The following is a question from the WD newsletter, Questions & Answers dated 2.9.24. This is a very short answer to a very complex question. See more of these Q&A’s Link
I know that before we come into a body, we agree to an experience. I also know that we have openings where we can choose to leave the body. Can the experience to which we agreed end before we are seemingly done with this life? I have always thought that with the power of choice, we could continue to be here and keep choosing through free will.
Each of us makes a plan for our lives before we come in. That plan is “free will”. We plan who we want to meet, the karmas we want to learn – experience and clear, and how we want to be of service. The heart of the plan is this: How do we choose to learn and experience love? Then we turn our plan over to Spirit and jump into our Earth bodies.
Learning what love in and how it works as well as experiencing all that is a double path. We learn both directly and indirectly. We can learn love by giving and receiving kindness as well as through the absence of kindness. Those can even happen simultaneously. As an example:
Let’s say that you are helping with a project, offering free drinks and snacks. You smile with direct eye contact, complement people when you can and generally bring a joyful energy. This is giving kindness. Someone comes up and makes fun of the whole thing. This absence of kindness usually brought about by that person’s own feeling of inferiority.
How you respond determines if you are truly experiencing love. Allowing your own intuition to guide you, do you respond with kindness or meet that person’s anger with anger? Do you stand firm in protecting those around you or shrink? Of course, each experience in unique and love shows in many ways.
Afterwards, do you talk about it with just a few friends, doing what we call a postmortem to process the experience, or do you contently repeat the story, getting stuck in the trauma?
From there, it is true that there are opportunities to leave along the way. Most of the time, we continue the Earth journey, which is, again, free will. Anything we don’t finish in a particular incarnation gets addressed the next time around again and again, until that lesson is learned and completed. The “early outs” are an opportunity to start over.
Since we come into the form to learn about love in the 3rd dimensional world, we don’t get to skip lessons or short cut them. We work through them until they are complete, whether that takes moments or lifetimes.
This is one of the reasons we look at past lives and where and when a particular lesson began. By addressing that experience and healing that time, we can bring the healing into the now. This will release the negative programs and patterns and help us to be more authentic and in balance, thus moving us forward on the path of enlightenment.