May 7, 2003. I remember that day well, because it was the day on which my life changed, the day that launched me on the path to writing the book Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born.
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.
For example, five years earlier I had been going through a very difficult time in my personal life. One day, alone in the privacy of my home, and silently in my mind, I said a prayer to God. I said, “God, I can’t get through this alone. Please send help.” I had completely forgotten about this prayer, but my guides knew about it, and they reminded me of it. They added, “Your prayer was answered,” by which they meant that additional nonphysical guidance had been sent. I was astounded.
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 started to think about writing a book about it.
At the same time, I began to have metaphysical experiences of my own. I would like to tell you about one in particular that profoundly informed my research and forever altered the way I look at the world.
One day, I was working in my home office and decided to take a break and go for a walk. As I was meandering down the sidewalk, I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of overwhelming unconditional love for every person I saw.
I remember this experience with crystal clarity. The first person I was a cab driver sitting behind the wheel of his cab, waiting for a fare to come along. I looked at this man – a complete stranger to me – and felt nothing but pure, unconditional love for him. Then I noticed a barbershop on the corner. I looked through the window and saw a barber cutting someone’s hair. Again, I felt overwhelming love for these people who I did not know and had never seen before. Then I noticed a young mother pushing an infant in a stroller down the sidewalk. Once more I felt the same unconditional love for these people. Everywhere I looked, every time I saw a person, I felt tremendous love flowing over me and through me.
Though I had never heard or read of an experience like this, I knew immediately and intuitively what was happening: I was in enhanced communion with my own soul. It was as though my soul were saying to me, “This love is who you really are. This is your true nature.”
I believe that my soul gifted me with this experience because when I went on to research and write Your Soul’s Plan, every pre-birth blueprint I examined was based on unconditional love. This was true even when the souls were scripting a “negative” role for someone to play.
Had I not had that experience of myself as unconditional love, I would have found exactly the same results in my research. But I think there would always have been a little voice at the back of my head saying, “How do you know any of this is true?” Well, I know it’s true because I experienced it myself. And so I can state to you with absolute confidence and certainty that I believe that we as souls are made quite literally from the energy of unconditional love.
In order to research people’s pre-birth plans, I collaborated with four very gifted mediums and channels, including one who is able 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.
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Robert Schwartz is the author of Your Soul’s Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born. A free PDF with a large sample of the book is available on Mr. Schwartz’s web site at www.yoursoulsplan.com
Robert,
I totally agree with you.
It's amazing to me how many therapists try to undo these soul paths at times. In the past, I have sometimes been led to believe that unconditionally loving acts were foolish, because the recipient wasn't able to return the love. Yet, I teach folks how to check in with their own intuition as to the correct action, regardless of the popular idea, and in the long run, they have been greatly rewarded for doing so, both personally, and by observing the effects of the love they offered.
I am looking forward to getting your book.
Warmly
Linda
PS May 7th is my birthday, so I am especially impressed that you had this experience on that day.
interesting and beautiful post.
Wish you love, peace and happiness.
Trisha
Robert,
Thank you for taking the time and energy to write and post this blog — not to mention what sounds like a very important and helpful book. I will get a copy A.S.A.P. as I look quite forward to reading it in its entirety.
I know, from my own life experience, that we do, indeed, plan the probabilities of our lives. Many have rejected this because they do not want to believe in "fate" or have the feeling that their life is not their choice. I am quite certain that we DO have the choice to alter, change, re-direct these "plans" — they are not "carved in stone" — but it is ever-so-helpful to know what they are and why we chose that path in the first place. Every participant is a willing, loving "dance partner" — whether cast in the role of villain, victim, rescuer, or whatever — I believe it is ALL planned out with great love for one another, so that each person can experience what they desire and choose to experience. Beautiful symmetry and synchronicities, planned and enacted from love, for the benefit of all concerned. As far as "plans" go — pretty hard to beat that one.
Again, Robert, thank you. I can hardly wait to get and read your book.
Kitty
thank you for posting, I too believe in the pre-incarnation blueprint. x
I totally disagree. It's a clean slate with each birth, but with a new set of genetic codes and a new set of imprints through personal experiences, which push you in a certain direction. The freedom to choose a direction is our God given right whether it be with our predispositions or in another new direction altogether. Although I can agree to an ever evolving plan that changes with our decisions. Life is challenging enough for everyone as it is without the need to create more challenges than the new ones we were born into.
We have to take personal responsibility for our decisions and accept our lot in life unconditionally without fishing for profound reasons or excuses to explain our behavior or disabilities.
Hi All,
Funny, I was just thinking about that…..the…you plan your life before you are born along with other equally intellectually convenient beliefs about the nature of our existence on earth.
Truly, there are a thousands of believers for any and every belief offered up by anyone about anything and everyone.
I have come to the conclusion that no one knows the program but everyone longs to know, we never outgrow our WHY?stage in life.
I am sure the is a method to this madness yet I am also sure that even though this book may be a "good" read , a "good story," it is just another story about the WHY of it and and us and our reason for being.
Being Is, at our every essence we are Being, without a story, without any glory and Being IS without a reason, but, we, millions upon millions, of little drops of beingness must believe that there has to be "a story, and there is, but there is the beginning, the middle and the end of all our stories and the stories most likely can be continued if one is very attached to it rather than the essence of their Being and this is where our soul comes into play, our soul is the vehicle with which the story can be continued or the soul can eventually choose to "rest in peace" in the BEING that IS witout any story or any glory beyond any reason, at all, and, if, it can even recognize BEING for what it IS, considering all the stories that it has been told….hmmmm.
Contemplating the WHY of it all is fun and enjoyable use of time….rann
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