“Prior to birth, we have in-depth conversations with our spirit guides and the other souls with whom we will share our incarnation. We discuss the lessons we hope to learn and the ways in which we will learn them.
The planning we do before birth is far-reaching and detailed. It includes but goes well beyond the selection of life challenges. We choose our parents (and they choose us), when and where we will incarnate, the schools we will attend, the homes in which we will live, the people we will meet, and the relationships we will have.
When we enter the Earth plane, we forget our origins in spirit. We know prior to incarnation that we will have such self-induced amnesia. The phrase behind the veil refers to this state of forgetfulness. As divine souls, we seek to forget our true identities because not remembering will give us a more profound self-knowing. To obtain this deeper awareness, we leave the nonphysical realm–a place of joy, peace, and love– because there we experience no contrast to ourselves. Without contrast, we cannot fully know ourselves. On Earth, we begin learning through opposites. That is, we experience who we are not before we remember who we really are. We explore the discordant sounds in our Earthly lives before we recreate the symphonies of Home.
Life challenges are set up to accomplish certain goals. One common objective is healing; specifically, the healing of ‘negative’ energies left unresolved from past lifetimes. We may plan a life to balance karma or resolve the cosmic debt of unbalanced energy with another individual. Typically, we have k
arma with members of our soul group–others at the same evolutionary stage with whom we have shared many lifetimes. An understanding of karma helps us to move beyond judgment, particularly in regard to those who have experienced major traumas or ‘setbacks’ like drug addiction or homelessness. Their lives, sometimes labeled ‘failures’ from the viewpoint of the personality, are often unqualified successes from the viewpoint of the soul.
Most souls plan life challenges to be of service to others. A lightworker is someone whose life plan is particularly service-oriented. Benefitting society as a whole may offer this selfless individual great challenges for personal growth and remembering how to more deeply love themselves. Gradually their inner light begins to shine forth for all to see.
For instance, a deeply compassionate soul who wishes to know herself ‘as compassion’ may choose to incarnate into a highly dysfunctional family. As she is treated with a lack of compassion, she comes to appreciate compassion more deeply. It is the absence of something that best teaches its value and meaning.
A lack of compassion in the outer world forces her to turn inward, where she remembers her own compassion. The contrast between the lack of compassion in the phy
sical world and her inner compassion provides her with a more profound understanding of compassion, and therefore, herself. From the perspective of the soul, the pain inherent in this learning process is temporary and brief, but the resultant wisdom is literally eternal.”
Your Soul’s Plan – Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born, Robert Schwartz, pgs. 15-30.
