Chapter One:
Pre-birth Planning

YOU MAY FIND THE CONCEPT of pre-birth planning - particularly the planning of painful challenges - astonishing. I know this feeling well. For most of us, this notion presents a new and radically different way of looking at the world and our purpose in it. The more traumatic our challenges, the more difficult the concept may be. My understanding, acceptance, and eventual embrace of the idea occurred slowly and in stages, particularly in regard to the most painful aspects of my life. With each stage I felt the healing of old wounds. Anger and resentment faded and were replaced by feelings of peace and joy. I saw a beauty in life that previously eluded me.

My purpose in writing this book is not to persuade you of the absolute reality of pre-birth planning, but rather to offer, in a spirit of helpfulness, an idea that has been profoundly helpful to me. I ask only that you consider its possibility. You need not be convinced of the idea to benefit from it. You need only ask, What if? What if I really did plan this experience before I was born? Why might I have done that? Simply asking these questions gives new meaning to life challenges and launches a journey of self-discovery. That journey demands no particular beliefs regarding spirituality or metaphysics, only an interest in personal growth and the acquisition of wisdom.

On these pages you will read the stories of ten courageous individuals. You will learn what they planned before birth and why they planned it. The process of understanding pre-birth planning may be likened to viewing a sculpture. If you want to truly appreciate a sculpture, you would not view it from only one angle. Rather, you would walk entirely around it, pausing in various places to look from a new perspective and observe the nuances that are now suddenly visible. Each story is one such perspective. By viewing pre-birth planning from ten angles, you'll arrive at a more complete and integrated understanding than only one or two perspectives or a purely theoretical discussion would allow.

I strongly encourage you to read the stories with your heart. The heart has a higher form of knowing, a greater wisdom, than the mind. Intellectual analysis will carry you only so far. These stories are meant to be felt. When you as an eternal soul planned your current life, you were not concerned with what your mind might come to know. Instead, you wanted to experience the feelings that would be generated by life in a physical dimension. Life challenges are a particularly powerful means of creating feelings, which are, in turn, vital to the soul's self-knowing. These feelings cannot truly be comprehended by the mind; in fact, the mind is a barrier. In many ways life is a journey from the head to the heart. We plan life challenges to facilitate this journey, to break open our hearts so we may better know and value them.

Empathy is a key that unlocks the door to the heart and makes possible an understanding of these stories and their spiritual meaning. Just as it took courage for the people in this book both to plan their challenges and to share them with you, it will take courage for you to empathize. I believe that empathy heals. If you seek healing, you may find your courage well rewarded.

This chapter provides you with the information you need to appreciate the stories' metaphysical aspects. If you are unfamiliar with metaphysics, some of these ideas may strike you as unusual, just as they once did me. I ask for your patience. They will have greater meaning and validity as you see them applied in the stories - and still greater meaning and validity as you apply them to your challenges. This chapter will also give you an overview of the commonalities I found in the interviewees' life blueprints. With this roadmap you will have a framework in which to incorporate the wisdom they share.

Why We Incarnate
The planning we do before birth is far-reaching and detailed. It includes but goes well beyond the selection of life challenges. We choose our parents (and they choose us), when and where we will incarnate, the schools we will attend, the homes in which we will live, the people we will meet, and the relationships we will have. If you ever felt you already know someone you just met, it may well be true. That person was probably part of your pre-birth planning. When a place, name, image, or phrase seems oddly familiar the first time you see or hear it, that familiarity is often a vague remembrance of what was discussed before incarnation. In many planning sessions, we use the name and take on the physical appearance we will have after birth. Such practices help us recognize one another on the physical plane. The feeling of déjà vu is often accurately attributed to a past-life event, but many déjà vu experiences are memories of pre-birth plans.

When we enter the Earth plane, we forget our origins in spirit. We know prior to incarnation that we will have such self-induced amnesia. The phrase behind the veil refers to this state of forgetfulness. As divine souls, we seek to forget our true identities because remembering will give us a more profound self-knowing. To obtain this deeper awareness, we leave the nonphysical realm - a place of joy, peace, and love - because there we experience no contrast to ourselves. Without contrast, we cannot fully know ourselves.

Picture, if you will, a world in which there is only light. If you never experienced darkness, how well would you comprehend and appreciate light? It is the contrast between light and dark that leads to a richer understanding and, ultimately, a remembering. The physical plane provides us with this contrast because it is one of duality: up and down, hot and cold, good and bad. The sorrow in duality allows us to better know joy. The chaos of Earth enhances our appreciation of peace. The hatred we may encounter deepens our understanding of love. If we never experienced these aspects of humanity, how would we know our divinity?

Imagine you are originally from a place in which the most exquisitely beautiful music ever created plays. This music is rapturous, resplendent. As long as you have lived, you have always heard it. It has never been absent, nor has any other music ever been present. One day you realize that because you have always heard it, you have never really heard it. That is, you have never really known it because you have never known anything else. You decide, therefore, that you would like to know the music truly. How might you accomplish this?

One way would be to go to a place where the music of Home does not exist. Perhaps a different music plays, a music that contains jarring notes or strident passages. This contrast would instill in you a new appreciation of the music you always heard at Home.

A second way would be to go to a place where the music of Home does not exist and recreate it from memory. The experience of composing those magnificent sounds would give you an even deeper understanding of their beauty.

A third possibility exists, one that is much more challenging but that also holds the greatest promise. It occurs to you that a truly profound knowing can be gained by going to a place where the music of Home does not play and once there recreating it but only after you have forgotten what it sounded like. The experience of remembering and then composing the extraordinary symphonies of Home would produce the richest, fullest, and most expanded knowing of their inherent grandeur.

And so bravely you travel to the world that offers the third option. There you hear music that you, lacking memory, believe to be the only music you have ever heard. Some songs are lovely, but many strike your ears as dissonant. These harsh tones foster within you a desire - and ultimately a resolve - to create original music.

Soon you begin to write your own compositions. At first you are distracted by the loud music of your new world. Over time, however, as you turn away from the external blare and listen to the melodies in your heart, your musical creations grow in beauty. Eventually you compose a masterpiece, and when it is finished you remember something: the masterpiece you wrote is the very same music that had played at Home. And this recollection triggers yet another: You are that music. It was not something you heard outside yourself; rather, it was you, and you were it. And by creating yourself in a new place, you now know yourself - truly know yourself - in a way that was not possible had you never left Home.

This is the experience the soul desires. A soul is a spark of the Divine; a personality - a human being - is a portion of a soul's energy in a physical body. The personality consists of temporary traits that exist only during the physical lifetime and an immortal core that reunites with the soul after death. The soul is vast and goes well beyond any one personality, yet each personality is vital to and dearly loved by the soul.

Importantly, the personality has free will. Life challenges may therefore be accepted or resisted. Earth is a stage on which the personality enacts or deviates from the script written before birth. We choose how we respond - with anger and bitterness or with love and compassion. When we recognize that we planned our challenges, the choice becomes clear and much easier to make.

While we are in our physical bodies, our souls communicate with us through feelings. Feelings like joy, peace, and excitement indicate we are acting and thinking in ways that are consistent with our true nature as loving souls. Feelings like fear and doubt suggest we are not. Our bodies are exquisitely sensitive receivers (and transmitters) of energy that tell us through feeling whether there is a match or a mismatch between who we really are and the ways in which we are currently expressing ourselves.

Why We Plan Challenges
Life plans are set up so we experience who we are not before we remember who we really are. That is, we explore the discordant sounds in our earthly lives before we recreate the symphonies of Home. This pattern became quite clear to me as I conducted research for this book. I refer to such life blueprints as "learning-through-opposites" plans.

For instance, a deeply compassionate soul who wishes to know herself as compassion may choose to incarnate into a highly dysfunctional family. As she is treated with a lack of compassion, she comes to appreciate compassion more deeply. It is the absence of something that best teaches its value and meaning. A lack of compassion in the outer world forces her to turn inward, where she remembers her own compassion. The contrast between the lack of compassion in the physical world and her inner compassion provides her with a more profound understanding of compassion and, therefore, herself. From the perspective of the soul, the pain inherent in this learning process is temporary and brief, but the resultant wisdom is literally eternal. There is a component of learning through opposites in every story in this book.

Remembering who we really are - majestic, transcendent, eternal souls - is one way to surmount our life challenges. For example, people who define themselves as the body will feel great anguish if their bodies are severely damaged. Others whose bodies endure the same damage but who define themselves as the soul will experience far less torment. Because our challenges call us into recollection of ourselves as souls, the very event that initially caused suffering may ultimately alleviate it. This expansion of self-concept from personality-body to soul may or may not reduce our pain, but it can certainly ease our suffering. Such awakening is both a purpose and a profound benefit of life challenges. It revitalizes our passion for life, the passion we felt before we incarnated. It is, quite simply, cause for celebration.

Check back with us next month,
as Robert tells us about one Courageous Soul named Jennifer.

© Robert Schwartz, 2007

Courageous Souls: Do We Plan Our Life Challenges Before Birth? (ISBN 9780977679454; copyright 2007) is available online at www.CourageousSouls.com or at Amazon. The book may also be ordered from Whispering Winds Press by phone at 1-800-742-0148. To contact author Robert Schwartz, please write author@courageoussouls.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Schwartz was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He holds a BA in psychology from Dartmouth College, and resides in Ashland, Oregon, where he enjoys hiking among the deer and pine trees.

In a personal session with a medium in 2003, Robert was astonished to speak with nonphysical beings who knew everything about him - not just what he had done in life, but also what he had thought and felt. They told him that he had planned many of his most difficult experiences before he was born.

Realizing that a knowledge of pre-birth planning would bring great healing to people and allow them to understand the deeper purpose of their life challenges, he devoted the next three years to studying the pre-birth plans of dozens of individuals. The extraordinary insights that emerged speak to our heartfelt, universal yearning to know ... why.