Understanding Your Challenges as Planned Before Incarnation

Follow

Listen to my interview with Robert Schwartz discussing his first book, Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born here: First Interview with Robert and the second interview here on his second book, Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born, Second Interview

by Robert Schwartz
Taken from the preface of his book, Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power of the Life You
Planned Before You Were Born

As a child I was severely emotionally abused by my mother. I planned this abuse before I was born.

When I say that I planned the experience, what I really mean is that my soul planned it. I am not separate from my soul; my soul contains my body, energy—indeed, the entirety of my consciousness. Yet, my soul is also more than me, just as the sun is more than any one ray of light it emits. My soul, like yours, is vast, expansive, limitless, and ever aware of its oneness with all beings. As I learn and grow, I bring my frequency closer to that of my soul and thus allow my soul to express more of its wisdom, love, and joy through me. My soul, your soul—in fact, all souls—are literally made from the energy of unconditional love. I know this to be true, because as you will read in Chapter 1, I have experienced it myself.

My greatest challenges, including the abuse I suffered as a child, were planned at the soul level before my birth to foster my evolution. If my soul is love, why would it plan for me to be abused? A fair question, one I have asked repeatedly throughout my life. In many ways the search for an answer is the driving force behind this book.

The abuse was intense and extreme, and though not literally unremitting, it was enough a part of daily life to feel so. The details are not important here. What is important is to understand how and why such things happen. For millennia humanity has learned through suffering. If we want to move beyond the learning-through-suffering paradigm, then such an understanding is essential.

Much of the planning between my mother’s and my souls was based upon a past life in which I was a woman and my current mother was my son. In that life I was in a very difficult marriage. I eventually managed to extricate myself and take my son with me, but my decision to leave my husband resulted in our impoverishment. My son blamed and deeply resented me for our poverty. I died at a relatively young age, and my son, though an adult at the time of my death, was then left both poor and alone. He felt abandoned by me.

Before he died, my son (my current mother) was unable to resolve the rage he felt toward me for the poverty and perceived abandonment. His anger, therefore, became part of his soul, an energy his soul wished very much to heal. Out of love my soul chose to give his soul the opportunity to heal that anger in a relationship in which our roles as mother and son would be reversed. Symbolically, this reversal represents the soul-level intent to “reverse” (heal) the rage. Such healing could perhaps best be accomplished, and is perhaps most meaningful, in circumstances in which my former son would have the power to act on his anger. Why? Because profound healing occurs in the moment in which negative emotion is felt but not acted upon. (Suppression is the choice to push “negative” emotion out of conscious awareness. Here, I refer instead to feeling the emotion but not acting upon it.) Had my former son not been in a position of power over me, he might not have had the opportunity truly to choose whether or not to express his anger. Such was our souls’ plan—a plan to which I agreed before I was born.

My soul had other motivations for creating this plan. In at least some of my other past lives, I was unable to love myself. Because we as souls learn through opposites, my soul chose for me to cultivate self-love by having an abusive mother. (Both our souls felt that at least some abuse was highly likely but hoped that healing would eventually occur.) From the level of the personality this decision may appear to be contradictory, even nonsensical, but it is not. Often, our souls forge life plans that are intended to get our attention, to put our “issues” front and center where we simply cannot ignore them. My mother’s apparent lack of love—she did and does, in fact, love me deeply, just as I love her deeply—mirrored to and for me my own lack of self-love. My soul intended to motivate and even force me to learn to love myself through the seeming lack of love from my mother. In choosing my former son to be my mother, it was as though my soul had placed an enormous billboard in front of me that read: “Self-love is what you are here to work on.”

My father, who died during the writing of this book, was a key part of my soul’s plan. Though he utterly loved (and loves) me, and though he was not abusive, he was unable during my childhood to tell me that he loved me or to show affection in a way I could recognize as love. In addition, at my soul’s request he agreed to judge me repeatedly over the course of my life, and many of his judgments felt quite harsh to me. His judgments and early lack of affection were intended by my soul to have the same effect as my mother’s abuse: to drive me inward, where I would discover, and then spend a lifetime fanning, the flame of self-love. That flame, once but a small, barely perceptible spark, has grown considerably. As I continue to learn more about my life plan, I see ever more clearly both the courage it took for me to agree to it and the courage it takes for me to live it. And so, self-respect blossoms, and self-love grows stronger still.

Significantly, and also I believe by mutual pre-birth agreement, my father was unable to fathom the idea of pre-birth planning. Nevertheless, during his last years, as he sensed death approaching, he became increasingly supportive of my life path and writing. (He also told me often that he loved me, and I told him that I loved him, too.) In the weeks before he returned to Spirit, I read passages from this book to him. Each time he listened attentively, then looked at me and said, “I don’t understand a single word you’re saying, but your writing is brilliant!” He genuinely meant both parts of that statement. I couldn’t help but laugh, and I was deeply touched by his support. After his death, in a gesture that is both wonderfully loving and delightfully ironic, he joined the team of nonphysical beings who helped me write this book. Indeed, these words may very well be his.

In other incarnations I have been unable to achieve emotional independence, and these lives, too, played a role in my soul’s decision to choose my mother. What is “emotional independence”? When I put that question to Spirit, I was told that it means looking to oneself as the primary source of one’s well-being. By designing my life as it had, my soul had created circumstances that would powerfully motivate me to become, and know myself as, the primary source of my own well-being. Like self-love, emotional independence is a life lesson I am still in the process of mastering.

In yet other past lives I believed myself to be powerless. Our souls seek to heal false beliefs, including, most certainly, beliefs that contradict what the soul knows about itself to be true—and the soul knows itself to be tremendously powerful. My soul designed for me, and I agreed to incarnate into, a family that would reflect to me the belief in powerlessness. Again, my soul had placed squarely before me an issue in need of healing.

There were also lives in which I felt and believed myself to be unworthy. Our souls are sparks of the Divine, and because we are sparks of our souls, we, too, are Divine. As you will read, feelings or beliefs of powerlessness or unworthiness are primary motivators of a soul’s decision to plan experiences that will mirror these aspects of self to us. Such feelings and beliefs are often largely or entirely subconscious, but as life reflects them to us, they trickle into the light of conscious awareness, where they may then be healed. Life blueprints that are intended to shine light on issues of powerlessness or unworthiness are often some of the most difficult learning-through-opposites plans, and experiences such as child abuse, incest, and rape are among them.

This book is the second I have written about why before we are born our souls plan to have specific experiences during our lifetime. It differs from my first book, Your Soul’s Plan, in three ways. First, although in Your Soul’s Plan I explored only the planning of life challenges, this book looks at two topics, pets and spiritual awakening, that do not necessarily fall into the category of challenges. The pre-birth planning we do with our beloved animal companions is the topic most often requested by readers. Because we live in a time of widespread spiritual awakening, that subject, too, is worthy of inclusion.

Second, this book focuses to an even greater extent on healing. Our souls do not wish us to become permanently enmeshed in trauma. If a traumatic experience does occur, however, regardless of whether or not it was planned before birth, our souls will seek to guide us to and through healing. Healing actually taking place depends upon many factors, not the least being our tenacity and resourcefulness, but our souls are always there, nudging us, leading the way. The fact that you found this book indicates you are open to the promptings of your soul.

Third, this book explores the pre-birth planning of several particularly difficult subjects, among them incest and rape. You may be repulsed or horrified that a soul would plan to participate in such experiences as either perpetrator or victim. But know that my intent is not to repulse or horrify, but rather to bring an awareness of this aspect of soul planning into the collective consciousness so we can heal the wounded parts of ourselves—the underlying issues of unworthiness, powerlessness, and rage—and in so doing bring an end to incest, rape, and other forms of violation. Whether to include these chapters was a decision I agonized over for a very long time. In the end I felt a responsibility to share what I had found. We can, if we like, deny that the Earth is round, but that will not make it flat. It will still be round. Similarly, we can deny that these traumatic experiences are often (though certainly not always) planned before birth, but that will not mean such planning doesn’t occur. It does. If we wish to create a world that is free of such trauma, then we must look bravely and honestly at what motivates the pre-birth planning of those experiences. And then heal.

I have not experienced either incest or rape in my current lifetime and so cannot possibly know the suffering that results. Yet, as someone who was abused as a child, I do know what it’s like to feel oneself to be a powerless victim, and I am intensely motivated to learn and heal. My childhood experiences have focused me on what I need to do, and what my soul wishes me to do, during my time on Earth. But, in addition to motivation and focus, my awareness of pre-birth planning has given deep purpose and meaning to what I experienced as a child. I know to the very core of my being that none of it was random or arbitrary. I know that I was not being punished by a wrathful God or a cruel Universe. I know that what happened is ultimately for my highest good.

In the Prologue you read about Mikæla. Her suffering was beyond anything I can imagine, yet it led her to a profound realization of herself as soul. When I asked Mikæla how she felt about everything she had gone through, she replied, “To get here, it was worth it.”

That is how I view my childhood experiences: may they be a path to healing and awakening for me as Mikaela’s experiences with mental illness were for her. May we also take all other challenges, and rather than misperceive them as empty, meaningless suffering, see them instead from the perspective of our souls and heal the wounds that underlie them. May all the experiences discussed on these pages and offered by life serve as tools of healing, awakening, and enlightenment for each and every one of us.

About Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz is a Hypnotherapist and Author of Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born and the just released Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born. Visit his website at Your Souls Plan