Soul Agreements

Many spiritual teachers say that every person’s soul purpose is nothing more–and nothing less–than to experience joy, expansion and the growth of wisdom and compassion, lifetime after lifetime. Exactly how that joyful expansion and growth are accomplished, however, is up to each individual, evolving soul.

It’s important to remember that there’s a big difference between soul purpose and life purpose. Your soul purpose is conceived of and directed by your eternal self, your Soul, and usually unfolds in stages that can last several lifetimes. You could call each stage the Soul’s “current mission.” Your life purpose, on the other hand, is basically a set of goals and objectives which were developed by your Soul specifically for this present incarnation, with the intent of furthering your Soul’s current mission.

And when you, as your Soul, sit down at the Big Conference Table in the Sky to plot out your next lifetime‘s goals and objectives, you’re not alone. With you are usually many members of your soul family, individuals who have traveled with you through several lifetimes, or a few, and who join you in plotting an intricate web of interconnecting life threads, encounters that will assist or challenge you, and them, to make the most of your coming incarnation.

Together you plan when and where you’ll meet. You cheerfully build in obstacle courses and synchronicities to keep things interesting. You decide on gifts and difficulties for your individual personalities, and whether you will take the role of friend, lover, family, Spirit Guide–or even enemy–this time around. And just to keep things suspenseful, you give each Soul’s incarnated personality the free will privilege of “opting out” of any Agreement, at any time, perhaps with karmic consequences, perhaps not, depending on how you make your choices, and why.

Your Soul Agreements are the result of all this creative brainstorming among Eternal Beings. And, while it’s is not true for everyone, many people discover that nearly every one of their important relationships has a Soul Agreement.

There are a number of ways to recognize the existence of a Soul Agreement in a relationship, although the specific parameters of the agreement aren’t always so easy to pinpoint. Always, the relationships are intense and full of meaning. Usually, when you meet there’s a sense of recognition that’s irresistible, and that can be misinterpreted by your personality or ego, especially when the possibility for romance exists. Often the relationship has built-in challenges or obstacles that require effort and commitment to overcome. Conversely, it can be so easy in the beginning that when obstacles do appear, it’s shocking, and can cause the relationship to collapse.

What if the parent or sibling who caused the most difficulty and heartache in your youth is actually a friend from prior lifetimes, one who agreed to take on the unpleasant task of helping you build your emotional and spiritual strength through challenge? Or to help you to balance karma by learning to treat them, in all their awfulness, with forgiveness and unconditional love?

Or perhaps you and another member of your soul clan will decide to spend a few lifetimes meeting and loving, but unable to find your way to happily ever after. Perhaps this choice will help you each develop your capacity for faith, your trust in the long-term, many-lifetime promise of consummated love, or your ability to give and receive wholehearted, unconditional love in spite of conditions. Or so that at least one of you will be forced to develop self-reliance or the ability to commit fully to the greater good of spouse and children rather than personal gratification.

It’s not always easy to divine the intent behind Soul Agreements, especially the ones that are painful, usually because when you’re focused on the personality level, you lack the necessary perspective. But your Angels and Spirit Guides can often help you at least understand what your Soul wants you to learn from the experience. Astrology, numerology and psychic readings can also help.

When you look at each of your relationships as though they contain a Soul Agreement, you get a whole new perspective about the purpose and meaning of what’s happening between you. When you look at it from a Soul perspective, even when you haven’t figured out the details of a particular Agreement, suddenly things become less personal, the drama that accompanies personality conflicts dissipates magically, and you are freed to learn the things that your Soul had in mind when it created the Agreement before you were ever born.