Have you found yourself wondering why life is so challenging, or why you’ve been dealt a nasty hand of cards? These are some of the existential questions I used to ask myself constantly. I’m so grateful to have gained clarity over the years for many of my questions about relationships, purpose, and life. Today, I want to share a special topic with you: soul contracts. This is a powerful concept that will hopefully answer many of the spiritual questions you’re stuck with.
So, what are soul contracts?
Before we are born on Earth, there is an incubation period. Like a spiritual roundtable conference!
And the purpose of this gathering of souls, is to help you decide which lessons you will learn in the life to come. You collaborate with other souls and take the help of God and your spirit guides in this process. For instance, to learn the act of forgiveness, someone must take responsibility for deeply hurting you. Thus providing you the choice to either forgive them or stay resentful. To know how to be independent and strong, someone must ensure they abandon you at your worst hour. Thus, allowing you to either stand up for yourself or fall down and succumb to your circumstances.
Everyone you ever meet is a spiritual companion playing a phenomenal role that will help your soul’s growth. From a person that you talked to for a brief moment in the lift, to a beggar on the street, and from your parents to your partner, your ex, your children, and so on. They’re ALL here with you and for you. And YOU have signed up too, to help them heal. Even the most annoying relationships “down here” were intentionally designed “up there”! And this design, my friend, is what we call soul contracts.
Are soul contracts unique?
Yes. Your spiritual journey on Earth is designed so that you can get the most spiritual growth out of it, every single time. While the underlying lessons will be the same for all of us, how we learn those lessons will be unique. Someone might become the parent to a differently-abled child so that they can learn to love someone unconditionally. And they might have to keep taking care of the child for several years before they truly understand this lesson.
On the contrary, someone else might learn the lesson of unconditional love by having to deal with difficult siblings or a stubborn partner who makes many bad choices.
That’s also why someone might have a financially booming career without putting in much effort, but suffer from acute illnesses due to self-neglect and die early. At the same time, another person who barely makes it through the days with a loaf of bread and water, yet manages to stay alive decades longer because they value their body and health.
The way our lives look on the surface can be different. And yet, at the end of the day, everything is being orchestrated for everyone’s spiritual development.
“But why don’t we remember that we agreed to our soul contracts?”
There are two aspects to answer this question:
When we incarnate here on Earth, we undergo something called Soul Amnesia.
Wait….what is that? And is it even true?
The consequence of our Soul Amnesia is that it prevents us from being overloaded with the past – it’s like a soft reset, giving us permission to start with a clean slate. Ultimately, what we do remember from our past is the lessons we’ve learned.
And to a degree, that’s true for present life as well. With a few exceptions, we don’t need to remember every little detail about day-to-day life. We might remember that a friend makes us feel good, but we don’t necessarily remember every single thing they have ever said to us. In contrast, we might remember a “toxic relationship,” but for all good measure, the mind mutes the traumatic details and mostly retains the boundaries we learned to place because of it. This selective remembering in the body (and beyond it) is helpful because otherwise, we would constantly be triggered by our past and have very little capacity to live life in the present!
Now imagine if you had to carry all of the memories from several lifetimes? Boy, that would be something! So, soul amnesia is helpful. Now let’s address the second aspect of the answer.
“But why would my soul choose such a difficult life?!”
I hear you! When my spiritual journey was in the initial stage sometimes called “the dark night of the soul,” I would often cry in despair, hoping for some kind of “ABORT MISSION” code to be activated. The truth I’ve discovered is that suffering happens the most where we resist the most. By knowing that everything is an elaborate play, we can let go of the suffering our life and relationships bring us. We can instead start using our “pain” as a guiding light to the deeper wounds that are now surfacing and asking us to heal. Now, we can see that we’ve all decided to do this together. We’re here to build each other up even if it means, ironically, breaking each other down sometimes.
The good news is: we can speed up our spiritual growth by actively healing ourselves and learning the lessons this journey is offering to us. This is often does through self-care practices like meditation (guided or instrumental), saying prayers, writing prayers, keeping a journal, getting a reading, etc.
“Do I have to work on healing my soul contracts?”
Sometimes working on our healing can feel so exhausting! We might want to give up or spiral down into unhealthy patterns (like vengeance, desensitization, self-sabotage, we all know how that goes…). I empathize with the struggle. And… there’s no easy out, unfortunately! As long as the lesson is resisted, it will resurface over and over again. And every time with higher intensity, and higher urgency. If you manage to let the lesson pass you in this lifetime, you’ll have to take it up in the next.
This is one way to look at innocent children who take birth and die soon after, from grave illnesses. Through their soul contracts, they had to grasp how to be taken care of when they are absolutely helpless and crippled. Perhaps because they held too much pride in their past lives to take favors.
So let’s put it this way – the only way out of it is going to be through it.
But don’t let that frighten you! I love what the amazing spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas tells us:
“Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life, are not chance or haphazard, they are actually yours. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything.
That part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You’re not going to go in the right direction unless there’s something pricking you in the side saying “Look here, this way”. That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up. It will make you suffer greatly, if you don’t listen, what else can it do? That is its purpose.”
Essentially what he reiterates to us is that by embracing our soul’s plan and working on healing these planned lessons, we become powerful within! Enough to become unshakeable by the very challenges that once threw us off.
And THAT is the ultimate goal of this journey to Earth and back home.
Louis Grassi 