Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

In a personal session with a medium in 2003, author Robert Schwartz was astonished to speak with nonphysical beings who knew everything about him - not just what he had done in life, but also what he had thought and felt. They told him that he had planned many of his most difficult experiences before he was born. Realizing that a knowledge of pre-birth planning would bring great healing to people and allow them to understand the deeper purpose of their life challenges, he decided to devote his life to the study of pre-birth planning. The extraordinary insights that have emerged from his work speak to our heartfelt, universal yearning to know . . . why. Robert Schwartz is a certified hypnotherapist who offers spiritual guidance and hypnotherapeutic regressions to help people understand their life plan. For more information please visit him online at www.yoursoulsplan.com.

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Your Soul's Gift

Whispering Winds Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................iPrologue...................................................1Preface....................................................3Introduction...............................................9Chapter 1 • Healing...................................37Chapter 2 • Spiritual Awakening.......................61Chapter 3 • Miscarriage...............................95Abortion...................................................126Chapter 4 • Caregiving................................133Chapter 5 • Pets......................................171Chapter 6 • Abusive Relationships.....................207Chapter 7 • Sexuality.................................229Chapter 8 • Incest....................................265Chapter 9 • Adoption..................................311Chapter 10 • Poverty..................................353Chapter 11 • Suicide..................................391Chapter 12 • Rape.....................................433Chapter 13 • Mental Illness...........................479Epilogue...................................................523References.................................................525A: Interviewees............................................527B: Mediums and Channels....................................528

Chapter One

The journey you take AS you read this book will be most meaningful and healing if you embark with a certain conceptual framework in place. Let us begin, then, with this most fundamental of questions: Why do we plan before we are born to have certain experiences—including great challenges—in our lives?

Karma

Karma is sometimes conceptualized as "cosmic debt," but in my exploration of pre-birth planning, I have come to view it more as a lack or absence of balanced experiences. For example, if you have a disabled child and dedicate your life to caring for and loving that child, after this lifetime either or both of you may feel a sense of imbalanced experience. On the soul level, you would likely seek to balance the experiences from that lifetime, and if so, you may plan another incarnation together in which you switch roles. You may therefore choose to be born with a physical disability, and you may ask your former child to play the role of your mother or father. Motivated both by great love for you and by a desire to balance the experiences of that past life, your former child would likely agree to your request. And so another lifetime would be set in motion.

The soul's feeling of balance derives not from what it does for another soul, but rather from experiencing what it did not previously experience. For instance, the soul of your former child will feel a sense of balance after it experiences caregiving. Similarly, your soul will feel a sense of balance after you experience receiving care. The same principle would apply if you had abandoned your disabled child in the past life. Though you might very well choose to "make things up" to your former child in another lifetime, that act of doing so would not create a feeling of balance. Rather, the feeling of balance would come from experiencing abandonment yourself. "hear me well," Jeshua said when speaking about this point. "Karma is not balanced by doing good to someone else as people like to think. It is not by doing something to someone that one balances one's karma, but by going through the experience oneself."

Too, there is a distinction between balancing and releasing karma. Karma is balanced when the soul feels it has experienced all sides of an issue. Karma is released when the underlying causes of the original imbalance are resolved. The distinction is significant; unless we heal the underlying causes of our karma, we will tend to create new karma even after the original karma was balanced.

Let us say, for example, that in a past life you held the false belief that the resources of the Universe are limited, that there is not enough to go around. Let us say, too, that this false belief generated great fear in you, so much so that you chose to steal food from your neighbor. At the end of that lifetime, when you transitioned back to the nonphysical realm and had your life review, you felt a desire to balance this experience. You therefore planned to experience material loss of some kind in your next lifetime. You also chose to carry both the energy of fear and the false belief in scarcity back into body for the purpose of healing them.

The experiences you plan for your next life would balance the karma, but they would not necessarily address the fear or false belief. If left unhealed, the fear and false belief would likely prompt you to take other actions that would generate more karma. The original karma is released only when the underlying fear and false belief are healed. On the soul level you would be aware of this fact and so might plan, for example, the experience of poverty or financial setback in your next incarnation, not as self-punishment for the act of theft in your past life, but rather as a means of mirroring to yourself those aspects of your consciousness (the fear and belief in lack) in need of healing. Though we dislike and resist suffering, it is a potent healing mechanism even if we have no conscious understanding of when or how it brings healing. A conscious awareness of its purpose, however, may empower us to learn the underlying lessons and create the needed healing in a much less arduous manner.

In one of our discussions, Jeshua described karma as "a set of false beliefs about oneself and the world ... the belief in fear and separation." I believe that at this pivotal time in humanity's evolution, we are returning to a state of unity consciousness in which our fears and belief in separation are healing. Contrary to popular concept, such healing can occur quite rapidly, even instantly. Said Jeshua:

The releasing of karma can happen instantly when the soul realizes the true nature of its own being: pure Divinity, one with Spirit. From this realization springs deep peace. When the soul can hold this insight, it will liberate itself quite easily from the bonds of karma.

There is a story in the Bible about a criminal who was put on the cross next to me. he was touched profoundly by the energy of compassion I radiated, and because of the deep surrender he experienced in his death process, I could tell him, "Today you shall be with me in paradise." There was a genuine release of karma in that moment, an awakening that he would remember in lifetimes to come.

There is a paradox at work here that is inherent in duality [third-dimensional life]. heavy karma can create great enlightenment; souls who have explored their dark side thoroughly and carried heavy karma on their shoulders may become the greatest and most compassionate teachers for others. They may have taken a long time to become free, but they will all tell you that the difficulty was not in the amount of struggle and suffering they had to go through, but rather in seeing that the struggle was not real, that it was a result of their belief in fear and separation, and that in truth they were free from the very start.

Releasing karma is not difficult in the sense of having to go through a lot of suffering. It is difficult in that it goes against deeply seated illusions that have clouded humanity's consciousness for a long time. The key is to become aware of who you truly are [soul] and to remember that you are unconditionally loved by Spirit and that you are safe and free Now. Is it difficult to realize this? You surely think it is.

This book intends to help you remember who you really are: the vast, wise, loving, limitless, eternal, and Sacred Being who planned the life you are now living. As you come more fully into this remembrance, you will see ever more clearly that you can balance and release your karma and heal in the ways in which you need to heal. You are the powerful creator of all you experience, both the challenges you planned before you were born and the healing you create in this and in each Now moment.

Healing

We also plan challenges and other life experiences to heal various energies and aspects of our consciousness that may be unrelated to our karma. For example, in Your Soul's Plan I share the story of Penelope, a young woman who planned to be born completely deaf. When medium Staci Wells and I accessed Penelope's prebirth planning session, we discovered that in the lifetime prior to the current one, Penelope had the same mother she has now. In that past life, Penelope heard her mother shot to death by the mother's boyfriend. Penelope was psychologically traumatized by this event, so much so that it led her to commit suicide later in that lifetime. She therefore returned to Spirit with what could be termed an "energy of unresolved trauma," which now needs to be healed. In her pre-birth planning session, Penelope's spirit guide asks her if she would like to be born deaf so that no similar trauma will happen again and so that she may complete her healing from the previous lifetime. Penelope responds, "Yes, that is what I want and what I wish to do." So begins the planning of the life experience of complete deafness.

I also related the story of Pat, a gentleman who plans before birth to experience several decades of alcoholism. Pat forges this life plan in part because of the way in which he died in a previous lifetime. In that life Pat died in combat; he was the last man standing in a battlefield. As he roamed the battlefield looking at his fallen comrades, he felt intense fear. While in this state of extreme fear, he was shot and killed. The energy of fear was thus left lingering in his consciousness, very much in need of healing. Before he was born, Pat knew that a prolonged experience of alcoholism would be so emotionally painful that it would drive him to seek god, after which he would have a spiritual awakening that would heal the fear he had carried into body. Pat's healing began one day when he came home from work, drank literally every last ounce of alcohol left in his home, fell to his knees, and called out to god for help. In that moment Pat he felt god's presence. Several weeks later he checked into rehab and never drank again. Pat planned and brilliantly completed a circle of healing: he planned for the fear he carried into body to express as alcoholism, for the alcoholism to create emotional pain, for the emotional pain to drive him to discover his spirituality, and for his spirituality to heal the fear he carried into body.

Our life plans are designed to heal certain energies left unresolved from our prior lifetimes. These include judgment (of self or others), blame (of self or others), anger, guilt, and many other such negative emotions. If we complete lifetimes with these emotions still present in our consciousness, they become like residue on our souls. Our souls will then seek to transmute such emotions by planning (or in some cases, being almost reflexively drawn into) lives that reflect these emotions back to us so we may address them. That which remains unhealed from one lifetime must be healed in another.

Service to Others

On the soul level, the desire to be of service to others is a major motivation for planning certain life experiences. This desire is an organic expression of Oneness consciousness, which is our natural state of being in our nonphysical home. By Oneness I mean that there is truly only one being in the Universe. You, I, and indeed every person are but individualized expressions of the One. It is for this reason that the term "service to others" really means "service to seeming others."

Let us say at the soul level you and I are planning a life together. When in a state of Oneness consciousness, you know that I am literally you. This knowledge is more than just an intellectual concept as it is for most of us when we are in body; rather, you actually perceive that I am you and that you are me. Naturally, then, you are inclined to be of service to me. Conversely, since I experience that you are literally me, I of course want to be of service to you.

Service to others is an accelerated path of spiritual evolution. What you give, you receive. What you teach, you learn. A common mistake—in truth there are no mistakes; all experience results in learning—of the spiritual aspirant is to focus overly on one's own growth, as though such growth is independent of service to others. excessive focus on self, even when that focus is on spiritual advancement, actually slows one's evolution. We tend to forget this truth after we incarnate, but on the soul level we are acutely aware of it. We therefore plan to be of service to others in order to foster the expansion and evolution of the One of which we are all integral parts.

What does service mean? Certainly, service may refer to acts of lovingkindness. One of the most common roles by which we serve through lovingkindness is as parents who nurture our children. Yet, it is also true that negative roles are sometimes planned upon before birth. Indeed, those who challenge us most in life may be doing so at our behest. Pat's children, for example, knew before birth that his alcoholism would prevent him from being as fully present or loving as he might otherwise be. They chose him as a parent not in spite of his planned alcoholism but rather because of it. They felt that the experience of having an alcoholic father would best foster their own evolution.

Those who play the most negative roles in our lives are not always doing so at our request. In the chapter on rape, for example, you will see that a higher part of the rapist's soul permitted the pre-birth planning of a rape so that a lower or darker part of the soul would have the opportunity to heal anger. Beverly, the woman who was raped, did not request such an experience, but she did know before birth that the rape was likely to occur. her soul agreed to this plan for reasons I will explore in that chapter.

Three Layers of the Soul and Healing false Beliefs

That a higher part of a soul allows a lower part to carry out an act like rape was not something I had seen in the research for my first book, at least not in those terms. When I encountered it in subsequent research I was perplexed; my understanding had been that we as souls are Love. Jeshua clarified by explaining, "The soul is both love and nonlove. The soul is growing and evolving and is not all-knowing and all-love. The soul is the experiencing part of you, and through experience it moves from nonlove to love."

There are three "layers" to the soul: the Spirit-self, the Soulself, and the earthly personality. The core of our being is the Spirit-self, what some would refer to as Spirit, god, or the I Am presence. This part of the soul is all-wise and all-love. It is part of the realm of Being: ever-present, unchanging, One with all other beings, and All That Is.

The Soul-self is part of the realm of Becoming. This is the aspect of us that takes part in duality. The Soul-self evolves through experience. It can make what we could consider to be mistakes. It can forget its eternal connection to Spirit and feel cut off from the Love from which it was created and toward which it grows.

The earthly personality in each lifetime is one expression of the enormous and much larger energy that is the Soul-self. The personality is inspired by the Soul-self, and the Soul-self learns from the experiences of the personality, particularly the feelings experienced by the personality. Much healing can and does occur in our nonphysical home when we return there between incarnations, but some healing can occur only through the experience of living through and surmounting a challenge while in body. In the nonphysical realm we have a greater knowingness, but life on earth gives us the magnificent opportunity to transform that knowingness into a felt experience. It is the difference between having and being wisdom.

The Soul-self knows more than the earthly personality but is not necessarily completely aligned with Spirit. The Soul-self is multidimensional; it can express in several different dimensions or incarnations simultaneously. The healing that each of us does in our current lifetime brings healing to the other personalities that have been created by the Soul-self, and their healing brings healing to us. In the chapter on mental illness, you will see that Mikæla agreed before she was born to experience several forms of extreme mental illness so that she could heal herself and in so doing bring healing to several of her Soul-self 's other incarnations.

The question arises: Why would Spirit or god allow mental illness and other forms of suffering to occur? One answer is that Spirit is inherently unlimited. If Spirit were to prevent the Soul-self from planning an incarnation and having certain experiences, then Spirit itself would become limited, which is contrary to the nature of Spirit. Spirit therefore allows the soul to experience all manifestations of ignorance, fear, and even darkness.

When the Soul-self plans an incarnation on earth, the plan is created from both knowing and ignorance, love and fear. Ignorance includes false beliefs, some of the most common being "I am unworthy," "I am powerless," "I am alone," "Love is painful," "Life is untrustworthy," and "Life is suffering." The soul will attract life circumstances according to these beliefs. Over time, as the world mirrors these beliefs to the personality, they will come into conscious awareness. When the personality realizes the creative power of belief and the fact that one's outer world is but a reflection of one's inner world, then he or she may set about healing those false beliefs.

Doing so requires more than just intention and awareness; also necessary are experiences that disprove the false belief. We are better able to create such positive experiences when we act as if—as if we feel ourselves to be worthy, as if we know ourselves to be powerful, as if love is safe and life joyful. With the passage of time and repeated positive experiences, our false beliefs will be transformed. Perhaps most important, false beliefs cannot be changed by forcing ourselves to think different thoughts. False beliefs change when and because feelings change. Can you feel that you are worthy, powerful, and not alone? Can you feel the presence of Spirit and the Love the Universe has for you? Can you feel joy in and trust for life? To be truly released, beliefs must be addressed at the level of feeling. It can be the work of a lifetime.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Your Soul's Giftby ROBERT SCHWARTZ Copyright © 2012 by Robert Schwartz. Excerpted by permission of Whispering Winds Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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