monastics, we may have vows of poverty that we never renounced. While it may have been spiritually productive at the time, it may not be in our best interest any longer. Once these vows are identified and cleared, life in the physical will also begin aligning.
5. Ancestral Blocks
Very advanced souls often choose to incarnate into difficult ancestral environments — with a lot of war, strife, adversity and lack of love. The goal of this connection with the pain of humanity is transmuting it – but it’s easy to get stuck in the process.
Family and ancestral wounds, such as experiencing genocide or loss of possessions, are often inherited across generations. We know ancestral trauma is transferred, and there has been much research on epigenetics and ancestral PTSD. These deep wounds usually have a clinging energy to them that makes it difficult to make room for more light and joy.
Both conventional therapy and over-simplified New Age spirituality often bring little relief for very advanced souls, and tend to leave them with a sense of failure. It worked for everyone else, but not for me – something must be terribly wrong with me! Over time, the ego becomes attached to the victim persona, and will resist healing with all its might.
However, there is hope. Once we go to the level of the soul, and transform the blockages there, the 3D life will gradually fall into place. Provided one is willing to let go of being a victim. Sometimes, letting go of suffering is the most difficult work one would have to do in their life.
While most advanced souls were never meant to lead conventional lives, they certainly have the power to manifest abundance. We just need to work at the root of the issues, at the level of the soul. Soul work tends to be more transformative and efficient than old-school therapy (although they can often support each other). The key is beginning the work at the level of the soul.
