Every soul has agency

How to overcome limitations and circumstance through the power of spiritual perception

Hi friends,

A few weeks ago, I shared a reel on Instagram about what I learned from refugee and displaced communities I had the privilege of serving for many years.

The core message was simple: every soul has agency.

But what does this really mean? And why does it matter?

I think we are living through a time when many people feel increasingly constrained by material and physical limitations. We observe the forces of capitalism and materialism ripping away at people’s inherent sense of worth. We see the struggle to meet one’s daily needs and the relentless pressure to make a living—not through our calling, necessarily, but by whatever means are available to us.

We also see more overt forms of violence accelerating insecurity and instability, resulting in the loss of life, the destruction of homes and the physical displacement of people from their homelands.

And then there are the more private constraints: illness, grief, caregiving, debt, discrimination, loneliness, disappointment, or simply the eerie sense that the life we hoped to live is moving beyond our reach.

In the face of such myriad difficulties and sufferings, there is a question that every soul must eventually answer:

Can I overcome?

For many of us, we answer this question through an exclusively material lens. Yes, you can overcome if you get a job. Yes, you can overcome if you make more money. Yes, you can overcome if you receive a visa, find a better home, access the right treatment, or gain the opportunities you have been denied.

Of course these things matter. Hunger requires food. Illness requires care. Displacement requires protection. Injustice requires laws, resources and institutions capable of correcting it. But in the contexts in which I have served, I have also seen that material responses alone do not always produce solutions that are lasting, effective or dignified.

A material solution without a spiritual principle can even reproduce the wound it is trying to heal.

Food can be distributed in ways that either humiliate people or honour them. Shelter can restore a sense of safety and belonging, or it can merely warehouse human beings. A legal process can recognise the full reality of a person’s life, or reduce them to a number in a system.

So perhaps the point I am trying to make is not that every material challenge requires a spiritual solution instead. It is that every material and physical challenge requires a spiritual solution too.

Photo by Greg Rakozy

What do I mean by spiritual agency?

Does this mean gaslighting people about their very real physical and material difficulties? Does a hungry stomach satisfy itself on prayer? Is physical insecurity resolved through wishful thinking?

No.

Spiritual agency is not the denial of limitation. It is not the fantasy that we can control everything that happens to us. It is certainly not the shallow promise that, with the right mindset, we can achieve anything we desire.

Agency is not absolute control.

It is the capacity to perceive that, even within circumstances we did not choose, something may remain ours to choose.

It is the power to orient ourselves towards truth rather than illusion, courage rather than despair, love rather than hatred, purposeful action rather than resignation.

It is the ability to ask: Given what has happened, and given what I cannot presently change, what remains possible for me now?

Sometimes the answer is an outward action: leaving an unsafe situation, seeking medical care, applying for assistance, telling the truth, learning a skill, creating something, organising with others, or beginning again.

Sometimes it is an inward movement: refusing to allow cruelty to make us cruel; resisting the belief that our worth has been diminished; accepting help without shame; retaining tenderness after disappointment; or deciding that suffering will not have the final word on who we become.

This is the agency of the soul.

The soul does not possess sovereignty over every circumstance. But it retains the power of orientation. It can turn towards something. It can cultivate qualities. It can search for meaning. It can make a contribution. It can love.

A person can be severely constrained without being emptied.

What refugee communities taught me

One of the things I came to distrust during my years working alongside refugees was the indiscriminate use of the word vulnerable.

People may certainly live in vulnerable circumstances. They may face legal uncertainty, material deprivation, violence, discrimination and an almost complete absence of institutional power.

But a vulnerable circumstance is not the total identity of a human being.

Again and again, I encountered people whose formal choices had been severely limited, but whose inner and relational capacities remained extraordinary. People supported relatives across borders, interpreted unfamiliar systems for new arrivals, cared for children, preserved culture, mediated disputes, created informal networks of assistance and imagined futures beyond anything their present circumstances seemed to permit.

They were not merely waiting to be rescued. They were acting, contributing, discerning and creating—often while also needing significant assistance themselves.

This taught me a valuable lesson:

Need does not erase power. Receiving help does not make a person passive. And dependence does not cancel dignity.

We are all dependent upon one another in countless ways. The opposite of agency is not dependence. The opposite of agency is being treated as an object rather than a soul—as someone to be managed, processed, spoken for or acted upon.

Every person possesses capacities that can either be suppressed or released by the conditions around them.

This is why the language we use matters. The questions we ask matter. The structures we create matter.

Do we see people principally through the deficits in their circumstances? Or do we perceive them as protagonists in the transformation of their own lives and communities?

A spiritually informed understanding of power is not chiefly concerned with domination or control. It seeks to release, encourage, guide and enable human capacity. It recognises that the powers of love, unity, knowledge, service and purposeful action can generate forms of transformation that coercion cannot.

The difference between helplessness and limitation

There is an interesting parallel in psychological research.

Studies of learned helplessness and controllability have found that when people or other living beings repeatedly experience situations in which their actions appear to make no difference, passivity can spread beyond the original situation. Motivation diminishes. Exploration contracts. The person begins not only to believe that this circumstance is uncontrollable, but that I am helpless. Conversely, experiences of meaningful control can support more active and adaptive responses to stress.

This distinction is profound.

There is a difference between saying: “This situation is beyond my present control.”

And saying: “I have no power.”

The first may be an honest recognition of reality and the second can become an identity.

Spiritual agency does not require us to pretend that the uncontrollable is controllable. It asks us to discern more accurately: What is beyond me? What is within me? What requires acceptance? What requires resistance? Where do I need help? Where might a small but meaningful action still be possible?

Sometimes the most spiritually intelligent response is not to push harder. It is to rest, grieve, receive care or acknowledge that we cannot carry something alone.

The soul’s agency is not demonstrated by never breaking. It can also be demonstrated by reaching for another hand.

We should not romanticise suffering

There is a temptation in spiritual discourse to speak about adversity as though every suffering has been specially designed for our personal growth.

I do not believe we should speak so casually.

Much suffering is created by injustice, greed, prejudice, violence and neglect. It should not be spiritualised when it should be prevented. People should not have to become extraordinarily resilient in order to survive conditions that never should have been imposed upon them.

We do not need to celebrate the fire in order to honour the person who has walked through it.

Nor should spiritual agency become an excuse for institutions to abandon their responsibilities. Telling people to become resilient while preserving the structures that exhaust, exclude or impoverish them is not empowerment. It is the privatisation of injustice.

A belief in the agency of the soul should make us more, not less, committed to changing material conditions.

If every person carries capacities of thought, creativity, love and service, then our social systems must be arranged to allow those capacities to unfold. Education, healthcare, housing, employment and public institutions should not merely keep people alive. They should contribute to the material, intellectual, social and spiritual conditions through which people can participate meaningfully in the life of society.

The inner transformation of individuals and the transformation of unjust structures are not rival projects. They need one another.

Photo by Omkar Jadhav

Agency is not individualism

Spiritual agency should also not be confused with the idea of the entirely self-made individual.

The soul develops in relationship.

Our capacity to act is strengthened when someone believes us, accompanies us, shares knowledge with us, creates space for our participation or reminds us of what we have forgotten about ourselves.

Sometimes another person holds hope for us until we are able to hold it again.

Agency is therefore both individual and collective. My choices matter, but so do the environments in which those choices are made. My spiritual life is my responsibility, but it is nurtured through relationships of love, justice, reciprocity and service.

This is why community matters so much.

A true community does not ask, “How can we solve these people’s problems for them?”

It asks, “How can we create conditions in which our distinct capacities can be combined, and in which more people can participate in generating knowledge, making decisions and contributing to our common life?”

None of us contains the whole answer but together, our field of possibility expands.

Photo by Anuj Yadav

The soul is more than its present condition

The deepest spiritual truth beneath all of this is that the human being is not reducible to material condition.

We have bodies, needs, histories, identities and social locations that profoundly shape our experience. But they do not exhaust the mystery of who we are.

The spiritual traditions of humanity have long insisted that the human being possesses an inner reality capable of knowledge, love, moral choice, sacrifice, imagination and transcendence. The human being is fundamentally spiritual, and true happiness is inseparable from learning to live according to that spiritual reality.

This does not make the body irrelevant. It makes the human being more than the body.

It means that poverty can limit a person’s options without determining their worth. Displacement can take away a homeland without taking away the capacity to create belonging. Illness can alter a life without rendering that life meaningless. Rejection can wound us without becoming the final authority on who we are.

There is a part of the human being that circumstance can influence, test and even temporarily obscure—but cannot possess.

This is why spiritual consciousness has sustained people through conditions that appear, from the outside, unbearable. Not because spirituality made the suffering unreal, but because it revealed that suffering was not the only reality present.

There was also love. Meaning. An inner life. There was God.

What overcoming may actually mean

So, can I overcome?

Perhaps.

But overcoming may not always mean escaping every limitation or restoring the exact life we had before.

Sometimes overcoming means:

• Changing the circumstance;

• Joining with others to transform the conditions that produced it;

• Surviving long enough for a new possibility to become visible;

• Becoming inwardly larger than the thing that tried to diminish us;

• Refusing to surrender our capacity to love, serve, create or tell the truth;

• Taking the next faithful step while we are still frightened, grieving or unsure.

The agency of the soul is not the promise that we can do anything. It is the recognition that we are more than what has happened to us—and that something meaningful may still remain ours to choose, cultivate and contribute.

So the question I am asking myself is not: How do I overcome this limitation?

But also:

• What quality is this moment asking me to develop?

• What action, however small, remains available to me?

• What help must I become willing to receive?

• And how might my struggle deepen—not diminish—my capacity to contribute to the lives of others?

May we learn to perceive this agency within ourselves.

And may we become people—and build communities and institutions—that recognise, protect and release it in every soul we encounter.

Thank you for reading, for supporting my work, and for engaging. I appreciate every ounce of support, in whichever and every way you express it.

With appreciation,

Kat