One day, a couple years after my husband had passed, I was previewing books on Amazon related to spiritual topics as I often did.  Usually, I would not blindly purchase a book without some knowledge of the author and his/her credibility.  But I found myself drawn to a book called Your Soul’s Plan.  The name itself called to me – did I have a soul plan?  Did we all?  I began to read the first pages and was immediately drawn in.  I was getting that ‘sixth sense’ that was becoming more commonplace, where my heart would start to race and I could sense this was important for me.

In those opening pages the author, Robert Schwartz, asked readers to suspend judgement, read the book, and ask oneself – what if this were true?  What if we make a choice before we incarnate, to be that person who is disabled/gay/addicted/ill etc.. in order to experience, learn and grow spiritually?  For the book Schwartz worked with mediums whose expertise is tapping into the Spirit World to access our pre-birth plans.  I devoured the book from cover to cover and realized I do accept the premise, and it has completely changed the way I look at what people call tragedies.

Another absorbing read on what we plan for a particular life is dealt with in the bestseller Journey of Souls by Michael Newton.  Similar to Weiss, Newton was a counsellor and hypnotherapist using regression to heal early life traumas, who felt that past-life regression was “unorthodox and non-clinical”.  Then he unwittingly regressed a patient to their time between lives on Earth.  Deciding to do more research he became skilled at guiding subjects to describe their time in the Spirit World and realized that this was much more meaningful to them than their time on Earth.  Some clients were religious or spiritual whereas others held no beliefs, yet their descriptions of the soul state and what happens there were remarkably consistent.  In line with Your Soul’s Plan, Newton learned that we do indeed choose our body, our parents and our lives.

At this point you may be asking yourself how the topic of past lives ties into health.  While I believe that most disease we unintentionally create through our emotions, thoughts and attitudes, I feel that there are cases where disease is actually something we devised before we came into this life.

In Schwartz’s book, he describes the circumstances of a man named Jon, who planned in this life to be a gay man living in a small town in the southern US in the 1950’s, whose parents, schoolmates, school teachers, and religious community did not accept his sexual orientation.  He also intended to contract AIDS.  In short, Jon “incarnated in a family of shame, in a place of shame, in an era of shame.”  Jon chose the experience to master the spiritual goals of learning to: 1) love and value himself despite what others said to and about him, and 2) forgive the intolerance of those around him.  Thus, in this case Jon’s design from the very beginning was to contract AIDS.

Another plan to potentially develop disease is what I refer to as a ‘redirect’ in life, meaning that it is only triggered if the individual deviates from his or her pre-birth goal.  In such cases the disease occurrence is a ‘plan B’ or wake-up call meant to shake us up to get us back on track.  Again referring to Your Soul’s Plan, Schwartz describes the case of a woman called Doris, whose soul challenge was not to believe and adopt her alcoholic mother’s derogatory view of herself, and instead to learn self-love.  When Doris was not able to rise above her mother’s belittling she developed a toxic self-image which initiated disease.  The spirit guide discussing Doris’ soul plan had this to say:

“Illness is dis-ease.  It is a final manifestation of emotional or mental difficulties.  It is simply another layer of learning.”

There is much more to this story and the others described in Your Soul’s Plan; no summary here can do it justice – it is a must-read for understanding the higher view of our lives on Earth.