Soul Contracts Help Me Keep My Sanity

Believing that all interactions have a purpose helps me stay on track

When my only brother died suddenly at the age of 35, the rest of the family was left struggling to make sense of it. After years of dropping in and out of college, and otherwise demonstrating issues with authority, Jack had finally gotten his degree and settled down. He found a great job helping underprivileged kids learn computer skills and was living a responsible adult life. Jack was well suited for this job and both the people that he worked with and the kids adored him. A year later he was gone.

“I don’t understand it,” my mother said sadly. “Jack had finally gotten his life together and was making something of it. It seems such a waste.”

Without even really thinking about it, I blurted out, “He’d finished what he came here to do. It wasn’t necessary to continue.”

This was long before I knew about soul contracts or had any kind of metaphysical training, but it just made sense to me that Jack had completed something and gone on to the next place, perhaps to start something new. I don’t know if it comforted my mother or not, but it comforted me. It gave his death a purpose, and that was what I needed to begin to heal from it.

Soul contracts, as described by Caroline Myss and others, are agreements that we make with other souls before we are born, for the purposes of learning and growth. They may come in the form of challenges or difficulties, meaningful relationships, or even passing one-time interactions. How many times have you heard a story about someone who had a life-changing conversation with a stranger on a bus, or some other fleeting but potent meeting? There is always room for free will, but soul contracts are a kind of lesson plan for life, agreed upon before you ever incarnate.

It doesn’t matter to me whether soul contracts are literally a true thing or not. I simply use the concept as a tool because I’ve discovered that when something difficult has meaning, it’s easier to deal with it. I try to ask myself, “What was this for? rather than “Why is this happening to me?” What am I meant to learn from this situation? How can I grow or get a deeper understanding of life? Where can I discover more about the nature of love or of acceptance, both for myself and for others?

I use this tool on pretty much a daily basis and it’s a question that I often ask my coaching clients when they tell me about something difficult they are grappling with. “What is this for?” It not only creates the opportunity to take on a new perspective but it puts the person asking that question in the driver’s seat. No longer is life happening to you, it’s happening for you. How can you make the most of that?

One of the most difficult, but also most rewarding places to ask this question is in close relationships. We want to have enjoyable connections with our family, partners, and friends, but from a soul contract perspective, those people are in our lives by design, and not only to bring us happiness. In fact, it’s my assertion that your mate is actually there to do a job, and not to make you happy, as you may have been led to believe by the Hallmark- fairytale industrial complex.

“Being in a relationship with your partner(s) will prompt you to deal with old wounds, ask you to get to know yourself more deeply, and give you the opportunity to learn how to be a better human. Think about it — if life and love were endlessly easy and beautiful, there would be no motivation to learn and grow. We’d all sit around like the people in WALL-E, too lethargic to get off of our floating comfort couches.”

And the same holds true for family members. The ups and downs that we have with our parents, children, siblings, and extended family are all opportunities. We have a greater ability to choose our friends, but even then, I find it empowering to look at these relationships as soul contracts. If you are butting heads with someone or a friendship runs it’s course, looking at it through the lens of that being part of a previously agreed upon dynamic makes it a bit easier to swallow. If it’s part of a larger plan and serves a purpose of some kind, then it’s just a little easier to get on the horse the way that it is going and try to make the best of it.

This doesn’t mean to just let everything roll over you as if you were a doormat. In fact, sometimes I’ve decided that the purpose of something has been an opportunity for me to learn to better stand up for myself. At this point in my life, I have a much more confident sense of myself and my own voice and there are things that I will no longer abide because I’ve learned along the way that I really don’t have to. A lot of that comes out of this practice of asking “What is this for?”

Many people object to the aphorism that everything happens for a reason because it seems deterministic and arbitrary to them — as if a great puppet master in the sky were directing their fate. Looking at my life and it’s interactions through the lens of soul contracts feels entirely different from that. The learning opportunities that I am presented with are ones that I have chosen for myself and enlisted others to help me with.

And as I said before, it doesn’t matter whether or not that is true in the literal sense, looking at my life and my experiences from that perspective is a way to help me make sense of a world that often feels chaotic. It’s a tool that I use to help keep my sanity and to help keep me from being entirely overwhelmed, and for the most part, it works. There are times when I get temporarily carried away by sadness or anger or frustration, but when I am able to bring myself back to asking how this situation can potentially be for my benefit, it never fails to help me. It may be only a coping mechanism, but it’s a very effective one.

© Copyright, Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love.