Who are advanced souls? In my work, I often use the terms highly sensitive person and advanced soul interchangeably. This is because from the perspective of the human energy body, an advanced soul has a more expanded energy field, more soul-level experience and greater awareness of the subtle realms.
Put in different terms, an advanced soul is an “old” soul. It is a soul whose purpose is to integrate previous karmic and ancestral experience, transmuting them into spiritual power. The Magus of many a magical tradition, an advanced soul is called to do the Great Work, the spiritual alchemy of transmuting separation into Union, grief into power, fear into victory.
Paradoxically, it is advanced souls that often find manifesting and abundance to be one of the most challenging areas in life.
Why is material abundance so difficult for many advanced souls?
1. Past Life Experiences
Advanced souls carry a baggage of lifetimes where they encountered violence, poverty and abuse of power. These souls have chosen to go through the full spectrum of human experience, for the purpose of evolution. But this spiritual baggage also has a negative side, in that painful experiences leave scars on the soul. 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 in a way that they can’t explain.
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. Lack of Grounding
Most advanced souls tend to “ground up”, having too much energy in the upper chakras, and avoiding their lower energy centers. This inevitably means struggling with some of the 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 necessarily align with what is deemed a successful life by society’s standards.
Now, there is nothing wrong with that. But sometimes it is 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?
This ties up with blocks and misconceptions around power. True power is not using and manipulating others — true power means having the capacity to choose the most spiritually productive response in any situation. Wealth is only unproductive if it leads to greed.
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.
But 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. Underneath it all, I had no idea what abundance was.
Many advanced souls need to heal mind-level misconceptions and societal programming and get clear about what abundance really means for them.
4. Advanced Souls and Soul Age
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!). And finally, advanced souls are at the stage of evolution where they can work on their spiritual connection to the Divine, integrating all their experience into the path of the Magus, someone who is a co-creator of their life. While this theory is very linear, it accounts for how many souls perceive their calling and mission.
Many young souls tend to have a much easier time manifesting, for two simple reasons – their mission is directly tied to learning everything they can about functioning in the material world, and they have less obstructions, vows and past life karma preventing them from living in abundance.
Past life vows and soul-level trauma often manifest as self-sabotage for many advanced souls. It may feel as 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. 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, and while we certainly should be allowed to choose simplicity – if we are constantly struggling with finances due to no conscious choice of yours, a soul-level vow of poverty needs to released. 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 just as easy to get stuck in the process.
Family and ancestral wounds, such as genocide or loss of possessions, are often inherited across generations. We know ancestral trauma can manifest through generations, 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.
Conventional therapy and over-simplification of the law of attraction often bring little relief for very advanced souls, and tend to leave them with an even greater 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 actually resist healing with all its might.
However, 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, of course. While most advanced souls were never meant to lead conventional lives, they certainly have the power to sustain both themselves and others. Soul work tends to be more transformative and efficient than old-school therapy. The key is acknowledging the deep soul-level issues and beginning the work at the level of the soul.
