I have two framed mottoes hanging on the wall in my office, where I can clearly see them. One says “The enjoyment of existence is a skill. It needs to be practised”, the other “Happiness is an inside job” Useful reminders when I’m finding life a bit hard going.
Nobody sets out to be unhappy. We all want to be happy. We are told by the world that the right job the right house, the right man, a family, and friends, etc will make us happy. We work hard, we try our best. Yet so often that happiness seems elusive. We may achieve everything we want, but somehow still feel unfulfilled. Or things do not work out, we experience difficulties, tragedy, and pain. Or we simply find life overwhelming and difficult to cope with. So many of us struggle in one way or another.
For me it really helps to understand a little about soul planning and purpose, to know there is so much more.
We come here for a reason. Our lives are not the result of random chance, we come from a place of love. When we die our existence continues. We go back home to the life between lives, rest and then assess what we achieved in that life. There is no judgement, only evaluation. Then, when it is time, we work with our soul families, advisers, and guides to plan our next life. We know what we hope to achieve, what our life themes, challenges and lessons will be, and we do not necessarily plan an easy life for ourselves.
Things are set in motion; patterns are woven into the tapestry of life, our soul vibration drops down to that of this world, and we come into our body. We are born.
And we forget. We forget all about the wonderful place that we come from. We forget all that planning. Forgetting is part of the deal by the way. How would we learn and grow if we already knew the script?
We forget that we are so much more than this body. We forget that we agreed to take on various challenges and lessons. We gradually forget that this life can be full of joy, we forget how to dance and instead life often becomes a struggle.
But part of us doesn’t forget. Part of us knows inherently who we really are, the love and the glory that we come from, where our true home is. From deep within us this still small voice whispers. “There’s something more. This is not all there is”. Or we might feel our guides or angels tapping us on the shoulder with the same message.
We don’t have to listen. We can let those gentle voices be drowned out by the noise of the world. Much of the time we do. But when we start to ask questions, open our hearts, and ask for help to find our path and purpose, then the universe will somehow respond.
It may not answer with the answers we think we want, or respond in the way we think we need, but at some point, it will respond, and when we listen, we can glimpse a deep happiness that comes from within, that is not dependent on what happens in our daily existence. This can give us strength to deal with whatever life throws at us, and strength to fight our own inner battles too.
We all have free will, although there are many things that we cannot change. Personally, I would prefer to be a tall, willowy blonde with a long neck. Ah well.
We have choice at every turn, not necessarily in what happens around us, but in how we react to it. We can choose to accept and rise to life’s challenges and learn our lessons, or we can turn away. We can choose joy, but we can also choose to listen to our shadow side, that negative bit of us, that doesn’t want us to be happy.
We all have a shadow side – our own inner demons. Once we leave the unity of the Divine to incarnate, we come into the world of duality, light and dark. The lovely person that we like to show to the world is shadowed by a part of us that is not so nice. It will pretend to be our friend but is not. It will convince us we are not good enough. It will set us up to fail, and then beat us up when we do, time and again. The poem “There’s a Rhino in my Garden”, describes some of its tricks.
We can never win if we try to fight our shadow. What we resist will always persist. Happiness lies instead in acknowledging its voice, but choosing not to listen, instead loving, and accepting our imperfect selves, “warts and all” to quote Oliver Cromwell.
The word ego gets a negative interpretation, but we all need a healthy ego, or sense of self-worth. When we love and accept ourselves, we are then able to accept and respect others, creating happy, healthy relationships. When we choose to forgive ourselves when we have gone wrong, we not only end our own torment, but we can also forgive others, and let go of old wounds and grudges etc.
The Serenity Prayer is one of the world’s most famous prayers. It seems a good note to end on.
God grant me the serenity to
Accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Interested in reading more about Soul Planning?
There are quite a few good books about this, written by hypnotherapists who have discovered that they can regress people back not Just to past lifetimes, but also to the time between lives.
A good place to start would be with “YOUR SOULS PLAN” by ROBERT SCHWARTZ, or “JOURNEY OF SOULS” by MICHAEL NEWTON. Both these writers have published several fascinating books about this.
Article by Kate Quartermaine. – Intuitive healer and dowser, poet and author.
See Poem by Kate Quartermaine – There’s A Rhino In My Garden
