Fate or Free Will: how much of our life is planned before birth?
When something important happens in your life — a tragic loss, a shocking betrayal, a drastic change of career path, a spiritual awakening, a sudden encounter that changes everything — do you immediately conclude that it was “meant” to happen, that it was planned by your soul before you were born?
How about the “small things” — the neighborhood you moved into, the friend you made at work, the hobby you enjoy — is all of that also written in the stars?
Or do you tend to see your life as a blank sheet of paper that you fill out by freely making choices every day that end up taking you in this or that direction?
After facilitating many spiritual sessions, where we get to look at a person’s past, present, and possible future, I tend to see our life journey as a combination of both: pre-birth life plan and Free Will choices made along the way.
But that’s not all! What also has a role in shaping our journey is the Free Will choices of the people around us, plus the karmic and energetic legacy of our past lives.
What do we plan or decide before birth?
(Note that this is a common scenario, but there are always individual differences!)
The time we’re born. Based on what our soul wants to learn and experience in this incarnation, it will often choose to come in at a moment in time when the planetary placements and universal energies will give the human the personality traits, strengths, and weaknesses needed for the desired experience of life. In other words, our soul will choose our astrology and numerology.
Fun fact: sometimes the incoming soul will even inspire parents to give their newborn baby a certain name. Our name also gives us certain traits based on its numerology!
The family we are born into and significant relationships throughout life: parents, siblings, life partner(s), future children, closest friends, important mentors, adversaries, etc. We tend to choose the most important players in our life and ask them to play certain roles for us, so that we can learn, heal, and grow.
Not everyone has soul contracts with a life partner and children — for some, it’s completely up to their choice. And by the way, not having such contracts doesn’t mean we’re meant to be alone! :)
Life lessons. These are the big “themes” of our life that give it meaning and that help us grow. Some lessons challenge us to overcome the fears, traumas, and limiting beliefs we developed in our past lives. Other lessons push us to cultivate certain strengths in ourselves. Yet others simply offer the soul an opportunity to experience something new.
Path of service (for some). Not everyone is born with a plan to work in a specific professional field, and very few of us have a highly specialized “mission” (write a certain book, create a new healing modality…). However, many souls do have at least a general idea of how they want to contribute to humanity during this incarnation, and so the person will be born with a certain set of gifts and leanings, and will be guided towards a specific professional path.
It’s not uncommon to have a few options of paths that we can take in this life and still fulfill our purpose. And for some individuals, choosing a path without given much guidance is the challenge and the main lesson of their life. :)
Significant events and traumas, such as a major injury, being a victim of abuse, breakdown of a relationship, loss of a job that ends up redirecting us to our true path, etc.
Many spiritual people believe that major events and traumas are always chosen by the soul, and often they are. However, it is not always the case. I’ve witnessed a number of cases where even something life-altering like child abuse wasn’t planned, and ended up altering the person’s pre-birth life plan.
What to do we get to decide in real time, while incarnated?
How exactly we’re going to navigate the course that we’d mapped out before birth! There are many ways to be a healer, to navigate a difficult marriage, to deal with trauma… The details and the many small choices along the way are usually up to us.
That painful karmic relationship with your sibling may have been predestined, but how you handle it, how long it takes you to understand and complete the lessons within it, and the degree to which it ends up affecting your life — that’s all up to you.
Occasionally in sessions, we get to look at a major choice a client is facing in life. The Higher Self will sometimes show them two possible paths, and how their life may unfold should they choose either path. The Higher Self will often honor the person’s freedom to decide, even if it happens to have a preference. :)
Some examples:
- All lessons have been completed in a marriage and the relationship has lost its meaning; the couple can choose to stay together and experience a new set of themes, or go their separate ways to have new experiences with other people.
- A person can choose to go through life either in a committed relationship, with the limitations it will place on them, or alone, with greater freedom but with a different set of challenges.
We can even decide to rebel against our life plan. :) Our spiritual support team will try to keep us to our general life plan, and yet, once we’re “in the game”, our Free Will can override anything we may have pre-planned.
For instance, we can spend decades refusing to quit our meaningless job and get on our true path of service; it will be hard and painful, and Spirit will “turn up the heat” to try to nudge us towards our path, and yet we can still choose to stubbornly resist.
Other major influences on our life path
Other people’s choices. It’s nice that we can use our Free Will to shape our path and even veer off our life plan. The problem is that other people have the same freedom. :) Which means: occasionally, the people around us will make choices that will interfere with our life plan, possibly in a big way.
Examples:
- A parent gave in to dark influences and started abusing their child, while the child was never meant to experience abuse in this life.
- The person we were meant to meet and have an important relationship with chose to stay in their unhappy marriage that they were destined to leave, or fell into addiction and deteriorated, and so we never got to meet them.
Influences from past lives. Our souls often choose to work on healing or overcoming old karmic patterns and fears developed in past lives. Those patterns will show up in our life and we’ll have an opportunity to heal them. However, at times, past-life baggage can be triggered unintentionally, often when we’re exposed to something associated in our soul memory with a past-life trauma.
Here’s one common example. In a past life, there was a circumstance in which we suffered a physical trauma or injury. When we experience a somewhat similar circumstance in our current life, that can trigger the memory of the physical trauma associated with it. This can then manifest as a major health issue or extreme phobia, which will end up affecting our life journey.
How much of our life is predestined versus freely chosen?
I believe the balance between the two is unique to each person’s life journey. Some of us are on a rigorous lesson plan, while others are learning to make choices in this life and therefore aren’t strongly guided in any specific direction.
In the former case, life may feel like it’s “one damn thing after another”: like you’re in a car driven by someone else and are constantly having to respond to whatever is happening.
In the latter case, it may feel like there’s a lot of options available to you in life, which isn’t necessarily easier! :) You may find yourself waiting for a sign from the Universe in order to decide on a career path or the future of a relationship — while the Universe is waiting for you to make that choice, and nothing will move until you do.
In an extreme case, the whole life is unplanned… You were never planning to be here in this body! In fact, the body was here before you — the soul, the Being you are — ever arrived. I’m talking about a walk-in: one soul coming in to replace another at some point during an incarnation.
Some walk-ins (soul exchanges) are pre-planned for a specific purpose, yet some aren’t.
Here’s an example on an unplanned walk-in. A child undergoes severe abuse at the hands of her caretakers, which wasn’t planned, or at least not to that extent. This is too much for this Being to handle, so the traumatized soul goes back to the Spirit world, and another soul (you) agrees to take over the incarnation. You didn’t plan this life journey — you inherited whatever came with the body, including the physical features, the emotional damage, the abuse situation, the parents, the circumstances and all.
You may or may not have had the time to plan what you were going to do with this inherited incarnation (your own set of life lessons, soul contracts, etc), so your life may feel like an uncharted course.
Some walk-ins, especially if they came in when the person was already an adult, end up overhauling their identity, leaving their “old” life behind, and starting a new journey from a clean slate. In this case, you go from “everything was planned, but not by me” to “the world is my oyster and I have complete freedom to shape my life journey any way I choose”. This would be an extreme example of a life based almost exclusively on Free Will choices made along the way.
How can we find out if something we’re going through is part of the pre-birth life plan?
Maybe it’s just Mercury Retrograde! :)
In many cases, we can kind of tell, especially in retrospect. If something was part of the plan, there’s often a lesson in the experience; we end up growing, healing, or overcoming something in ourselves. That is not to say that we don’t learn from random happenings, but a pre-planned lesson just makes sense in the overall picture of our life.
If we’re not sure, we can bring this question to our spiritual support team — our Higher Self and Spirit Guides. (And if we don’t trust our hearing and knowing, a pendulum can be a handy tool for getting answers from our “team”.)
There are many spiritual modalities that can offer insight. An intuitive practitioner or channeler can connect with your spiritual team to ask the question. Some intuitives/psychics can access your life plan. Your Akashic Record will often have the answer. For more complex issues, a past life regression or Quantum Healing is a great way to explore a past or present situation, as well as peek at the possible futures. And I’m sure there are many more options to choose from!
And whatever the answer is, I hope you always remember that you have Free Will, and no matter what a psychic or even your own Higher Self says you “should” do or are “meant” to do, YOU have the ultimate authority over your life, and are free to make choices that feel right to you, even if they go against all the guidance you’ve received.
I hope this article has inspired you to take another look at some of the things that happened in your life and to ponder if they were really meant to be… or not. :)
Have you ever discovered that something in your life that seemed random was actually predestined, or that something life-changing actually wasn’t part of the plan? I’d love to hear your story!
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