The truth is bigger and more beautiful than you know.
In this material world, a contract is a binding legal agreement that defines obligations and duties of one party to another, and the exchange that will occur. Goods, services, or information flow mostly one way; money flows the other. To prevent cheating or abuse, contracts attempt to cover all possible details and contingencies. Consequences for breaking a contract are usually punitive, written into the contract itself or imposed by law.
None of this, either in the way it is expressed as a “contract” or in spirit, applies to the intentions and agreements that souls create among themselves as they prepare for an incarnation. Planning for an incarnation, human or other, is complex and thorough. In that beautiful and indescribably loving realm we work courageously with guide souls, elder souls, and colleague souls to express our intentions and design appropriate environments for learning as human beings. That’s why we incarnate: to further our growth as souls.
Every life is dual-purpose
The first is the advancement of the soul. Souls enter human bodies in order to learn. The Earth is an excellent place for the soul’s learning because of the contrast between the realm of souls and material life on Earth. Here, we are constrained by three physical dimensions. We move slowly and within a very limited range. We are also limited by our perception of time: here we see time as moving in a linear fashion where we are unable to move back or forward. In the realm of souls, these limitations are absent. The soul is able to move to any point in space or time it chooses, with no sense of moving and the only effort an exercise of will.
Another aspect is what we experience as human emotion. On Earth we feel a wide range of negative emotions: fear, anger, hatred, sadness, confusion, shame, loneliness, and so on. These states are absent in the realm of souls, and are known there only in the memory of souls who have incarnated and returned home. We incarnate in order to learn about negative emotions and what to offer in return: love for fear, compassion for sadness, acceptance for shame. This is how we grow during our time as incarnated souls. When our soul-learning is sufficiently advanced after many incarnations, we move on to realms that few still-incarnating souls can imagine.
Souls incarnate willingly in circumstances that from a human point of view are harsh, difficult, even incomprehensible. Why would any soul deliberately choose to incarnate in a situation that involves pain? The first time I heard that I had chosen my parents, I mentally dropped an F-bomb; I could not imagine voluntarily choosing that family or situation, let alone participating in designing it!
It was not until I made the journey into the realm of life between lives for myself that I understood in a profound and beautiful way that I had chosen this life in agreement with other souls who have incarnated around me as parents, siblings, and other important people. I had also chosen, in discussion with my guides and those same other souls, what lessons I wished to take on, what learning opportunities I wished to experience. That understanding has impacted my life deeply and in ways that continue to unfold more than ten years later.
The second purpose of incarnating is to provide the soul with an opportunity to be of service to the planet and the people on it. All souls have a vocation, comparable to the human idea of a hobby, a calling, or a favorite activity. When a human feels called to a particular vocation, it may be because that work is aligned with the gifts and passions of their soul. In this fortunate situation, an incarnated soul has the opportunity to express its love through work, creativity, or small acts of kindness. The soul’s gifts can also show up as a skill or interest that repeats from one lifetime to another.
For those who find a match between soul’s intentions and human interests, work is often deeply satisfying, feeling more like a privilege than an obligation.
Our lifetime is a weekend workshop to our soul
Think of a challenging weekend workshop that you knew would be demanding physically, mentally, and emotionally. It may have involved hard work, risk, unpleasantness, and pain, possibly without much immediately visible gain. You chose it for the growth and learning it offered; you believed that you would become a better person for having participated in that workshop.
From a soul’s perspective, an entire human lifetime is equivalent to one of those weekend workshops.
As a soul you can return again and again to Earth for another lifetime/workshop, choosing different circumstances, different environments, different relationships. You may accomplish the learning in a single lifetime, or you may repeat lessons from one lifetime to another until your human self learns the lesson your soul needs.
For an example I offer this from I draw from hypnotherapist Michael Newton’s book Journey of Souls. He guided more than 7,000 people to the place of Life Between Lives, and his observations are grounded in that extensive and varied experience. When the soul of someone who dies by suicide returns to that place, its most common first reaction is “Oh no, I did it again!” This points to a pattern, repeated over a number of lifetimes, of escape from difficult circumstances that the soul took on deliberately but the human found intolerable.
These clients came to Newton because they didn’t want to suicide in this lifetime. When they discovered the background pattern and recognized its higher purpose, most were able to face the difficult lessons they came here to experience.
Free will is fundamental
Free will is another exception to the idea of a contract. An incarnating soul comes into a human lifetime through what is known as the “veil of forgetting.” In this transition the intentions and agreements made the realm of souls are forgotten by the human by the age of three (with rare exceptions).
An incarnated soul can make choices that are not well aligned with — may even be completely at odds with — the forgotten intentions of the soul. When this occurs, there is no penalty. There is no broken contract, no winners and no losers; there is only learning and progress.
Review and renewal: preparing for next time
Whether or not a lifetime achieves the soul’s intentions, that soul returns to the realm of souls when the body dies at the end of the incarnation. The soul is patiently and lovingly guided to review the experience with some of the same advanced souls who participated in the planning of that lifetime, and decide how and when to take those lessons on again, or set new lessons, in a new incarnation.
So if you wonder about breaking a “soul contract,” remember that what exists are not contracts as we understand them but intentions for growth, plans and designs to enhance learning, and the freedom to choose how life unfolds. Even when we stray from what was planned, nothing is wasted. Every step, misstep, and insight adds to the learning we carry forward into our next incarnations.