Monads are essential experiences. You might say that they are the “courses” of the “University of Life” on earth. To get your “degree,” you have to complete a minimum number of them. Although the curriculum is not the same for everyone, there are some “basic” courses that most people take.

You set up any monads you intend to do when you are making your life plan before incarnating. Most of them are reciprocal. You usually do one side in one lifetime, the other side in another, with the same essence. That gives you more specific information about the monad. It is like a scientific experiment in which you use controls, keeping every factor the same except what you are testing for so that you can see where the variations are. You generally feel pulled more intensely into a monadal relationship than you do into a nonmonadal relationship. You are not likely to do two major monads in one lifetime, although you might.

The most common monad is teacher/student. In it, you agree before a lifetime begins to be either a teacher or student with another person. On the teacher side, you are not necessarily a school teacher, but may be a mentor or a friend, usually an older person to the one being taught. You learn about the teacher/student relationship. Exploring the act of teaching itself is as important as what is specifically being taught. To learn about teaching, you must have a student. If you are on the student side, you are learning about being a student, about receiving knowledge. Such a monad normally lasts many years.

Sometimes teacher/student monads are done with therapists or spiritual teachers, but the teacher/student monad can be done within the context of a sibling, mate, or any other kind of relationship.

Do we sometimes have lifetimes in which we do not work on any monads?

Yes. Everything is by choice, and it is important not to take on too much in one lifetime. If you have a lifetime that is devoted to repaying a lot of karma, you may choose not to also involve yourself in monads. However, the monadal relationship is a foundational one and is intimately connected with the evolution of the soul on the physical plane.

Messages from Michael stated that monads are only done once. According to my channeling, it is true that most people do them only once.
 

However, those with many previous cycles, with their boundless energy for advanced experimenting, often choose to do the monads several times, each time in different ways.

Completing monads more than once makes possible “love monads.” Love monads are formed when two essences have completed all the major monads together. If, for example, a person has love monads with five other essences, he obviously has completed each of the major monads at least five times. That suggests that he has been quite busy on the physical plane, and probably has had many past lives. Love monads are only possible in the old soul cycle, since some of the monads are not done until then.

There is no set number of monads that we must do to complete our cycle on the physical plane, but Michael channel Aaron Christeaan compiled a list of over thirty, and there are variations possible on those as well.¹ The monads we actually do are a matter of choice.

One monad involves mature souls honorably serving a corrupt master. We might wonder why the soul might wish to undertake such a negative experience. I think of it as being like an inoculation: in this case, once we’ve completed and validated the monad, our naiveté regarding leaders is likely to be gone forever—in the future, we will use more discernment about whom and what we serve.

Incidentally, in More Messages from Michael,² Michael said that many people around Hitler were doing this monad, which suggests that Hitler was doing the same monad with several people.

A tandem monad is one in which two people align with each other so that they are going through the same or similar experiences at about the same time, in order to support each other through them. I have an old friend with whom I am doing a tandem monad, and it’s a running joke between us about how parallel our lives are in certain respects. I have another friend with whom I am also doing this monad, but it wasn’t planned before this lifetime began; after I moved to New York and we became close, we decided on an essence level to initiate it and began to notice that we were synchronized. (This illustrates how parts of our life plan are improvised as we go along.) For instance, in one conversation we discovered that we had both just begun taking voice lessons again (from different teachers) and had found that, after two lessons, a lot of things had come together for us that hadn’t during lessons taken in previous years; we were both excited about that, but neither of us had been consistent in practicing. We also find that our inner process is somewhat synchronized, so that we often have similar realizations or breakthroughs simultaneously.