Soul contracts are agreements we make in the spirit world. When I was learning to read the Akashic Records, I was taught that before we incarnate, we make soul contracts with important people in our lives. I still hold this to be basically true, but I have also come to recognize soul contracts with places, substances and spirit beings.
A soul contract usually means an agreement to learn a lesson. A soul contract may include working through karma, being an influence in each other’s life, offering help and support, or being a catalyst for change. You may have a soul contract with a city that always called you. You may have soul contracts with food items or substances, such as alcohol.
We make soul contracts in order to experience life and to evolve as souls.
This sounds pretty straightforward. The broad brushstrokes of our lives are defined before incarnation, the major players and influences are set out — and now it is up to us to respond and choose. This, however, is the part that is most often misunderstood in the context of an Akashic Record reading.
Many people believe that what is contracted are situations or specific people. This is to some extent true, but the main issue is the lessons. If we don’t learn a particular lesson that we have contracted to learn, it will come to us in another form — through another situation or another person. Lessons are more important than situations.
Additionally, emotions and messiness of human life do not exist at the soul level. We make agreements with full knowledge that our enemies will be our greatest teachers, that the bad guys of our lives will give us the most power in the long run. Our souls know that it will be difficult, but ultimately worth it.
Yet, in a human body with its emotions and our human capacity for interpreting events, the original agreements become a whole different story. And we may — and do — dig in our heals and refuse to budge, being dragged into heaven kicking and screaming!
Soul Contracts and Free Will
From the perspective of the soul, 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 this relationship.
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, the broad brushstrokes of our Earthly lives are predetermined. 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. We choose the lessons that we want to learn.
However, 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 lesson is learned and karma is cleared. I don’t look at karma in a linear way. Many of us are working through ancestral karma, the karma of our gender or our ethnicity, and so on.
How can we identify a karmic soul contract? Let’s say you meet someone and become romantically involved with them. You are 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 karma is cleared, mutual attraction gradually fades and people either separate, or continue living together as if from a clean slate. The latter is less common. The enormous sense of relief that we experience when having worked through karma makes us want to run away and start a new life, with someone else, somewhere else entirely.
Often, karma is tied to painful memories and ancestral wounding that our souls are trying to heal. If this is the case, a relationship with your karmic connection will bring up many unhealed and unprocessed emotions. A karmic relationship that is meant to bring healing is, paradoxiacally, often very painful and emotional.
Can I Break a Soul Contract?
Soul contracts, karmic or not, are never about punishment. Karma is simply a systemic law of balance. It’s how the system works. The Akashic Records are a perfect place to look for systemic misalignments, for code corruptions at the soul level. An unhealed pattern is like a corrupted code, a broken record that is stuck on the same phrase. The same situation is bound to repeat over and over again until we learn to make different choices.
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.
Heaven, once attained, will work backwards
This does not mean that horrific crimes and abuse of 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 only to avoid responsibility. This thought process is only a chewing gum for the mind. The ego wants to hide behind the tears of a child.
We have a choice to heal and transform 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.
