Do you ever wonder if what is happening in your life is due to some choice you made at the soul level before you came here? If you are wondering, this is likely a factor in your current experience! You may be familiar with the concept of soul agreements or contracts. These are mutual plans that souls forge before coming here so that they might serve each other in various ways.

First of all, it’s helpful to know there is always great love at the core of our soul agreements. I say this because, depending on the contract, there may be a lot of heartache along the way! Sometimes we agree to come and play a role that may be painful or difficult for someone else, or they agree to do the same for us. Keep in mind the only reason we agree on this is because we love one another so purely and deeply. We are willing to do pretty much anything in service to our soul beloveds so that they might gain what they wish from this lifetime.

The soul is brave. It is wise and ready. And it has a sense of confidence and clarity that isn’t necessarily evident in our fragile human situations.

I’d also encourage you to keep in mind that when you make these agreements, it is your soul that makes them, not your human person (she/he didn’t exist yet when this deal was struck, remember?). How your human feels when the contract plays out may be fully at odds with the soul choice, particularly when situations of victim/perpetrator, heartbreaker, or betrayer arise.

It’s why we made the choice before coming, because once we’re here, honestly, I think there are many situations we simply wouldn’t choose or sanction. In this way our human experience is a bit like becoming delirious from a lack of oxygen at high altitudes. Before we ascended the peak (came here), we agreed to follow the wisdom of our guide (our soul). We knew they (as us) were the ones to see us through. We were on their team! But then the delirium of the veil of forgetfulness sets in, and we find ourselves adrift. That’s when we can really get in our own way, just as someone with altitude anoxia can wreak havoc on their life.

Another analogy I heard recently to illustrate the relationship between our soul and self is that our soul is acting like a parent to our human (thank you, Nikola, for this one). Just as a parent sets parameters and makes requirements of their children which the children do not always like, sometimes our soul is delivering a kind of tough love to our self.

I would go so far as to say this soul-parent/human-person dynamic plays out as agreements with those who show up as our perpetrators, heartbreakers and betrayers in this particular divine mystery play. They come to play a role so that we might glean some wisdom or other soul expansion through a deeper awareness of what it truly means to love and be love. They are here in service to us, but lots of times all we can feel is the well-justified anger, hurt, and dismay.

But then, there aren’t many children who actually like going to bed when they feel like staying up all night at a sleepover, or eating all of the foods that their parents deem as necessary nutrition instead of constant cereal and candy. This is what soul love is – the celestial nourishment that we so courageously choose but for which we have no human appreciation. We feel more like, “That stuff is wrong! It hurts! What do you mean I chose it? Screw you!” And we are right! And… there is another truth at play here. It takes a real maturity of consciousness to find the entire feast of earthly experience not only palatable but perfect. It doesn’t mean we like it or that it doesn’t hurt. It means we are with it in a different way.

I was able to understand this nutrition analogy very directly when I had been diagnosed with an auto immune disease some years back. My naturopathic physician suggested I might want to give up eating wheat and dairy. I told him no thank you, I wasn’t interested in that, and I went about my way. How many healthcare providers (or guides or coaches) have encountered this, where there is a clear knowing of what could assist an individual to literally get them where they say they want to go, but that person just isn’t interested!?

Well fast forward a bit to when I signed up for a yoga detox camp. It was a two-week series where we met every morning for class, coupled with an elimination diet to give the body a cleanse. Within about five or six days I felt soooo much better. My pain level was significantly reduced and I had more energy. It was actually amazing. I began to wonder about the food triggers. There was a whole host of things I wasn’t eating in this particular cleanse, so at the wise counsel of my naturopath, I added them back in one at a time at two-week intervals. Guess what immediately lit up my symptoms? Dairy and wheat.

Well now I was motivated, because I’d experienced both what it was like to indulge my personal preference as well as to feel better from choices in accordance with my greater overall health. The latter easily won out, and my diet shifted for good.

Isn’t this how so many of us learn, through experience? No matter how many times a parent tells a child about consequences, the dangers they’ll risk, or the pain that will come if they go a certain direction, that child simply has to experience it for themselves before they’re ready to make a different choice. That was me with dairy and wheat.

This has also been my human’s response to my soul’s parental wisdom at times. Not so much any more, because I’ve learned the folly of the short-sightedness of my human awareness and small-self preferences.

Now whenever I am in a phase of eating that which I would rather not eat, soulfully speaking, I have simultaneous access to the wisdom underneath it. But I still don’t like it! So I just go ahead and grump in my garden of dislike while giving my wholehearted “yes” to the process.

Because I’m all in: for embodied consciousness, for living beyond just my small self, for living as the whole of me. It’s clear to me that this is what we’re here for: all of the experiences, not just the comfy ones. Again and again, experience shows me that Love expresses as the whole spectrum. Because Love is infinite and infinite includes all. As a friend likes to say, “All is the single, undivided beloved” (thank you, Andrew Kalki Forrest).

So when we talk about unity and oneness, it necessarily includes everything. Every vibration. Darkness. Density. Pain and anguish. Brilliant love and light. Our truest nature shies away from nothing, and is up for everything (just like our souls!…our human selves not so much). This process of embracing the whole in love expresses as embodied enlightenment.

I for one really don’t l like it when my soul is doing tough love on me. Even when I know that all of my experiences are of my own creation for the ultimate good of everyone involved, I just don’t like it.

I’d also like to add that there is nothing in me that thinks it must be hard, that our soul lessons are destined to be painful, that tough soul love is required. I don’t believe that we ever need be at odds with ourselves, dimensionally speaking. It’s just that I see it play out, over and over. I see it with my clients, as well as in my own life. For now it seems to be one of the primary ways that we do ascension here on earth. Through the body. Through the stuff. Through the messiness of being human. And, my friends, this human thing requires stamina, courage, and grit.

So when I’m eating my soul-love pie, I can soften into the moment. I can honor the pain or rebellion of my human heart, knowing that my being always has my back. I know that everything is Love, and this abiding wisdom walks along side me. It holds and cradles me in my human weariness, like the comfort of an unconditionally loving parent, a love that never ends.

Living in this awareness also allows me to experience my past differently, such as the man who woke me at knifepoint and raped me. He is now a guardian angel energy of protection in my life, which absolutely blows me away. And this is real for me. But that is a story for another time!

This is how I love to guide others, bridging their human awareness to their advanced consciousness, the absolute wisdom and love of their being, so they can relate to their lives from far beyond the limited perceptions of their small human selves. Then they can see the incredible generosity of others as they play the tough roles, and deliver the soul lessons. They can actually come to see that there is no separation between their less-than-noble characters in their divine mystery plays and themselves. It’s all one infinitely grace-filled dance of love, for the love of all. The single, undivided beloved.

I wish you a blessed and gentle journey through your tough soul love junctures. We all have them, and they can be challenging! I wish you the grace to love your human self with tender devotion, the courage to step surely onto your soul path, and the presence of awareness to know you are always so much more than anything you can think or see. You got this.

All Love,

Christine