What do we choose before birth? Do we have a Soul Contract?

Today, a question came in from one of you, the readers and members of this site. Thank you. It is an honor to be where you all would like to join to learn more and meet up with others who are also learning and growing.

The question is: "In your opinion, do we choose our parents, partners, jobs, and life experiences before we are born?"

This is a rather large question. I appreciated that the question started with 'In your opinion.’' A series of Mediumship Lectures ended last night with thoughts on perspectives and how we can keep growing, healing, merging, and integrating into more encompassing perspectives. Essentially, we first allow the blinders to come off, then move outside the proverbial box. Then we realize that outside of the box just isn't quite enough to witness a closer perspective of the truth, and we climb on top of the box. From that vantage point, we see many people inside their boxes with their blinders on, and others are just starting to mill about outside their boxes. You catch a glimpse of someone, you think off in the distance that is also on top of their box, and in tilting your head ever so slightly toward the sky, you see, off in the distance, someone who has taken their box apart and reassembled in a way that they have a vantage point higher than anyone. Off in another quadrant of the distance, you see someone moving around! Stepping from box to box. You think to yourself, that is precisely where I want to be. I want to be the person who is higher and also find a way to step from place to place while being just a little bit higher. And then, off the corner of your eye, you see something else. You need to turn around to try and witness, but it seems as if someone has created wings from their box and blinders and is soaring, able to see all the boxes and the various states of the people below. 

All of this is to say that we all have our own vantage point, and we can all express that to the best of our ability. That expression may change as we start to be comfortable with and figure out how to gain more perspective and take on the integration of what we hear from others. What works for us and our lived experience? What works for us, our language, and our culture? What are we willing to sit with, research, and have conversations about, take on aspects of, and merge with what we already have? What parts of what we already have are we willing to say no longer work and let it go in favor of a new, and if we have done the work right, a more authentic perspective?

This question has the tones of the perspective of life contracts and life lessons. It is also a question about the relationship between our individualized self and any planning it may have had with other individualized consciousness before incarnating as human. 

I have a friend who has 'memories' or an experience pre-birth in which he 'remembers' a 'guide' helping him figure out what would be best for his individualized self to grow into the wisdom that the more experienced 'guide' had. I love my friend's perspective and the work he has been able to do, sharing the love of Creation with anyone. He has a light that keeps shining brighter and brighter as he is willing to share his perspective. I have used what he has related to as a flow chart of life as a metaphor for me to wrap my heart around questions like: "How much did the soul 'Jenn' have a say in and plan what has transpired in my experience of Jenn this past 54 + year?" 

I don't share my friend's complete interpretation of his experience; I also didn't have his experience. However, it doesraisep the question of what it really means to be 'Jenn.'

This question pops up for me occasionally when I experience what one may call de ja vu. The feeling always makes me feel as if another aspect of myself, the 'future self, ' perhaps since humans recognize a linear timeline for their lives, somehow remember or are aware of what I just experienced. 

I understand the Universe, especially its nonphysical aspects, to be more fluid and complicated, like a ball of 'wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff' (Dr. Who), than we perceive in our world of boxes and timelines. 

Consider that the physical was born (created) from what was, at some point, only nonphysical consciousness. At some point, that nonphysical consciousness felt, needed, and wanted more self-understanding. In that instance, there was BREATH; there was a life beyond, including the thought and the beingness that was already present. 

In that breath, perspectives were born. Having perspective is the only way to have more than what is already present. Creation/Spirit/Divinity/Universe has perspectives beyond counting. Each particle, sun, moon, planet, rock, snail, tree, and human offers perspective. 

We, reading and contemplating the question of soul contracts, are the human perspective. Then, we have the 7 billion perspectives of all the humans we know roaming on Earth. 

My relationship with my former mother-in-law has always been tenuous. During my husband's illness, it was hideous, and after his death, it was just downright awful. There has been a softening now, a move to healing the relationship. I was told by well-meaning people that she had decided on some level to be the person who caused me to really struggle with that type of relationship. She actually signed on to be my bad guy so that I could learn something. I took on that idea for about a year. It did allow me to have some extra compassion for her in our difficulties, believing that somehow our difficulties were all part of some Divine Plan. Yet, really? REALLY!?

I do not believe she would enjoy the idea that her early life difficulties that led to the relationship she had with her son and then with me that culminated in her son passing is something this woman would say she signed up for. 

This supposes that external forces are always at play and that we are puppets in a play, acting out the scenarios and lines that are forced upon us. I prefer to see her as a mirror for myself. The parts that I am really seeing reflecting back as me are parts that I recognize, not parts she signed on to be sure I understood by suffering in her life.

I do not know that 'Jenn' had any type of existence before my parents conceived and then decided to bring that conception to a birth. Within the Ocean of the Universe, there are many, many, many aspects of knowing, feeling, and being. All the individualized perspectives, talents, and expressions can come together to form another level of consciousness. I often joke, but I find it more and more true that those aspects would like to understand what it means to be conscious, what it means to be the ONE, and what healing, a.k.a love, is all about. The elements that came together as 'Jenn' pulled together specific talents, drives, and a way of gathering information from experience. Also, I feel a wish to understand what PATIENCE is and how it works in Loving. 

Those aspects, coupled with my parents' choices, provided me with an opportunity for physical expression in my current life. 

We all live in an if-then flow chart—a huge and complicated one filled with many connecting dots to many people, situations, human history, and human understanding. Any computer programmer will tell you that moving one semicolon changes the whole dynamic of how the program runs. 

We are never victims of the process of life; we ARE the process of life. We are the Universe Made Manifest through its desire to move beyond simply being and into loving. Loving is only possible through choices and awareness coupled with understanding how those choices unfold. We are a very tiny and hugely significant part of that process. 

We have the same choice: to be in this life or engage with it. Do we choose to take authentic action to fix what we may have broken or take care of ourselves by washing, dancing, or making plans with a friend? Do we choose to step into Patience and Perseverance and integrate our unlimitedness with what we are enthusiastic about in this life? Do we move forward, create connections, and care for each other's physical well-being? Do we bring meaning into our lives through awareness, creativity, and self-expression? 

The alternative is to decide that what we are experiencing is some type of contract and have no choice but to be confused, heavy-hearted, disconnected, angry, ill, annoyed, and helpless in our life circumstances. It is not bad to feel these things, but they do give us a choice on how we would like to act or not act. Do we wallow in the feelings or use them as a way to understand how we are interpreting a situation?

Life is not a lesson. It is an experience. Whatever the experience has, the threads and opportunity for the Universe to move into the ONE Universe. We need to share this with the ONE in the movement of BREATH and Discovery. My time as Jenn is a result of the Universe, the Divine Universe, offering the opportunity of expression and choices around the talents and personalities that came together as me. Some parts of me have had other experiences and recognize de-ja-vu as connecting me to people and the Spirit all over Creation. Yes, I am Jenn. I am here and now, and I am writing this essay. And yet, I am so much more connected to the Infinite that first breathed and allowed my Jenn perspective to be a reality. It is hard for me to stay in the box of contract when the feeling is soaring and shifting and being the physical Jenn and the nonphysical awareness moving my experience the best it can into the ONE for all to share in the knowledge the experience brings.