What If the Advanced Soul Is the One Having the Hard Life?

By Dr. Marie Feuer

Years ago, when I first met my teacher, there were people in the Los Angeles crowd who couldn't wait to become advanced. Advanced souls. Spiritually evolved. Whatever the next impressive thing was, they wanted to get there. My Teacher told us he suggested that we not be so ambitious. Then he said that his first human student to awaken had done so through becoming a quadriplegic. You could have heard a pin drop. Everybody was sitting there with some version of, “Oh, shit.” That was not what they had signed up to hear.

Then he told us about another student. This man, he said, had died in his early thirties, drunk, lying in his own vomit and poop on a city curb. According to my Teacher, that was the man's last life on Earth. He was done. Imagine that landing in a room full of people who thought becoming advanced meant becoming more radiant, more peaceful, more admired. The man on the curb was nobody's spiritual brochure.

Those were my Teacher's accounts of those particular souls. I am not giving you a formula in which disability or addiction tells us how evolved somebody is. That would be another ridiculous ranking system. What stayed with me was how thoroughly his teaching blew apart the one we already had. We thought we knew what spiritual advancement would look like. Apparently, we had decided it would look like a successful human life, only with better energy and possibly white clothing.

I still hear versions of that assumption. Someone is wealthy, serene, has a lovely partner, and speaks in that soft spiritual voice, and people think, “Wow. They must be so evolved.” Someone else is lonely, ill, struggling, or having a miserable time, and we start wondering what they haven't learned. What are they doing wrong? Even when nobody says it out loud, that judgment is there. We have made human circumstances into a report card for the soul, and then we act as though we know how to grade it. Well, how the hell do we know?

When somebody tells me a person is an advanced soul, that is my question. What are you basing it on? The amethyst? The beautiful retreat center? The fact that being around them makes you feel wonderful? Maybe that person is a young soul having a fabulous time discovering energy and being adored by humans. Maybe the person outside the 7-Eleven, the one you don't particularly want to look at, has a depth of experience you cannot begin to recognize. We are awfully confident about spiritual development when what we can actually see is someone's presentation and circumstances.

The way I understand incarnation, Earth gives us experiences we don't have as a ball of light. Having a body. Needing things. Loving somebody we can't keep. Having power and finding out what we do with it. Depending on another person. Being responsible for somebody else. Across lifetimes, there is an enormous range of experience available here. I don't believe every soul arrives with the same assignment, or that every assignment ends with the human being looking like a winner.

My Teacher's stories made me think about college. Some people take the courses they enjoy first and save the really difficult ones for the end. Statistics. Mathematics. The thing they have been avoiding. I think some souls may do something like that. A final lifetime might be extraordinarily difficult. Or someone may be here to experience a relatively happy, comfortable life because that is something they haven't had. Once you allow that possibility, you can't keep assuming that ease means advancement and difficulty means failure. You would have to know far more than we usually know.

This is an unpopular thing to say, and I understand why. We want the work to pay off. We want proof that we are getting somewhere. So the spiritual marketplace offers levels and advancement and something to show for our investment. But when we expect a higher spiritual level to purchase a nicer human assignment, I hear the culture we grew up in talking. Work hard, move up, get rewarded. We bring that entire arrangement into our relationship with spirit and are shocked when it doesn't seem to be honoring the contract.

I don't push people toward becoming advanced. My response is usually, “What's the rush?” As we develop, the challenges can grow with us. Being able to encounter more doesn't necessarily mean being asked to encounter less. And I am very suspicious of anyone who can look at another person's awful circumstances and announce exactly what that person's soul is doing. A belief in soul development should make us more careful with people. If someone is suffering in front of you, they need whatever real help you can offer. They don't need you standing there explaining their spiritual curriculum to them.

I have been what I call a pain magnet for a long time. People in pain find me. Some come because something specific has gone wrong, and once that situation is handled, they move on. Others stay, and often these are people for whom Earth has never quite fit. Even when life becomes stable, they still feel something is missing. They know there is more to being here than making the human arrangement function. Then they look at someone who seems perfectly happy with that arrangement and wonder what is wrong with them. I recognize that predicament. I've lived with that feeling myself.

What has kept me involved spiritually is experience. In meditation, and sometimes in waves of energy during the day, I experience a connection that is more compelling to me than the things we're supposed to want. Someone else gets excited about a Corvette. I get excited about a tree, a beetle, that extraordinary sense of being in contact with something alive beyond the usual human conversation. This can sound like gobbledygook until you experience something yourself. Then the interest is there. You want to explore it because it matters to you, even when you can't make it sound sensible to somebody else.

That doesn't mean I float through life. I complain. I bitch and moan. I get discouraged and have hard days. I have never understood why having a human response to a hard human experience is supposed to disqualify somebody spiritually. What a cruel little arrangement that is: you're hurting, and now you have to worry that hurting proves you haven't evolved. A person can have profound spiritual experience and still need to cry, vent, rest, or ask for help. I certainly do. Being able to recognize suffering in myself also gives me somewhere real to meet it in another person.

If somebody had told me all of this when I first started, I probably would have run away. You need enough of your own experience for the journey to mean something. It's like being told everything that having a child will require before you've ever held your baby. You might say, “Oh, hell no.” Once that relationship exists, you have a different context for what you're willing to go through. My connection with energy gives me that context. It doesn't make every difficult thing pleasant or give me a neat explanation for why it happened.

In individual work, I want to know what you are actually living through. Sometimes there are psychological patterns we need to look at very directly. Sometimes there is an energetic experience you have never had room to explore. Sometimes you are exhausted from trying to reconcile a difficult life with everything you were told a spiritual person should be. My training in health psychology and my psychic and energy work all belong in that conversation. Which part we work with depends on you. There is no useful reason to squeeze your life into somebody else's picture of an evolved person.

I care about how you live through what is happening, including whether you can receive help and whether there is room for joy. I care about the quality of your connection with yourself and with the spiritual energy you actually experience. Those are things we can work with. Awarding you a soul ranking isn't. You can come into that work with a messy life and questions you are almost afraid to ask. I am much more interested in meeting you there than in hearing how advanced you're supposed to be.

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