Soul Plans and Karma: Unbalanced Energy
Karma, to most people, is a carrot-and-stick sort of thing: you have good karma because you did good things (carrot) and bad karma because you did bad things (stick). Nothing could be further from the truth.
Remember see-saws when you were a child? (Maybe you called it a teeter-totter; same thing.) One child went up, and the other went down. When the down child pushed up from the ground, THEY went up and the other child went down. Was either position better than the other? Not at all; guaranteed you’d have giggles on either end of the board. All the children did was play with the balance.
That’s what happens with unbalanced energy. Here’s a hypothetical example:
Two souls decide they want to look at self-love and self-worth. They agree to come in as sisters. One will be what the world considers pretty and the other will be what the world considers plain. During this existence, the pretty sister always outshines the plain sister in the family’s eyes, and is given much more in the way of compliments, opportunities and favors. The plain sister is left, for the most part, on her own to understand who she is and what she is worth, without positive feedback or reinforcement. In this lifetime, because the plain sister is always in the shadow of the pretty one, she learns to value herself not on how she looks, but who she is on all levels. This understanding gives her a strong and happy personality until death in her 80s, unfazed by aging. The pretty sister gets by on her looks until she is in her 60s, at which time she fades rapidly, and has a great deal of trouble adjusting to the fact that she feels loss and worth less as she ages. She dies wondering if she was worth anything other than her looks.
When they both transition out of the body, the two companions compare experiences. They examine emotional independence; worldly values vs. internal/timeless values; self-love vs. self-judgment. They look at the myriad ways their life paths and decisions shaped their life’s lessons. And at that point, they may decide to reverse roles – NOT because the soul that chose to be physically beautiful owes the soul who chose plainness anything. In that existence, both souls return Home with valuable information regarding duality, love, and what it is like to walk the Earthplane. When these souls are between incarnations, their relationship is one of mutual love and compassion, for when the Soul is out of the limited Body, love is all there is.
So in the next lifetime, they might choose to come in as friends, rather than sisters. The pretty one incarnates with plain features, and the plain one incarnates with a very beautiful outside form. In this relationship, the one who understood how to value herself is challenged to do so again when the world is ready to turn her head with compliments and favors at the expense of her plainer friend. The one who understood herself only based on looks is challenged to understand herself on all levels. A third challenge may be for them to support each other as equals, regardless of the outside packaging. And they must do this all without remembering their previous lives as sisters in opposite circumstances.
Do they succeed if they stay supportive of each other and fail if they do not? Not at all. In all of this, there is no right or wrong, success or failure. There is learning on all levels. This kind of learning can happen with any kind of monad: parent and child, siblings, teacher and student, murderer and victim, king and serf, best friends, rivals, artist and patron…the possibilities are endless.
In my own life, I asked that the soul who generally comes in as my best friend play the role of Father for me, as I knew I would have a very challenging life with my mother, and would be walking in the world in ways that were far from the accepted norm. Additionally, this kind and wonderful soul is usually the one who shepherds me through the death experience – I die before he/she does. In this life, coming in as my father, this soul planned to die well before I did, with the extra challenge of understanding death and dying in a very clinical model, due to the chosen vocation of a physician.
We still remained each other’s best friends, despite a great deal of emotional difficulty placed within all members of our family. And because of my father’s understanding and acceptance of my spiritual and metaphysical nature – so unlike anyone else in the family unit – I was able to actively ease his way into the death experience with quiet, one-on-one conversations in the months before. When the soul made contact with me three weeks after its transition, I discovered that “Dad” had already transitioned into his full-Soul self, dropping the restrictive personality very quickly.
When you find yourself in circumstances that feel very difficult, resist the idea that you are being “punished” for something or “owe” somebody something. That is putting judgment on learning that will not help you, and will keep you in what I call victim think. Circumstances are set up for learning, just as a chemistry lab is set up for learning chemical reactions, or an obstacle course is set up to learn flexibility and quick thinking. If you mix two substances together and get a noxious smell, is it because either one is bad? No, an element is an element, and will behave in certain ways when it gets together with another one. If you trip on the obstacle course because you lost your footing, is it the fault of gravity? Not at all; gravity works in certain ways and if you do not remain upright, you are likely to hit the ground.
Instead, in these situations, try to look at the situation from all sides, just like viewing a scientific experiment. Understand that you are choosing to learn certain things in this lifetime, and you can choose to learn different ones the next time. But no matter what happens within this life to this personality you have chosen to wear – happiness, sadness, abundance, poverty, health, illness – there are amazing gifts for the soul to bring Home from these experiences; and having walked through them, you are guaranteed to have lived well from the Soul’s point of view.
Interested in discovering your own Soul Plan, with a detailed look at the past lives that are affecting you this time, and keys for moving ahead in this life with joy and fulfillment? Visit my Sessions section where the Soul Plan Reading is described in full.