If you spend very much time in New Thought spirituality, eventually you’ll run across the idea of Sacred Contracts: the idea that before we’re even born, we choose our lessons and make agreements with other souls to help each other grow.
Coming from a theatrical background, I have a picture in my mind’s eye of a giant green room – the room not too far off the stage where the actors gather to wait for their cues. I imagine a bunch of souls sitting around, deciding what they’re going to learn in this lifetime. Let’s say I want to learn forgiveness during this life. I tell that to the group of souls, and another one jumps in – “oh, that’s good, I can help you with that: I’ll be the person in your life who gives you something you have to forgive.”
Or maybe I need to learn to stop trying to control others, and another soul jumps in: “That’s great, I’ve been thinking that I need to learn how not to be co-dependent! So how about if I’m your daughter in this next life, and we can help each other learn those lessons!”
Now go back and read those again. Because here’s the thing: using that belief system, the people and relationships that are the hardest, the most trying, the most painful . . . those are our greatest teachers. And the souls that agreed to bear those lessons to us? Those souls have given us a tremendous GIFT. They have agreed to take on a role that will cause both parties pain in this human world, that neither party will remember agreeing to . . . and they (we) have done it in service to our greatest spiritual growth and potential.
Now, look. That all sounds super evolved and enlightened, but I know – I KNOW – that in practice none of us wants to think that our toxic parent, or that asshole who cheated on us, or even the jerk who cut us off in traffic this morning, is a beautiful soul offering us a lesson. I mean, fuck those people, right? Those jerks.
And that’s ok – that’s NORMAL. That’s actually part of the human learning process, and you need to own those negative feelings in order to change them. (Seriously, have you ever had weeds in your garden? How’d it work to just ignore them? Not at all, right? You have to face them, acknowledge them, and THEN you can go deal with them. Same principle.)
But once you do that, once you really let yourself FEEL those uncomfortable emotions, it’s time to get on with the work of asking, “What am I meant to learn from this? What can this teach me?” Because honestly, we’re not energetically meant to hang on to our feelings (good or bad) for long periods of time. (If you’ve ever experienced the meditation exercise of letting feelings and events flow *through* you, then you’ve experienced how we’re meant to function. You can find something similar HERE and another variation HERE.)
And here’s the beautiful thing: when you realize the lesson, when you really recognize and absorb and LEARN it, forgiveness is SO MUCH EASIER. It’s hard to stay angry when you realize that your toxic parent allowed you to learn to let go of the need to make everyone else happy at the expense of yourself; when you realize that the cheating asshole allowed you to learn that you can love *yourself* enough; when you realize that even the jerk on the freeway reminded you to slow down and smell the roses because life is fleeting. As soon as you learn the lesson, you can let go of the anger, forgive them, BLESS them, and (if necessary,) move on.
I find that whole idea empowering. It exemplifies the idea that nothing happens TO us, but that everything happens FOR us, and it does it in a way that feels tangible and actionable.
Now, having said all that . . . remember the idea that God is like music, and different belief systems are just different types of music? If the idea of Sacred Contracts feels disempowering to you, or makes you feel discouraged, or hopeless . . . IT’S OK. That just means it’s not your station. Spin the dial, and find the station that helps you learn and grow and feel joyful about it.
(Wanna know what a Sacred Contract looks like in action? I’m going to be writing about my relationship with my dad pretty soon . . . specifically how after years of feeling angry and unloved, I was able to release all that rage and pain in *45 minutes* using this framework.)
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