Family: The Lessons to Learn and Reasons We Choose Them

Looking at how we each select families which will provide them the necessary skills, experiences and motivations to prepare us to succeed in the goals we've set for the life ahead and how this doesn't mean we're responsible for them or their choices past, present or future. 

Transcript

Family: The Lessons to Learn and Reasons We Choose Them

Coming into an embodied life is somewhat like planning a NASA mission to the International Space Station, albeit far more complex. Free will means we have only a certain amount of control over how things will go. On top of this our need to focus on embodied life therefore temporarily forget our true nature means we're ostensibly flying blind once we launch. We therefore plan extensively for what we want to have happen, for every possible alternative, improbable incident, and impossible coincidence which may occur. All the while knowing we are unable to foresee the consequences of our own choices in the moment let alone all the consequences of everyone else who is making choices which might affect us and so on and so on. This is, in part, why embodied life is so hard and frustrating, yet capable of handing us happy surprises, synchronicities, and miracles. The mix of preparation and chaos, goals achieved, detours taken, and new paths forged make embodied life a heady place full of possibilities.

A major component of the embodied life planning process is choosing a family to be born into.

Most people, when thinking about their family of origin, focus primarily on relationships and behaviors. Good, bad, or indifferent, how we interact with our family, or don't, in childhood is a huge factor in who we become. However, prior to and beyond behavioral considerations, souls have decisions to make concerning the physical aspect of being physical.

The family we are born to provides us the body we will navigate embodiment with. If, for a moment, we consider a body as similar to a car, then our biological parents will be designing and constructing the car we'll drive for the next 60-90+ years. Like a car, different bodies come with different option packages and possibilities beyond the standard features. Some are built for additional speed and agility, others for skilled emotional processing, some hold and work with large amounts of energy, others easily focus on the details and so on. In preparing for an embodied life, it's important to set up the right car with the necessary features. We therefore select parents who, when their DNA is combined, have the highest probability of creating the desired body for us.

Our family also provides us with ethnicity and socio-economic status. What we do with these things as we enter into the adult phase of our life is up to us, however a significant part of our identities in any embodied life are formed through our experiences of ourselves in and with community as well as being excluded from it. Ethnicity gives to us a legacy of culture which can be hundreds to thousands of years old, therefore a mixture of good/bad/ugly which we are challenged or encouraged to incorporate. Our experience of how the world works will be informed in part by this as well as the level of ease our family, individually and as a whole, has in navigating it.

Families provide us the means for our souls to seat completely into the body, for us to become acclimated to embodied life, to become fluent in navigating not only physicality, but emotionality, the restrictions of embodied communication, and social interactions, while at the same time setting the framework for us to enter into the bigger world as an adult. This is not to imply they do so exceptionally well, that everything is implemented flawlessly, or even marginally correctly. However, for better or worse, our family does all these things for us and if they do not then we are set on a course to rectify the matter on our own.

What can be confusing for people in all this is the notion we, as a soul, choose the perfect family. Perfect is defined as the nicest, easiest, best family we can devise which will be the most pleasant and joyous, welcoming, giving, and happy. We somehow come to understand they are meant to follow through on every single thing in our soul contract as if they are robots rather than human beings who are making it up as they go along. If you compare most families against this Disneyfied animatronic version of what a family should be, not all, but most will seem as if something went wrong in the process. If it were possible, a large number of people would look at their family, pick them all up, put them back in the box and haul them to the return counter for their money back because what they got is not what they wanted...at all!

However, most souls don't choose a Disneyfied family. They select people and situations which will provide them the necessary skills, experiences and motivations to prepare them to succeed in the goals they set for the life ahead. This is not to say what any one of us experienced was predetermined, appropriate or even healthy. Like any NASA launch, preplanning does not prevent mishap or misadventure. Parents, siblings and other family members have free will. They can choose to act on a thought or feeling when they shouldn't, refuse to act when they should, relinquish their responsibility leaving us unprotected or forced into responsibility beyond our maturity or capability and so on. Families are made of soul's living an embodied experience which does not in any way imply they are doing it well, striving for the best and highest good of anyone or anything, or succeeding in what they came to achieve. Or they could be doing all of these things and more. In fact, they could be both failing and succeeding in a whole host of things throughout the week or even a day. Such is the gift and curse of embodied life.

I'm frequently asked to read information about people's parents. About why they did things or didn't do things, why they set certain things in motion, why they hold certain beliefs, etc. But quite often the most pertinent question is "What is my duty or responsibility to them now?"

To be clear, people rarely ask about their parents if they had a happy, healthy childhood. They may have questions around the roots of their relationship with these souls, like "have they had past lives with them and if so, how many and what kind" or about why this person they loved died when and how they did, but they don't have a need to figure out something which was/is a good part of their life. It wasn't broke so they aren't looking to fix it, as it were.

Questions about parents come from those who had difficult/abusive childhoods, parents who were incapable or unable to effectively parent, absent parents, or those who are clearly toxic. These come in two varieties: I really want to have a good relationship with this person, and I've done (laundry list of healings, spiritual practices, and boundary setting) but things are still not good, so what do I do?...or...I'm trying to honor my parents by making sure their needs are met while at the same time trying to have a healthy life, but it's not working, so what do I do?

The first thing I do in this situation is discuss the nature of "Honor thy Father and Mother". In many cultures this has been twisted into a form of emotional slavery where we must do everything our parents want and expect of us no matter how damaging to us, others, or the world around us. However, honoring is not the same as obeying. Honoring someone or something is primarily about accepting what they are. If we are to honor the scorpion, then we shouldn't try to hug it. This is not what it wants and will provoke a sting which is both injurious to us and to it. 

If we are to honor our parents then we need to see them for who they really are, both as individuals and also as our parents.

This does not mean learning all the reasons why our parents are who they are, taking on their narrative as our own or excusing their behaviors because of circumstances or experience. Our parents' lives were no more predetermined than our own. Free will is granted to all of us, including parents. Which means, just like us, they set goals for what they wished to achieve in their lives. This includes being parents, and as parents they made agreements to provide their child (us) with a variety of things and experiences, and then these things get implemented in the embodied world. And they will fail spectacularly in a variety of ways from small to amazingly large.

Just as in in our lives we will succeed and exceed our expectations in some things while failing to some degree in a host of others, so they as unique individuals and as parents will succeed and fail concerning everything they agreed to do and be for us. When I look at the records concerning this, I often see clients knew there was a chance for things to go wrong, for things with their parents to not go as well as could be hoped and this gets factored into the planning as a possibility. In those cases, I would agree the person chose the experience or at least accepted that the events might occur and were an acceptable outcome. I also see where people knew the parents wouldn't be anything less than a bit awful and they agree to this, not out of a need to rid themselves of karma or as some kind of punishment, but as a means to grow strong and overcome. They use it as a means to spur themselves to action, to cause themselves to rebel and strive in areas they might not otherwise do, to challenge themselves to rise above it and to create a deep well of empathy for others. Many healers go this route as it spurs their healing abilities.

In other cases I see where the parents were to behave in the realm of mediocre, being neither excellent nor horrifying, but make choices which lead them into abusive, horrendous acts which were not planned and cause difficult to overcome damage which takes the priority over any other plans for the person's adult life. In these cases I can validate the person's experience of this being wrong and it should not have happened. This is one of the negative effects of free will and the nature of parent/child relationships. The effects can be healed if the client is willing to do so and it usually helps to know the events they survived were not planned nor acceptable nor karmically induced.

While each life is unique and so has its own dynamics, choices of parents and family can be grouped into a few general categories:

DNA Donor: Sometimes the best body a soul can have, one which is optimal for the life, will come from a combination of adults who would not be satisfactory in providing the child with their desired upbringing. So, the soul agrees to be born to people knowing the family who will ultimately parent them will be alternative in some way. Some choose parents who they know will immediately go through the process of giving them up for adoption in some manner so they can be raised by others. Some choose parents who don't intend to stay together for a variety of reasons or who were never really together to begin with. In all these cases the soul gets the DNA, lineage, skills, temperament and ethnicity they desire, all without an upbringing or family situation they don't.

Souls know in choosing this type of life they may and probably will have to work through feelings of abandonment, of something being missing, feeling alien or misplaced, feeling like an outsider, or having a missing parental figure if they are raised by a single parent. Rather than considering these as a compromise, such matters are factored in as features in this type of life and utilized as a portion of the individual's core identity. These feelings may be used as a means to learn specific soul lessons, to drive a person towards a certain career or goal, to cultivate a certain type of empathy or personality, or even set up a type of future relationship choice which is meant to help bring in the next generation of souls in a certain manner.

Soul Groups: Souls who are learning lessons often embody with their soul group and it is not uncommon for this to be set up as several generations of family. Grandparents bring in parents who then bring in the children who then bring in grandchildren and so on. Most large groups do up to four generations and then, when everyone has returned to the Akashics, the planning begins for another round of embodiment. This allows for everyone to take on roles and experiences they need to work with while at the same time supporting others in their group in their roles and experiences. Everyone gets to focus on their learning and in the process help others to learn.

These types of group embodiments can be a pleasant experience where everyone gets along, is emotionally healthy, supports one another in their aspirations and everyone's life is good. They can also be a hot mess where the entire family is alcoholic, dysfunctional, pushing every button, and making a hash of things. Not all lessons are best learned through pleasant experiences. Sometimes and often, we learn best when things are difficult. I liken this to learning about "hot". For most people, one burn from a match held too long, one touch of the oven, one momentary encounter with a stove turned on is enough to learn what "hot" truly means and we adjust our behaviors accordingly.

Families populated with soul group members mean individuals will feel very connected to their family, have ease in communication, and feel as if being with their family is somewhat like entering a different world. Like with DNA donor situations, this is a feature the soul is aware of and incorporates into their plan for the embodied life.

Learning Lessons: Sometimes a component of a soul's embodied life plan requires they work solo or without their soul group. This can be due to the need for focus on a lesson they are struggling with and need to repeat in a concentrated manner, to work with other soul group's which have requested their expertise or insights to achieve a goal, or to explore a facet of embodied life not interesting to the rest of their soul siblings. This doesn't prevent a feeling of deep connection with a family of origin, but it makes it less likely and usually means the connection will more often be with one member of the family rather than the entire group.

It is not uncommon in these lives to have a parent or sibling be a major feature of a lesson being learned. Struggles with one parent or another can be about developing empowerment somewhat like lifting weights or doing resistance exercises develops muscles. Parents can be amazing examples of what in life to strive for or against. Siblings can be a means to direct us into forming new connections, can be examples of the path not taken, or help us achieve a new level of emotional maturity and flexibility.

In Service: One of the most seemingly contradictory family choices is made by those who come to be in service. Embodied life on this planet is an educational process. It is meant to be highly experiential and to teach lessons about Love and Fear which help souls develop in ways Akashic life cannot. Like all educational spaces, one does not throw the students into it and just hope they come out with the necessary education. Not only is there a need for teachers, but maintenance crews and support staff as well.

While some of this work can be done cross dimensionally, most needs to be done with boots on the ground. This means mature souls embody, not to learn lessons, but to provide service to those who are. Embodied life is experiential so everyone will learn as they go along. Good luck trying to avoid that. However, the point of service lives isn't to learn, but to live fully, both a personal life of becoming and in service so that others might become.

This additional focus or both/and, both a personal life and a focus on others, creates a need for a particular type of childhood. Embodied life on this planet is hard. A feature of the physical body, including the preprogramming in the brain, is for personal survival. This is a good thing as we are fragile and have to navigate our physical needs. Add to this we are social beings which need to be interconnected, and it can take all of our resources just to get through living. Our natural inclination, therefore, is self-preservation, self-care and even selfishness even with the soul attempting to direct us to move beyond these things. Without something added into the mix we struggle to achieve more beyond our small circle of family/friends/acquaintances except in extraordinary circumstances such as natural disasters or large-scale tragedies.

The added ingredient which moves us from competent individuals into soul driven service providers, beyond the passion or calling our soul provides, is a difficult family. Difficult situations within a family, whether this means being excluded, being abused, or surviving dysfunction in all its multihued varieties provides us the impetus not only to heal ourselves, but the empathy to want to help others do the same. Like cracking the shell of a nut, it allows us to open ourselves in a deep and meaningful way, so we seek to do more than just survive or thrive personally. We extend ourselves to others, connecting with the wisdom of our soul, with the skills we've learned from previous incarnations, with our aptitudes provided through our soul work outside of embodiment and spin all this straw into the gold of service.

This doesn't make the upbringing any easier, more pleasant or more appealing. And it certainly doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to negative situations, behaviors, or consequences. Having come to live a service life does not give our families a pass, but it can help put things in perspective. If a service person has been attempting to figure out what they are meant to learn from a relationship and finding nothing, it is more than likely there is nothing of that nature to find. There often is no inherent lesson, but instead a function which, having achieved adulthood, is probably long since completed.

These are just the broad strokes of why we choose the family we do. There is a great deal more involved than I can delve into in one podcast. And like any NASA mission, even though a huge amount of time and effort goes into planning, constructing and preparing everything and everyone, the millisecond that rocket launches all bets are off. Anything can and will happen along the way and it's up to the astronauts to navigate through the experiences moment by moment. Unlike a trip to space where it's a handful of people against a vast cosmos, embodied life is astronauts interacting with millions of other astronauts, all with their own missions which may or may not intersect with or affect our mission along the way. In the end it's how we navigate through it all that matters.