Your Soul's Plan

[Guest guest]

May 7, 2003. I remember that day well, because it was the day on which my

life changed. I was 40 at the time, working as a self-employed marketing and

communications consultant and feeling profoundly unfulfilled with my life. I

often had the feeling that if I were to fall off the face of the Earth, none of

my clients would notice. They would simply plug someone else into my role and

continue along.

 

Yet, at the same time I had a feeling that there was a higher purpose to my

life. I just didn't know what it was. And so, in my search for that higher

calling, I did something on that fateful day in 2003 that I had never done

before: I had a session with a psychic medium.

 

The medium introduced me to the concept of spirit guides – highly evolved,

nonphysical beings with whom we plan our lives before birth and who then guide

us through our lives after we incarnate. Through the medium, I was able to

speak with my guides. They told me that I myself had planned many of my

greatest challenges in life - and that I had done so before I was born.

 

I might have dismissed this as some sort of elaborate fantasy, except that

my guides knew literally everything about me. They knew not only what I had

done in life, but also what I had thought and felt. Private thoughts and

feelings that I had never shared with anyone. As you can imagine, when certain

beings know literally everything about you, they have a great deal of

credibility.

 

So I was listening in rapt attention when they went on to tell me why I had

planned some of my greatest challenges. In the days and weeks after the session

with the medium, this information was constantly on my mind. It allowed me to

review the course of my life and, for the first time in many instances, see a

deeper purpose to the seemingly bad things that had happened. For me, this was

deeply healing.

 

I realized I was on to a concept that could bring similar healing to other

people. I resolved to write a book about it.

 

Three years later, I completed the book Your Soul's Plan: Discovering the

Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born.

 

In order to research people's pre-birth plans, I collaborated with four

very gifted mediums and channels. In doing so, I had the extraordinary

opportunity to hear the conversations people had before they were born with

their future parents, children, spouses, friends, and other loved ones. I put

these conversations verbatim into the book. The people I interviewed had

planned such challenges as physical illness, having handicapped children,

deafness, blindness, drug addiction, alcoholism, losing a loved one, and severe

accidents.

 

Why do we plan before birth to experience challenges? I found four primary

reasons. First, challenges allow us to balance karma from past lives. Karma is

sometimes conceptualized as " cosmic debt, " but I think of it more as unbalanced

energy. Let's say, for example, that in a past life one person was physically

ill and another person was the caretaker. When these two people transition back

into spirit and have their life review, they will have a sense of unbalanced

energy. One way to create balance would be to switch roles. The one who was

ill now plans to be the caretaker, while the one who was the caretaker now plans

to experience illness. What makes these life blueprints so challenging is that

once in body, neither soul will remember the pre-birth plan.

 

Second, we plan challenges in order to heal. For example, Penelope, the

deaf woman in my book's chapter on deafness and blindness, planned to be born

completely deaf because in a past life she had heard the gunshots that killed

her mother. She was a small child when the murder occurred. She was

traumatized by her mother's death and went on to commit suicide later in that

incarnation. In this lifetime, she sought to focus on self-healing and wanted

to make sure that her healing would not be hindered by a similar trauma. In her

pre-birth planning session, her spirit guide asks, " My dear . . . would you

prefer to be born deaf so that no sound will ever remind you of those sounds

again? " Penelope replies, " Yes, that is what I want and what I wish to do. "

 

Third, we plan challenges to be of service to others. In the chapter on

physical illness, I write about Jon, a homosexual man who planned to have AIDS

so that he could teach tolerance to humanity. In his pre-birth planning

session, we heard Jon conferring with the soul of the future loves who would –

at his request – transmit the virus to him. The future lover says, " There is an

issue larger than all of the personal benefit of contracting this illness. We

can teach our elders, honor them, and provide them with a valuable opportunity

to experience, learn, and grow. " Jon, therefore, is not someone to be judged or

scorned, but rather someone we may thank for having the raw courage to plan such

a bold mission in service to others.

 

Lastly, life challenges allow us to know ourselves as love. By this I mean

not simply that we are loving, although certainly that is true, but that we are

quite literally made of the energy of love. In our nonphysical Home, we

experience no contrast to ourselves and therefore cannot fully understand our

nature as love. On Earth, in a realm of duality and stark contrast, we often

encounter a lack of love. As we choose in the face of such experiences to give

and receive love freely and unconditionally, we remember who we really are.

 

* * *

 

Robert Schwartz is the author of Your Soul's Plan: Discovering the Real

Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born. (This book was previously

published as Courageous Souls: Do We Plan Our Life Challenges Before Birth?) A

free PDF with a large sample of the book is available on the About the Book page

of Mr. Schwartz's web site at www.YourSoulsPlan.com