7/24/12—Choosing Your Life Before You're Born

Today's Draw: The Life We Long Ago Chose from Illuminate! Life Journey Cards by Linda Clayton, Part 2. Do you believe it's possible you chose exactly the life you're living long before you were even born? Why might you have chosen this life, with both its struggles and its gifts? What did your soul come here to learn?

What I'm going to talk about today is something not everyone is going to believe in. But it's something that's interesting to consider nonetheless. It requires believing we all have souls that may have been alive as humans before.

People who believe in souls generally believe that the soul comes to earth in human form to learn lessons for its own growth and/or healing. If that sounds like a reasonable belief to you, then it's not far off to consider that your soul (or some other force) might have a hand in choosing the lessons it would learn while in your body in this lifetime. I mean, they don't just come down here to learn a lesson-free life, right? That would boring. And, besides, have you ever met anyone who had nothing to learn in their lifetime? Of course not. So it's logical to assume that souls might come down here with some sort of agenda or lesson plan to complete.

Looking at the image above, imagine you're the soul on the right and you're just about to travel down into some lady's pregnant belly and be born on the earth plane. What happened in the moments before you made your journey? What agreements did you make? What lesson did you say you were willing to learn? What tradeoffs were you willing to make to learn those lessons? And what lessons did you NOT come down to learn? What was that "life you long ago chose?"

For example, I don't think I came here to learn any lessons about poverty. I'm by no means well off, but I've got a life I'm very comfortable with. I've been like that every day of my life and there's no reason for me to believe that won't continue. My situation may not be enough for a lot of people—I'm not someone who's into extravagant things, so I don't require as much as someone who is. I can easily live without the things I can't afford. I don't overspend. And when things are a little tight, money or opportunity always shows up for me. So struggling over monetary or material concerns doesn't seem to be on my list this time around.

But what might be on my list is learning different avenues to love beyond the romantic form. Romantic relationships haven't worked out well for me in the past, meaning the cost felt greater than the value received. The longest relationship I've had was just shy of two years. After that, you can count the string of others in months apiece.

I just don't think I'm made for it, frankly. I like men. I enjoy sex. But some key ingredient in having a good, solid relationship with a man eludes me. It's probably because I'm a loner at heart. And I don't want to be tied down to anything that might limit my options. I'm sure most people don't see love in that way, but I do. And even though the highs of life are higher when I'm coupled than when I'm not (and, I might add, the lows are lower), overall I'm happier without a man in my life. I'm more balanced. I'm more "me".

That said, I feel more love in my life the way it is now than I've ever received from being coupled. I pour my own love into my dogs and my work and my dreams and hobbies and friends. And all of that gives right back to me in palpable ways. I believe that, because I'm not dependent on—or distracted by—the dynamics of romantic love, I've become more attuned to some of these other forms. In short, I'm not missing anything in the love department, and looking around me, I thoroughly believe I experience more love on a daily basis than the average person does. It's just not romantic love.

And let me clear here...I fully acknowledge that other peoples' experiences of romantic love are different than mine. For some people the dynamics are effortless. For others, being alone leaves them feeling like something's missing. I get that and I'm not making comment on others' choices. I'm just speaking of my experience and what I have and haven't come here to learn. Self-reliance, finding new avenues to love, feeling okay with being different in that regard—all of these are things I'm here to learn.

Which brings me around to say it hasn't always been easy. It's hard when every decision rests firmly on your shoulders. And trust me, my choices are frequently misunderstood. People think I'm asexual or a lesbian or afraid or have never experienced love. For most people, being the way I am is outside their frame of reference. Either they think something's wrong with me or they're convinced I'm unhappy.

So another lesson I've come to learn is allowing others to feel and think whatever they want about me in this regard...to move beyond the ego need of fitting in to others' ideas of how I should be. Truth is, when I meet a man who can add more than he subtracts in my life, I'll be happy to meet him. But in the meantime, I've built a nice nest o'luv for myself through other means. So nice in fact, I'm not motivated to go looking for him. And because like attracts like, he's probably not looking for me either. And we're good with that. ;)

Anyway, those are just a few of the lessons and tradeoffs I figure my soul might have made before coming to earth. Thinking this way works for me, because I figure if we made an agreement about something before coming here, then we might be more agreeable to the things we just can't seem to try to figure out.

Entertaining this line of thought is great for introspection, but it's also interesting to consider when you look back over the life of someone you've loved who has now passed on. From that final perspective, it's interesting to see how their entire life might have led to that final moment. We all have a story like that...a trajectory upon which our life moves. Sure it may all be random. And there may be no such thing as soul or an agreement or a past or future life. But whether you believe in that or not, musing over the "life you long ago chose" in this manner can teach you a lot about the life you're choosing now.

7/23/12—Choosing Different

Today's Draw: The Life We Long Ago Chose from Illuminate! Life Journey Cards by Linda Clayton, Part 1. Is there a choice you made a while back that you thought you could honor, but now you've changed your mind? Do you think couples can or should promise forever, or is that part of marriage unrealistic? When it comes down to a choice, would you rather choose to honor a previous commitment or would you rather choose your future happiness?

You might have noticed that I use this deck every few weeks. I'll tell you why. I'm a very verbal person and the phrases on the cards are very evocative for me. This card in particular made me think of a couple of "big things", so I'm doing this card in two parts. I'm not sure if I have a theme this week or not. We'll try for "Looking Back" week—things from our past, including past lives—and see what comes up.

So the card depicts a group of people and the person on the far right seems to be falling away from the pack. This can happen with people and also with things and dreams and other stuff that once worked for us. For example, very few of the people I was friends with in my 30s are still in my life. I changed or they changed. Whatever happened, the life I long ago chose is no longer the life I choose.

A bigger example of this is seen in my career as a performer. I know you're all thinking, "huh? A performer?" But if you knew me from, say, 12-22, that's how you'd know me. I was in all my school plays and musicals. I was in all the talent shows. And I studied voice and theater throughout college.

Acting and singing were huge passions of mine. In fact, I wanted desperately to go to a performing arts school at one point and my parents wouldn't let me. By the time they came around to my way of thinking, however, I had seen the wisdom of their choice and decided to stay in the school I was in.

While I was always a writer, back then I was writing for performance. In fact, I won a national award for a play I wrote in college. Up until just before my 22^nd birthday, the whole advertising thing, while something I really enjoyed and earned my degree in, was merely a good fall back in case my acting career didn't pay off.

It sounds so foreign to me just writing those words right now. By the time I did graduate from college, I was full-on advertising and have had that passion ever since. But back up to really my last semester of college, I was still entertaining thoughts of the footlights. The desire for that had been slowly slipping over time, but it was still there.

So what happened? I've asked myself that a number of times. And while I can cite certain things that disillusioned me, the real reason is that the life I long ago chose was no longer the life I was choosing. It's as simple as that. Something that I thought was going to be my life, ended up being something I would set down and never revisit again. I never acted again after I left college. And I only sang in public once more after that...at my brother's wedding.

Whether the life you long ago chose is with a man you now cannot stand, or whether it's your career, friends, or even sexuality that no longer fits, it's OK. We are both amazingly adaptable and changeable creatures. There are some things that will never change. I'll always be dramatic and expressive, I just won't give voice to those qualities in the same way.

There's this thing in society that says once you've chosen a direction you need to stick with it. You've chosen this man, so you have to stay with him for better or for worse. You've chosen this career, so you have to work in it until you retire. But all of that is BS. We change. We grow. We change our minds. And to deny ourselves the room to change and grow and explore our constantly evolving selves, is like leaving a seedling in its little seedling pot. Either you give it the room it needs to grow, or it will just wither away and die.

Is there something in your life that you once enthusiastically chose that you just can't tolerate any longer?