According to the Akashic Records, soul contracts are agreements we make with other souls prior to incarnation. A soul contract usually means an agreement to learn a lesson. This may include working through karma, or being an influence in each other’s life, offering help and support, being a catalyst of change — in short, fostering soul evolution in some way.
There is just one caveat. The emotions and messiness of human life do not exist at the soul level. Nor do they exist at the level of the Akashic Records.
We make agreements with full knowledge that our enemies will be our greatest teachers, and the bad guys of our lives will give us the most power in the long run — and that it will be difficult, but ultimately worth it. And then we are born… When we are in a human body with human emotions and human capacity for giving meaning and interpretation to events, the original agreements become a whole different story…
Soul Contracts and Free Will
From the perspective of the soul, which does not have emotions or ego, every soul contract serves the purpose of evolution. Our souls learn, grow, and evolve together with planet Earth. A relationship that did not work out is the Divine experiencing an aspect of reality that could only be experienced through us. Soul contracts are not based on feelings or human understanding of “good” and “bad” (this does not mean good and bad don’t exist. What I mean is our limited view is usually very far from reality).
But many of us have at some point asked the question – is it karma or choice that caused a particularly painful encounter? What role does free will play in these events? Is a soul contract something that is imposed on us, that we are led into blindly, or have we agreed to arranging these meetings with other souls? And what is the extent of our free choice?
Based on what I learned from working with the the Akashic Records, we choose the broad brushstrokes of our Earthly lives. Before our incarnation, our souls take part in planning the important events and meetings of our lives. We choose our families of origin and the particular genetic makeup that they carry. This pre-planning includes making agreements with important people in our future lives — friends and enemies. Our incarnation is a choice.
This does not mean soul contracts and other agreements are always concluded from a place of perfect clarity. Our souls are not omnipotent. They may have been burdened down, lifetime after lifetime, by guilt, pain, confusion and mistakes. Mistakes that we make in our human incarnation activate the karmic law of cause and effect, —and we need to come back to rectify the wrongs and learn the lessons.
What is a Karmic Soul Contract?
Soul contracts that we make based on rectifying past life wrongs and mistakes are karmic in nature. That means we are not released from them until the old debt is paid and karma is cleared.
We can meet someone and become romantically involved with them, feeling a very strong pull, almost a sense of not having a choice. The ego often interprets this as “we are meant to be together,” or “this is the one.” There will be certain aspects in such relationship that will indicate old karma needing to be worked through. For example, unequal social status, where one partner needs to help the other over a longer period of time, a health issue that binds people together, a common business, and so on.
When the karma is cleared, the attraction, that irresistible pull, gradually fades and people either separate, or continue living together as if from a clean slate. The latter is less common, because the huge relief we experience when having worked through karma makes us want to run away and start a new life, with someone else, somewhere else entirely.
If their egos are not attached to this connection, this separation happens very gently and painlessly. The same principle applies to other, non-romantic, karmic connections.
Often, karma is tied to painful memories and past life wounding that our souls are trying to heal. If this is the case, a relationship with your karmic connection will bring up all unhealed and unprocessed emotions. A karmic relationship that has its main purpose to bring about healing is often very painful and emotional.
Can I Break a Soul Contract?
Soul contracts, karmic or not, are never about punishment or even justice. Karma is the law of balance. Our souls are striving to resolve pain and to heal. An unhealed pattern is like a corrupted code, or a broken record. The same situation is bound to repeat over and over again until we learn to make different choices.
Then, as the scars heal and we break free, not only the future, but also the past gets transformed.
When we attain higher consciousness, we start seeing how even the most agonizing experiences were only stages on the path to bliss. Pain loses its power. In the words of C. S. Lewis, heaven, once attained, will work backwards.
This does not mean that horrific crimes and abuse perpetrated against the innocent and defenseless throughout centuries are somehow less horrific just because they have a place in the bigger picture. The ego always asks, like one of Dostoyevsky’s heroes, whether the tear of one child is worth all the goodness in the world. This question does not have an answer, because it is asked specifically to avoid responsibility.
The ego wants to hide behind the tears of a child. But we have a choice to heal and transform even the most horrific of our past into a victory. We don’t need to transform anyone else’s past. That is up to them.
Can we break a soul contract? In most cases, a soul contract is an agreement that is a part of our path. We can’t break it simply because we don’t like the experience. However, the more spiritual awareness we bring into what we are going through, the more we are able to clear. In other words, the less we resist, the faster we work through our karma and lessons.
It is important to understand that we made a soul-level choice to experience certain events. It is our present reaction to those events that causes us the greatest pain and turmoil. Most importantly, this pain propels us to seek a solution. This solution will lead us to our healing and spiritual ascension.
Once we start seeing our souls as powerful co-creators of our experience, we also start taking our power back, the power that was always ours, transmuting all, even pain, into light.
