Living the Life Your Soul Intended
Understanding the Instruction is the key to living the life your soul intended: one of profound meaning and contentment.
—THE AUTHOR’S CAUSAL GUIDES
How can you tell when you’re living the living the life your soul intended? One way is to ask yourself, “Am I happy?” It sounds simple, but when you’re following your soul’s direction, you’ll develop a sense of deep contentment.
And there is something else that happens. When you commit yourself to a course of action that’s compatible with your life plan, you’ll discover that amazing opportunities and synchronicities come your way.
When I first began working with my spirit guides, they offered to assist me in creating the life I wanted. I’d decided I wanted to live in a houseboat, so for several weeks I asked them for their help. They had me visualize my future, write my goals in my journal, and ask them several times a day to make my requests a reality.
A few weeks later, not only did I find a houseboat, but when I first saw its interior I recognized it immediately. I’d actually had a picture of it in my mind since I was in my twenties. It was exactly as I’d seen it (except that everything was flipped from left to right).
A couple of years later, I met my wife, Lisa. And some time after that, we moved to a small island in the Pacific Northwest with our two small children (all of which my spirit guides had predicted).
One afternoon, shortly after arriving on the island, I asked my spirit guides for help. I wanted to find a place where I could do sessions in public. They promised to give me all the support I needed.
Working as a psychic is intensely introspective. Fortunately, I have a hobby that offers a perfect way for me to balance my life. Since I was sixteen, I’ve played bass guitar in bands. When we relocated, I found myself a band, backing a Seattle singer named Teri Derr.
A few hours after asking my guides for their help, I got ready to leave the house for a band rehearsal at Teri’s home, situated an inconvenient forty miles from where I lived. Suddenly, an idea popped into my head. There was an eccentric little shop called Minglement, situated not too far from us. I thought perhaps that would be somewhere to approach about doing sessions. I mentioned it to Lisa as I said goodbye.
She said, “I think it would be perfect. It’s a pity we don’t know anyone who knows the owner.”
Two hours later, after a ferry trip and a fight through rush-hour traffic, I turned up for the rehearsal. It was only the second time we’d played together, and the band barely knew each other. We worked through a couple of songs, then took a short break. Teri turned to me and asked, casually, “So, where do you live?”
I told her.
She said, “Really? My best friend has a shop there. It’s called Minglement—do you know it?”
By the time I got home, Teri had called her friend Eva, and told her about me. I met with Eva the next day. I told her she was planning to remodel the center part of the shop and that she’d soon be opening another business.
A few days later, I set up a table in the corner of the shop and began doing readings several days a week. Shortly afterward, the center of the shop was remodeled and, two years after that, Eva got the chance to take over an old coffee roastery about half a mile away. She gave me an office in the rear of the building, which was where I wrote this book.
Manifesting Your Destiny
The point of this story is that when you begin working with your guides and listening to your soul, doors will open and opportunities will present themselves.
Before learning this, I spent decades in the spiritual wilderness, wondering why I seemed to lurch from one disaster to the next. It was only with the support of my guides that I learned to listen to my soul and make choices that supported its purpose.
Though the process lacked a name in those days, what I went through was the Instruction.
I’ve truly walked the talk. I’ve gone from a life of dissatisfaction and isolation to one of happiness and love. I wake up every day knowing my ultimate destination, and what actions and decisions are in my highest interest.
It’s my sincere wish that following the Instruction will have the same profound effect on you that it’s had on me. That’s why I want now to share some important insights I’ve learned for getting the most out of it.
To achieve your destiny, it’s essential to exercise your free will: to be yourself. You have to live your life your own way, free from the influence of those whose interests are not yours. And that’s not easy.
Coercion is the enemy of free will. It takes many forms. There are extreme examples, like slavery and military conscription. And there are much lesser examples, such as peer pressure, mandatory drug testing, and advertising. They all detract, in some measure, from your ability to exercise your free will.
In everyday life, nothing—and I stress nothing—gets in the way of living the life your soul intended more than this: other people’s expectations. Teachers, friends, politicians—they all “know” what’s best for you.
Parents can be some of the biggest culprits. The problem with so many of them is that they assume their children are here for the same reason they are.
They may be well-meaning: “We just want you to be happy.” But, more often than not, what they think will make you happy is for you to live their destiny—not your own.
Parents have the power to influence you in ways no one else can. Their control over you may be subtle or overt. It may not even be intentional, but it can last a lifetime.
It all starts in childhood. It may begin by giving or withholding rewards—perhaps something as seemingly insignificant as a smile. Or it might be through the use of statements like “Why can’t you be more like your brother?” or “Nice girls don’t behave like that.”
But it can also get much more coercive. Guidance is essential when you’re a child, but when parents start interfering in such matters as your selection of a career or who you choose as a partner, they’re no longer looking after your highest interest.
“No Son of Mine Is Going to Be an Artist”
Michelangelo, arguably the greatest artist who ever lived, knew what it was to experience parental disapproval. His father used to beat him in an attempt to persuade him to adopt a more dignified profession.
This is your life to live—according to your own life plan. If you marry Becky or Larry because Mom and Dad like them, that’s fine, as long as you do too. But if you make a major life decision based on Mom and Dad’s desires rather than your own, you may regret your choice long after they’re both gone.
The power of the Instruction is that it will help you make better choices by making you aware of who you are and why you’re here. Should you go to medical school like Mom and Dad have always dreamed you would? Or should you go to art school like you’ve always dreamed you would? If you know you’re a Creator type with a talent for Art, then that decision is going to be lot easier.
And what if you make the wrong choice? Well, that’s how you learn. It will help you make a better one next time. And don’t forget, it’s one thing to screw up because you made a poor choice, and quite another to screw up because you allowed someone else to make that choice for you.
The ability to make virtually unlimited choices is, as I’ve said before, the result of having a soul. Like many skills, it improves with practice. In other words, the more choices you make, the easier it becomes.
One of the reasons doctors have a relatively high rate of alcoholism and suicide is that many of them, on a soul level, never planned to be doctors. Unfortunately, smart children are frequently persuaded to join the medical profession by ambitious parents or teachers. This is fine if it’s part of their life plan, but can cause years of misery if it’s not.
When someone’s life plan is derailed in this way, the results can range from mild discontentment to serious depression.
For most of us, the negative effects of being in the wrong job may not lead to suicide, but it can still make us deeply unhappy.
One way to limit the damage is to practice spiritual acts. Helping those less fortunate than yourself is always a spiritual act, which is why charitable work can help give you a sense of purpose.
At this point, I want to address a myth—a belief that can be totally disempowering. That belief is that everything is somehow meant to be.
When I first began exploring the subject of spirituality, I read something to the effect that wherever you are or whatever you’re doing, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
That’s comforting if you’re sitting in a hottub in your million-dollar beachfront home, sipping a margarita with someone you love. But try telling that to someone who’s being tortured in a secret prison, or being raped somewhere at gunpoint.
The reality is that bad things happen all the time, and they’re not part of anyone’s life plan.
You might slip on a banana skin and hurt yourself. That’s what happened to Jessica. Unfortunately, the banana skin was one she dropped inside her car. As she bent to pick it up, her foot slipped on it and hit the gas pedal. The car shot forward and collided with a street light. The car was wrecked, the street light totally destroyed. She had to pay the county $8,000 for a replacement.
Was all this part of her life plan? Was it meant to be? No, it was simply an accident (though, admittedly, a rather unusual one).
One of the biggest misunderstandings connected with the “meant to be” myth is that those who are disabled in this life are being punished for something they did in a previous lifetime.
This is absolutely not the case.
There is no cosmic punishment. You might choose a lifetime in a body that’s confined to a wheelchair because your soul wants to know what that would be like. There are powerful lessons to be learned from such a life, ones we’ll all choose to experience at some point in our soul’s evolution. But no one ends up in a wheelchair because they were “bad” in a previous incarnation.
Choosing a Life of Disability
A soul who decides to inhabit a physical body that’s born with a disability will usually have made that choice, prior to birth, as part of their life plan.
A person who becomes disabled as the result of an accident is more likely to have suffered just that—an accident.
Whatever the reasons for being disabled, your soul will always do its best to help you adapt or overcome its effects.
If you’re in an abusive relationship, the “meant to be” myth can be disempowering. It suggests that life is unfolding according to some kind of a script, and that there is no point trying to do anything about it.
You have a clear destiny—a complex web of experiences and relationships that extends into your future. Yet your life plan allows for free will at all times. Nothing, as they say, is carved in stone. Your future is entirely in your hands.
And that can be scary. How much more comforting would it be to have decision-making taken out of your hands—to put responsibility for your future in the lap of the gods?
It’s that fear of taking responsibility for your own destiny that empowers those who’d gladly tell you what to do with your life. When you give up the responsibility, what happens is that you end up losing your autonomy and, with it, your destiny.
Taking responsibility for yourself will give you the maximum opportunity to live the life your soul intended. And if you choose to take this courageous path, you’ll have the unlimited support of your spirit guides on the other side.
You’re not a victim of circumstance, and you’re not being punished for past-life indiscretions. Where you go from here is up to you. You have ultimate control over your destiny. No one but you can achieve what your soul wishes to accomplish. At the same time, you don’t have to go it alone. You have the power of the universe behind you.
A ship at sea needs a compass and a good set of charts if it’s going to reach its destination. All you need is your life plan, and the ability to follow it.
Don’t forget, your life plan is there to guide you where you and your soul want to go, not to force you along some inflexible route, regardless of what gets in your way. If an iceberg suddenly appears directly ahead of a ship, does the captain stubbornly refuse to alter course? No, he takes appropriate measures to avoid it.
As the captain of your ship, that’s what you’ll learn to do. Obstructions and difficulties are everywhere. That’s the nature of life. But by exercising your free will, you’ll learn to overcome them.
Why You’ll Never Be the Same Again
By completing the Instruction, you should now have many of the important answers to the age-old questions “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?”
Who am I? You are a unique soul with a personality and outlook on life that’s the result of your soul’s age and type.
Why am I here? You’re here to follow the plan your soul chose for you before you were born.
Is that it, then? Is that all you need?
The answer is yes.
And no.
You can put this book down and walk away from the Instruction forever. Then again, you can use it as and when you need it. You might refer to it in a crisis, or turn to the chapter about soul types when you meet someone new and want to figure them out.
It’s entirely your choice. And that, for the umpteenth time, is a gift that having a soul confers upon you.
But now, there is another choice you can make. You have the opportunity to take it all to an even higher level. And the way to do that is to fully embody the lessons of the Instruction.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
By investigating the different soul ages, you learned that we all see the world differently because of our varying degrees of experience. If you can bear that in mind the next time you feel like dismissing someone’s point of view because it contradicts your own, you’ll be acting from your soul.
You can do that with every other part of the Instruction. When you get frustrated at someone else’s lack of grounding, or their need to take control, remind yourself that we’re all different soul types, here on specific missions and investigations.
And before you look down on someone for their lack of confidence or their obstinacy, remember the profound impact that your challenges and your past-life fears have had on you.
The same goes for desires and talents. Before you criticize anyone for following some false goal, take a look at your own life and ask yourself if everything is in perfect balance. And when you feel frustrated with someone because they can’t do something you can, don’t forget they have talents you don’t.
Accepting others with all their foibles and idiosyncrasies is a sign of spiritual maturity.
Like everyone else, you are here to live the life your soul intended. Doing that is the key to enlightenment. By leading a life that’s in harmony with your soul’s desires, your journey on this plane will unfold in ways that are compatible with who you are. The result will be true contentment.
The Instruction can transform your life. In many ways, it already has. The simple act of reading it, and following the few simple exercises that accompany each chapter, has shifted your consciousness. It has helped to break through the Illusion and unite your Physical Plane self with the Soul World.
The Instruction is your guidebook for the future. Just how far you go with it is, quite simply, your choice.
I wish you the greatest happiness and success on your voyage.