Wisdom Rising

Understanding The Power of Soul Contracts

• Christine Renee, Isabel Wells, and Shantel Ochoa • Season 2 • Episode 12

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Ready to transform your understanding of life's challenges and embrace your divine purpose? Join us on the Wisdom Rising podcast as we unlock the mysteries of Soul Contracts!

Discover how these pre-life agreements shape our experiences and provide a compassionate lens through which to view life's hardships. By understanding the relationship between free will and these spiritual pacts, we illuminate how even the most difficult experiences can be powerful opportunities for growth and resilience.

In this episode, we cover:

• Explanation of soul contracts as pre-incarnation agreements 
• Distinction between soul perspective and human emotion 
• Role of free will in navigating life experiences 
• Personal reflection exercises to uncover soul contracts 
• Impact of one individual's contracts on collective growth 
• Series of events and challenges reshaped through the lens of purpose 
• Encouragement to embrace life experiences for personal expansion 
• Call to action for ongoing engagement in exploring deeper insights

.......

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Speaker 1:

It's time to remember your divine purpose and limitless potential. Welcome to Wisdom Rising, the official podcast of Moon Rising Shamanic Institute. Join shamanic Reiki practitioners Christine René, isabel Wells and Chantelle Ochoa as we guide you on a journey of radical self-discovery and spiritual guidance. Each week, we'll dance through the realms of shamanism, mysticism, energy healing and personal development to illuminate your path to true healing and self-sourced wisdom Through weekly inspired conversations and interviews with leading spiritual and shamanic practitioners. We are here to help you acknowledge, reconcile and balance your energy so that you can awaken to the whispers of wisdom rising from within. Welcome back to another episode of the Wisdom Rising podcast. In today's episode, I am going to dive into soul contracts with our moon rising mystic, chantel Ochoa. This is really Chantel's happy place to play when it comes to spirituality, because understanding our soul contracts allows us to come into a more compassionate understanding of how we can learn and grow in this lifetime. Soul contracts can help to give a sense of meaning to what we experience in life the good, the bad and otherwise and in today's conversation we're diving into all of the ins and outs of what soul contracts are, how we can view them from both a spiritual and philosophical, but also a psychological perspective and how understanding our soul contracts can really help us completely transform the way that we approach our life and our mindset. This is definitely an episode you won't want to miss, and it's a special episode today because Chantel will be teaching a four-week masterclass on soul contracts starting in March. We're really excited to announce that we have a new series of four-week masterclass on soul contracts starting in March. We're really excited to announce that we have a new series of four-week masterclasses that we are creating just for our Moon Rising community. These four-week masterclasses are going to cover a range of topics, and our first one dives into soul contracts and is led by Chantel. This class will be taking place for four weeks on Tuesdays at 4 pm Pacific time, 7 pm Eastern time, and the first class is on March 11th. In this masterclass, you will learn all about how to wake up to unity, consciousness, what soul contracts and soul families are, how to empower yourself by understanding soul contracts. Introduce yourself to archetypical guides and the role they play in your life. Learn how to recognize and map your soul contracts. Introduce yourself to archetypical guides and the role they play in your life. Learn how to recognize and map your soul contracts in this lifetime and learn valuable steps for personal growth and collective healing. This four-week masterclass is now open for enrollment for only $288 US for the energy exchange, so that you can join Chantel weekly. Live on Zoom again at 4 pm Pacific time, 7 pm Eastern time, on Tuesdays, starting on March 11th. This is the first masterclass that we have in our new series and I hope that you will enjoy. If you love today's episode and you want us to dive in even deeper, this class is a fantastic place to start. Again. That link is in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

In addition, if you have been interested in joining us for our Gateway to Spirit book club, we are really excited to announce that we are finally starting our first 2025 book club. Starting next Wednesday, february 26th, at 4 pm Pacific time, 7 pm Eastern time, we'll be meeting every other week to discuss this month's book club pick braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer. This is an absolutely fantastic book that I personally am on my third read through of and I am so excited to be diving into it with you all. Book club will meet four times, but, unlike other book clubs that we've done in the past, this time we're only going to be meeting every other week because this book has a lot of content and we want to make sure that everyone has enough time in between meetings to be able to read and absorb the information. So, with that said, we'll be meeting for our first meeting next Wednesday, february 26th, at 4 pm Pacific time, 7 pm Eastern time, to discuss the first chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass. From there, we'll meet every other week for four meetings, so that will be March 12th, march 26th, april 9th, and that will be our final meeting.

Speaker 1:

We are so excited to dive into book club. We've had so many requests from the community for us to pick this back up again, so we are so excited to answer that request and come back together for this book club. Please note that this time around, as we are offering so much amazing free content for you all, we are asking for donations of $15 to $25 if you do choose to join us for book club. This donation goes directly into our Soul Alignment Fund, which allows us to continue to fund these free offerings, but also allows us to help those in need who need financial support for our Soul Rising courses and more. So, if you are interested in giving back to the community and allowing Moon Rising to continue to show up and hold sacred space for spiritual and shamanic insights and conversations, then we are so thankful for your donation and we can't wait to see you at book club. The link to learn more about that is in the show notes as well.

Speaker 1:

So, with that said, before we dive into the podcast, don't forget to join us in our moon rising shamanic mystics a Facebook group and join our newsletter so that you can get updates on all of the amazing masterclasses, book clubs, podcasts, free conversations and more that we have coming up for you and for our community. We are so excited that you're here and we hope you enjoy today's episode. Welcome, welcome to another amazing conversation. I am joined today with Chantel Ochoa, our Moon Rising Mystic, and we are diving into all things soul contracts, and this is really Chantel's happy place, her passion point. I love hearing her talk about this, so I'm going to let her kick us off today and I'm excited to see where this conversation takes us.

Speaker 2:

Thank, you and good morning everyone. So soul contracts definitely is something that I really enjoy, and not just teaching and discussing all the different elements of soul contracts, but it was also a big awakening moment in my life when it came into my awareness, and so I had kind of always heard a little bit about soul contracts and different things, and then when it really hit it was like, oh my gosh, yes, that is how it is. It's not that we are just these humans here and there's nothing beyond, or that we don't have any plan of action before we come in. And so the whole purpose and the whole concept of soul contracts is that when we are in our soul body, we come together with our spiritual team, we come together with families and friends and, like soul, our soul community, our soul family, and so we discuss what our mission, what our purpose in life will be, what we're here to learn, and so with that we create these contracts with different soul members that become our parents, our family, our children, our friends, our enemies, our lessons in life, and so when you can see the pattern of how like soul contracts are in your life, it's so powerful because I feel like it gives you like this empowering part of yourself where you can say you know what, if I did it there, if I planned it there, I can move through it here and so it's just for me, it's just was really eye opening. And so with that you can learn from Carolyn Miss or Mace I'm not quite sure how she pronounces her last name, but I think it's Carolyn Miss and she has soul contracts, and so with that you can definitely check out her book and plug in there with why we do soul contracts, how they show up the benefit of it and what we're doing like on a soul level.

Speaker 2:

And so it really is kind of coming to this roundtable of discussion and what it is that you want to experience. So remember, on a soul level we're not attached to emotion. So this is a big crown chakra point of view, right, A soul point of view, where when we're looking at the different lives that we can take on and the different experiences we can go through, there's no emotion attached to it. So a soul can take on a huge contract where there's disability, there's sickness, there's, you know, experiencing death, there's experiencing accidents and you know poverty, and there's so many different aspects in a soul contract that we can take on right, and that's because the soul is like I want to elevate, I want to move up in dimensions or frequency or whatever it is that the soul is doing and wanting what their goal set is, and so, on a spectrum of life experiences.

Speaker 2:

As a soul, we get to choose that. And then the souls that love us enough you know they love us they come forward and they say okay, I want to play your mom, I want to play your father, I want to be your son, your daughter, your best friend, the one that hurts you. You know, like there's a meeting in life where you come together and so say there's an accident in your life. Let's just say that, right, Well, in that contract, the driver versus you comes together at some pivot, some point in life and that lets them learn what they need to learn as well as you need to learn what you need to learn. And that's just a very simple example of what we come here to do. But as we move through this conversation, we're going to have some deeper ones, because I really loved to point out certain soul contracts and throughout history that you can go oh my gosh, that's huge yeah.

Speaker 1:

I love that and I love this as a starting point for this conversation, because there are I think there are kind of two camps of people when it comes to soul contracts.

Speaker 1:

There's people who have absolutely never heard of this concept before, and so the idea of soul contracts and I'd love to start with this camp of people who've never heard of it and kind of boil it down into this core definition and see what you think about my definition here.

Speaker 1:

So for someone who's never heard of soul contracts, we can kind of think of the fact that when we're not embodied, right, our human form is not our full form. We are souls, we are those pieces of the divine, and when we choose to incarnate, when we choose to come to earth in what Christine calls a human suit, we get to live a life and within that life our soul has made choices or contracts for what we will or won't experience or what we could experience. I think that's an important part of contracts, right, that they can be rewritten, but it's this idea that the soul has made a choice for what will be contained within this human's lifetime, for the growth and development of that soul. So some of those things might be difficult, but it's because through those difficult growing pains is how we actually develop and evolve. Would you agree with that?

Speaker 2:

because there's a lot of people that if you haven't heard of soul contracts, or even if you have that, it might not resonate. Because you're like, why would I choose this as a human right? Why would I want to experience that? But when you look at it from that perspective, you're really looking at it from the human perspective, through the lens of a human, and so you have to take it to the next level, the higher level, from your soul perspective, your higher self, and say, okay, yeah, maybe on a higher level, I chose this because there were certain people I needed to meet.

Speaker 2:

Or there was, like you say, like you come in and you have cancer, but maybe there's a doctor that's going to help you to cure something or diagnose something or figure something out within you because you have that contract, and then that has a huge impact on the collective, on the human society and all that. And so that's really what it is. It's what are these two people or a group of people coming together that is bringing awareness to the planet, is bringing awareness to the planet?

Speaker 1:

And so, within that, I think that brings us to, like you mentioned, kind of the second group of people who have heard about soul contracts, and either they're totally on board, it makes a lot of sense, it really resonates, or there can also be this tendency, like you shared, to have a little bit of that. Well, I wouldn't choose this, why would I call that into my life? And I love that idea that on the soul level there aren't emotions, because one of the things that I really like thinking about and I'm going to I'm going to take this conversation from, like the really traditional shamanic perspective as well, because I think it adds an interesting tint is that when we look at things from a shamanic perspective, or even just a spiritual perspective, when we're in that soul state, we don't have an eye, there's not an emotion, there's not a mind, there's not a this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong, this is negative, this is positive, everything just is, and so it becomes a lot more. We like to joke around that duality is black and white, like it's good or bad, it's positive or negative, but it actually is a lot more black and white when you're a soul, because there isn't that sense of good or bad, it just is what it is. And so there's less emotional intensity because there's no emotional intensity, because you're just looking at what is going to roll forward with the energy of the universe.

Speaker 1:

And I think this is where how I understand soul contracts from a shamanic perspective. Because from, like a traditional shamanic point of view, the way that we see soul contracts and the way that Caroline Missy soul contracts isn't particularly necessarily aligned with traditional shamanic views, because from a shamanic viewpoint there's never this, there's not a huge impetus on personal soul evolution. It's always from the perspective of the collective. So how is the collective going to advance? And what I love about this conversation is we get to see how both of those overlap. Because I think I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is a shamanic practitioner and he was sharing his thoughts on soul contracts and reincarnation and these things and how, from a really truly traditional shamanic perspective those aren't a thing. But when we look at them from the broader again, when we take it to that crown chakra point of view and we're not so caught up in the details, but we're looking at this crown chakra of what's the idea here. What's the thought and the idea is that there are certain things, certain experiences that need to happen to progress, either our growth or the growth of the collective right.

Speaker 1:

And I think, whether we're talking about this in the context of soul contracts or the shaman's ladder and that cycle of consciousness, or even just from a day-to-day life perspective, I think we can, if I invite everyone listening to really think about what was an experience in your life that was really really difficult but, looking back, you're grateful it happened because it made you the person you are today. I think probably every single person that I've ever talked to has an experience like that. I can think of mine right now. And when we look at it that way, it's this understanding that from the human perspective yeah, that was hard right we could even say from a root chakra perspective when we're looking at the details, when we're really down on the earth, the earth level, looking at how did it feel and who was involved and what were the emotions and the thoughts and the limiting beliefs and the physical pain and the limitations that got placed on you and all of this, that was really really hard, there's no denying that and when we can kind of zoom out and come to that crown chakra perspective or that bigger picture perspective where we're looking at it through the eyes of the divine or your higher self or your soul or your intuition or whatever resonates for you there, we can really see that that situation yes, it was hard.

Speaker 1:

That doesn't take away from that truth.

Speaker 1:

But on the bigger perspective, it did make you who you are today.

Speaker 1:

It did help you grow, it did help you evolve, and so I find it really interesting that, even just on an interpersonal level right, even if you're not woo or spiritual at all we kind of all have this understanding that, yeah, okay, I can see how that would be true, I can see how this situation really did help me grow, and I love finding all the ways that it's like okay, if we take that idea, if we take this understanding that that really difficult situation, I think about friends of mine who have gone through a divorce or who had some kind of childhood trauma, which is mine or who have lost a job and went through a divorce, or who had some kind of childhood trauma, which is mine or who have, you know, lost a job and went through a really difficult time of unemployment or had really serious chronic disease or things like this, and they come out the other side and they're like I am.

Speaker 1:

Because of that, because I had to go through this process of realizing how limited I actually was in that situation, how much I was holding myself back and denying myself and all of these things, I am now so much more free and so much more myself than I ever was at the beginning.

Speaker 1:

And I love that we can take that idea and apply it to soul contracts of what if that was happening, not just on the human level, because life is hard and unfair, but because there's actually this cosmic dance to it happening, whether we want to look at it from the soul contract perspective of you and your growth and evolution or from a more shamanic perspective of the growth and evolution of a collective. Thinking about when you went through that situation, how much did everybody else in your life change too as a result of that catalyst? It's a fascinating energetic pattern that we can see and I like how there's that kind of universality to it. Of no matter which angle we're looking at it from, there's clearly some kind of truth to this idea that it's through those hard things. You know, there's that kind of cliche saying, growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone, and I like that we can kind of go down the rabbit hole and see how true that actually is.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely, because when we can connect the dots through our life and see like you're talking about, you know, if I didn't go through this I wouldn't be where I'm at Right. And there are a lot of experiences that we go through that if we could turn back the time, you know, change the clock and all that kind of thing, and go back, maybe we would want to change them. But when you look at the bigger picture, would you really? Because a lot of times, whether it's a job or it's a loss of a loved one or it's a divorce, you gain more people experiences, there's different things that come into your reality that would not have happened if you didn't experience that right. And so it is having that bigger picture of life and saying in the moment it was extremely difficult, but now I can see why I could have chosen that.

Speaker 2:

And then it brings in the free will. Right, because on the level of free will, yes, we have these soul agreements, these soul contracts that we come in with. We have our soul family that we come in with, okay, but at the same time, at any moment, we have free will to change and pivot from whatever it is. So we have our soul alignment that we're, you know, going through life doing our thing, and then all of a sudden we're at the spork in the road and we make a decision based off of free will that maybe we don't want to go down that road that created trauma or may be more difficult, so we pivot and take a different route. Well, if that route creates more lessons, more heartache, more struggle, it's like our spiritual team is not nudging us back to the original path, right To keep us going to. So we're learning what we're here to actually learn. And so, when you see it too, it's like these detours in life that we take that can create more suffering, sometimes because we want to avoid what we think will be painful. You know, we predict things in our life Like if I create this, if I make this decision, it's going to create that. And that's where you get into timelines and different things that we, you know, we create within our reality.

Speaker 2:

But it's all a part of that original soul agreement and saying I'm going to come into life to experience this, whether say it's an abusive relationship or something, and then you're going through your life with this abuser or this like narcissism is such a big thing right now with people like I'm in this narcissistic relationship. But what are you learning? There's a reason that person is in your life so you can learn something from them, and it doesn't mean that you need to be a victim. It means that you learn how to empower yourself, to stand up, to be strong, to say I'm done with this. And when you shift and you move into your consciousness and awareness of I'm leaving this relationship, what happens is the next one. If you've learned from that experience, the next person in your life won't be that, because you'll see all the red flags, you'll understand.

Speaker 2:

I've learned from that experience. The next person in your life won't be that, because you'll see all the red flags, you'll understand. I've learned from him or her and now I'm shifting this way, and so your whole life takes a whole different change and turn. And then next thing, you know you're living a completely different lifestyle, a different perspective, and your old life becomes like it feels like it's in a whole different book, right, like a whole different action of life, and so really it is us tuning in and seeing it, because then there's that silver lining and I think that's really what I take from it is what am I meant to learn from whatever experience I have gone through, whatever it is that I'm being, I'm facing, and so from there I'm like, okay, if I can see the silver lining in it, then that means I can move forward with a better decision-making.

Speaker 2:

I have a broader point of view of why I'm going through what I'm going through, instead of sitting in the victim state of it, which I have. You know, we've all been in that moment of why me and so I find the empowering part of soul contracts and agreements is to say it isn't happening to me, it's happening for me. And when we can stand in that state of mind, then everything starts to shift and you know you can leave those relationships, you know you can heal through grief, you know you can go find a better job or you can make more money or experience life in a different way, because you start to shift your perspective from the victim to the warrior and to the empowered one and everything like that. And that is what, for me, coming forward is like yes, I will take that all day long, you know, because I know I can make decisions based off of those experiences.

Speaker 1:

And that's such a powerful takeaway too, because I think one of the things that for me, when I was learning about soul contracts and I think a lot of people have this there's that feeling of like, yeah, it really resonates and your mind hates it. You know, your mind hates that idea because, again, it's like it's a little bit of that feeling of, well, I wouldn't have chosen this. And I think what you said I kind of want to emphasize again that it really is, even though on the outset, right, it's the situation, right, this maybe it's an abusive relationship or a divorce, or again a period of unemployment and illness, whatever it is, for you it's not the situation that you picked, it's the opportunity that that situation creates. So, like Chantal was saying, if it's an abusive relationship that you experience in this life, it's not that your soul, right, it's not you, it's not your mind, it's not that your soul came into that experience just to have that experience. It came into that experience so that it could learn what the process of becoming empowered was, of knowing your worth, of standing up for yourself, of standing in your truth, of setting boundaries, so that it could practice these things.

Speaker 1:

And I love this idea from more of a psychological perspective as well, because our minds think that we can think our way through problems. Right, that's what it's designed to do. Our mind is designed to try and logic our way out of situations to keep us safe. That's literally what it was designed to be used as as a tool, right? And so it thinks that we shouldn't have to go through the relationship or the illness or the trauma in order to be able to learn the lesson. We should just be able to walk through life and have the lesson unfold. Right? And I think so many people can probably resonate with that idea of, yeah, I should be able to just live life and my mind can figure it out. Why do I have to go through the really hard thing in order to learn the lesson? But what's really interesting about this is that, for as much as our mind thinks and tries to logic its way through things, our soul experiences. Our soul doesn't think, it doesn't emote, it doesn't have that string of thoughts to get from point A to point B. Our soul just exists. And so the only way that our soul can learn or evolve is probably a better term for it the only way that our soul can evolve and develop is through experience. The mind thinking its way through a certain problem does absolutely nothing for the soul, because the soul doesn't resonate at the thought level. It doesn't exist at that level of consciousness. It exists at a deeper level of consciousness where we experience things.

Speaker 1:

And this is where, and part of why, I think shamanic techniques are so powerful in that because something like a shamanic journey or a guided meditation if you've never done a journey are really powerful because you're not thinking your way through it, you're experiencing your way through it. When you come out, it's once you're out of the meditation or you're out of the journey that then you get to invite your mind in and say, okay, what meaning can we pull from this? But it's rooted first in that experience and I think a lot of times we have that backwards in our day-to-day lives. We think that if our mind can just think through a problem, then we can apply it to our soul. Then, once we have the answer, then we can choose to feel that way or really bring it to the level of our beliefs. We want it to be this kind of top-down way of thinking, but the way that our soul engages with life, the way that we were intended to engage with life was experience from that heart-soul space first, and then bring in the mind, this tool that we have to help make sense and pull meaning out of those experiences.

Speaker 1:

And so, when we look at it from that perspective, soul contracts for me took on a completely different perspective and a completely different light, because suddenly it wasn't you know your mind's choosing to have these negative experiences, when it could have just thought its way through. It's like the mind has nothing to do with it. The soul contracts, what you experience here on earth, have nothing to do with your mind. They're not happening for your mind, they're happening for that soul, part of you, that part of you that is one with all things, that part of you that is part of this cosmic dance that we're going through, and that part only learns and evolves and continues to move its energy through through experience.

Speaker 1:

And so, of course, it would seem like we come in for the abusive relationship or the illness or whatever it is, but that's not actually the end of it.

Speaker 1:

What we truly come in for is the opportunity, the catalyst to become more of ourselves, to become more aware of our self-worth and our self-love and our right to be here and experience everything. And I find that really fascinating because for me, that's where it really starts to dovetail into something like you know, how much are we thinking our lives instead of experiencing our lives? And how much easier would our soul contracts be if we allowed ourselves to really sit in the experience of it and process our emotions and be aware of where we are, instead of trying to think our way through it because that's just a protection mechanism, it's just our mind trying to say, well, if you could just think your way through it, then it wouldn't have to hurt as much. And I think this idea of soul contracts really challenges that state of mind, because it's really prompting us to remember that we are first and foremost souls. We are first and foremost energetic beings, and energy doesn't think, it experiences.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it sure does. And so with that it's, it is actually experience life, right. So it is eat the food and you connect to our five senses and do all of that, because when we are truly embodying our physical self, we are having that human experience that allows our soul then to experience through us, right, because on that soul level we're not doing all of that, we're not eating and smelling and tasting and touching and doing all of the things. But what I was thinking too while you were talking is to look at the duality of it too. So with soul, agreements is like if you going back to having an abuser and having the one who is being abused, right, a lot of times it's because each party, each soul, wants to experience that side of it, and then in a next lifetime, you know, down the road or whatever, they switch it. So a lot of times we come in like that too, when we're partnering up with someone, because one soul needs to experience the other side of it, and also knowing that the collective is your family, your friends, your co-workers. All of that, if it's more, you know, a personal experience versus a global experience is that you're being witnessed too. So other beings are witnessing your journey and learning through watching what we're going through. And so, for example, if you, you know, have like a death of a child, right, like that is a difficult experience to go through, you know, extremely difficult. But there's reasons why the mother or the father have agreed to do that because they themselves are needing to go through that grief, whether it's going to bring them through it or the emotions that they have to go through. Or there's going to be another child that comes after that child is lost, and then they have that connection of heart again and they, you know. So there's all these different elements that show up and when we are able to really see it from that bigger perspective of it, it's like, okay, it does make sense, it doesn't make it hurt any less. You know, our heart is gonna ache through a lot of these human experiences, because life is very difficult when we're going through things, right, and so it doesn't take it away. None of this takes away the earthly experience of what we're feeling, the emotions of what we're feeling, but what it does is it gives a different perspective to say okay, on a higher conscious level. We chose this because our soul wants to evolve.

Speaker 2:

And one example that I really like to use is Helen Keller, and with her it's because she chose a contract to come in to be deaf and blind, right, which on an outside perspective you might look at that and say, well, who would want to come in, deaf and blind, right and so. But through her contract she had people that came in Ann Sullivan, who was her teacher. She became good friends with Alexander Graham Bell, who then was so interested in who she was as a deaf mute child that he went to England to bring to America a deaf ASL interpreter or a teacher, and then together they established the Gallaudet University, so the first deaf school in America. And so from her contract, now every state through the United States has a residential school for the deaf community, for deaf children, for K through 12th grade, right. So you can see from her perspective as a soul, if I come in, I'm deaf and blind, not only will I evolve myself, but collectively and for the world I'm making this huge change. If she would not have come in, there's a possibility there would have never established a deaf you know education system. But through her that all happened. And here's this man that he's all about telephones and communication with hearing people. But he found so much interest in her and the ability so it changed his perspective of communication. It connected different countries, it brought in different ideologies and language and education.

Speaker 2:

And that is looking at it from that crown perspective, how one point, one sole perspective, can just change everything. And so when you can see that, look at it from your life now. Where in your life can you say you know what, if I hadn't met this person, I wouldn't have done this, I wouldn't have had my children, I wouldn't have had this job opportunity, whatever it is? And you can see it and go oh my gosh, yes, there's my soul contract. And that's a really good way, without having to do like soul regression or anything like that, just look at your own life and start to pivot, or not pivot, but connect the dots right. So it's like once you connect your dots, you go okay, I can see how, maybe, being abused as a child, you become a counselor or you start advocating for abused children. Right, if you wouldn't have experienced it, typically you wouldn't become that.

Speaker 1:

And I find this fascinating too, because I think we can see this pattern, this idea, in different ideologies and ways of thinking as well. Things like karma right, everybody's familiar with the idea of karma, and that's essentially. You know, details aside, that's essentially what we're talking about is this idea of finding that energetic balance, of agreeing to experience something in this lifetime Karma probably wouldn't use the term agreeing, but experiencing something in this lifetime for the development and the furtherance of energy, both individually, so your soul and collectively, like the whole earth and the cosmic system. And what do we collectively need to continue to evolve and grow? And so this is something that we see across a lot of different philosophies and religions and ways of thinking, and so, for me is someone who likes to find all of those connections and those places where things come together that we can really see. Okay, there must be something to this, whether we want to call it karma or soul contracts, or just the law of cause and effect, or we want to take a more shamanic perspective and look at it as this idea that energy is constantly searching for balance. So, if something is imbalanced, there has to be this kind of give and take in order to bring it back into balance. And that brings us back again to karma of this idea of if you were abused, then maybe in another lifetime you become the abuser or vice versa, so that again there's that energetic balance there. And so I find this really fascinating, because it's something that we do see spread across so many different religions and philosophies and ways of spiritual thought that there must be this core nugget of truth here. And what I love about it, from even just a personal growth perspective, is it does exactly what you said earlier. It helps us to get out of the victim mentality and whether or not you want to take it further, whether or not you want to look at it as a soul contract or karma or whatever it is for you, if we can just take it as this idea that maybe there was more to this situation than I can see right now with my human perspective, right, I think that's really the baseline invitation when we're talking about soul contracts is we could dive so deep into the rabbit hole and if this resonates for you, there are so many resources and Chantel is absolutely amazing at helping you walk through this.

Speaker 1:

But when we're really bringing it forward here at the start, it's this idea of what if there was more to this than what your human mind can see? What if it wasn't happening to you but it truly was happening for you? How would you move through this situation differently? How would you perceive your past traumas differently If the idea wasn't that life was just happening to you so that you could get hurt and life is terrible? But this idea that these situations are catalysts that open the door to more understanding, more learning, a different way of living and existing and more expansion in your energy field. What if, instead of those situations being painful and hard and there to beat you down, the reason that you feel so beaten down is because it's just trying to break through your walls? What if they were opportunities to let those walls come down so that you could step back into your fullest self? And when we think about our experiences that way, when we think about them from this idea of what if there was more here? What if there was an experience on this soul level, what if this soul level experience was the catalyst for my mind understanding something deeper.

Speaker 1:

It takes the victim mindset out, because I think when we have a chronic illness or we're in an abusive relationship, or we do lose a child or whatever it is that we are going through. It is hard. Like you said, it doesn't take away from the fact that it's hard, but it's also so easy for us to get stuck in that grief or the loss or the anger or the fear or all of these really heavy emotions that are easier to shove to the side than to sit with and process. But when we can take it from this perspective of there's something for me here, there's a deeper meaning here. This is a catalyst for something. It can help us to have the courage not only to then look at those really difficult emotions and figure out what is it that I need to be able to process those, knowing that it's in the processing of those emotions that we learn our biggest lessons, right? But it also opens us up to this idea that I don't have to give my power away anymore, not to another person, but especially not to life.

Speaker 1:

And that, for me, has been one of the biggest switches after learning about soul contracts is this idea that we can be a victim to life. In fact, a lot of us are victims to life because we feel like it's just happening to us, it's happening at us, life is hard and it sucks and that just is how it is right. That statement that probably all of us have said at some point in our lives is a victim statement and an example of how we're giving away our power to life and saying this is how it is, I can't change it, when, in reality, because we are spiritual beings having a human experience yes, we have these contracts or these agreements or these karmic cycles, whatever you want to call them. We have these contracts, but we also have free will, you want to call them. We have these contracts, but we also have free will. We are spiritual beings, yes, but we're also human in that we get to make choices and we get to experience and we get to have the emotions and the thoughts and work through them and find what that catalyst is opening us up for.

Speaker 1:

But we only get to go through that process if we consciously engage with it, and so a lot of times I've started thinking about those harder experiences in life as wake-up calls.

Speaker 1:

I had one of those this past weekend.

Speaker 1:

My husband and I had a really difficult situation come up and it was this moment of sitting there and realizing it feels like a physical tug of like I could choose to stay stuck in the emotion and, just like blackout, sit down, not do it be done, or we could move through it and we could feel the feelings and we could do the things and we could step through it, knowing that on the other side, yeah, this middle part's going to be harder because we're actually going to be looking at the problem and we're actually going to be having the conversations, but what happens on the other side is it's going to get better.

Speaker 1:

There's going to be more feeling, more connection, more whatever it is on the other side, because we allow this experience, instead of being, like you know, a jackhammer to our heart and beat us down, it becomes like a jackhammer to those walls that we've put up, and those difficult experiences can break down all of those walls and those barriers that we've put up if we let them. And I love that way of looking at life problems because it really does completely shift, I think, the way that a lot of people would live their lives if we could take some of that victimhood mentality out of it and go. What if it wasn't that? What if there was more to it? What if there was a different way of seeing this situation?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and I think too, with that, with the victimhood mentality, is not just filling the victim, but also people victimize people, right? So a lot of times, like you, you know, especially like with empaths this weekend I went to an amazing conference and it was a. I was there only for two days, but I went to the conscious expo in LA and it was like two, 10,000 people were registered and it was just back to back workshops and channelers and all the all the people, and it was just so amazing. But one of the main things that they were talking about was then empaths came up and it said you know what happens? And this was actually a channel, a channel that was talking and what he was saying is when you are feeling into what other people are feeling, right, as an empath, we take it on.

Speaker 2:

He goes why do you look at, why do you want to tune into? Just the trauma and the drama and all of that he's like tune into the light of the person, tune into the magnificence of them. He goes you humans, you're so attached to being the victim or attached to the emotion, attached to the experience, instead of being the observer of it and saying this happened to me and I can shift my perspective of that and let that go. And that's where the freedom of forgiveness comes in. Right Is knowing you can forgive yourself, you can forgive others, you can forgive the situation, you can release it so you can move forward, you can move on from that, and that can help you really shift that perspective and the way that you walk in life and it makes you stronger with it and it gives you it's like lifting your head up and seeing through a different lens and that is when we come to soul contracts is definitely giving ourself the grace and the space to be able to say I'm going through this now, but this is just a season in my life. What am I meant to learn from here? So I can grow and evolve in the next stage? Right, and so we all have that opportunity. We can all choose to be a victim and we can all choose to grow out of it and so, and to empower ourself and to stand in the knowledge and the wisdom of what we've gained.

Speaker 2:

And you know when, that, when we're able to do that, it just, I think it makes life juicier, it makes life more tangible and fun, and it's like, because we can't oh, we.

Speaker 2:

You can get stuck in it, but you don't want to be stuck in it, you know, like something that happened 20, 30 years ago should not still identify us for who we are today.

Speaker 2:

Right, and we don't need to self-punish and we don't need to continue to do all that. And when you can't forgive and move forward from a situation, what we're doing is we're just punishing ourselves or stripping ourselves away from life and from the experience of life and being able to go and journey and do the things in life that is fun. And what we're here to do, right, is to experience this earth and this experience of walking and journeying with people and meeting new people and having all those different, like travel and whatever it is you wanna do in life, but be abundant in it, be expansive in it, because this lifetime, when it's over, it's over Now. I believe in reincarnation. We come back, but you're never going to be the personality that you are right now, you know, and so it's like, yeah, go enjoy it and know that things are going to happen and we're going to have these life experiences that we have contracted through, but it's okay to look at it for what it is and allow yourself to shift out of it much faster.

Speaker 1:

And it takes a lot of the fear out of it too. I think a lot of times when we have such heavy things happen in our lives, we kind of sit waiting. For I know I'm, I'm really, really I really get into this cycle, sometimes in my own head, of waiting for the other shoe to drop, like when's the next bad thing going to happen. But when we can look at it from the lens of soul contracts and from that invitation of, can you let yourself experience life instead of thinking your way through it, instead of trying to figure out all of the stories and what the right answer is and what the wrong answer is, and how you're going to live your life perfectly so that when you die you don't regret it? Right, that thought pattern that our brain gets on, instead of thinking your way through life thought pattern that our brain gets on, instead of thinking your way through life, can you let yourself experience life and understand that, within that realm of experiencing life from your heart, from your soul, those difficult experiences are just catalysts to allow you to deepen in that experience, to allow you to deepen in the joy and the passion and the connection that you have in life, if you choose to allow them to.

Speaker 1:

And I think that's one of the most empowering things about soul contracts is, yeah, your soul is going to experience it either way, but you get to bring your mind on board so that you can make the free will choice to get everything out of it that you were meant to get out of it.

Speaker 1:

And that in itself is so empowering, because by making that choice, by choosing to believe that these difficult experiences are just catalysts for deeper experience, you are claiming your power back. You are making an empowered choice, you're bringing your mind along for the ride so that, yeah, no, you're not thinking your way through life, but you are experiencing it, and all of you get to experience it, and so it does. It takes away a lot of the fear because then, instead of thinking, oh my gosh, when's the next bad thing going to happen, it's I am fully experiencing life and when something happens, I know on a deep soul level that it will be okay, because it's just that catalyst for the next layer of understanding and the next level of consciousness and the next deepening of that experience.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think a lot of people they do their in that when is the next shoe going to drop? And then you spend so much energy waiting for that next shoe to drop. That may never happen and if it does, it may be like 10, 15 years from now, you know. So it's just like live in the moment. That's why it's like just for today, do not worry. You know, I always joke with my mom because she, with my Grammy, she's always like for 20 years, you know, talking about you know she could die, and I'm like mom for 20 years doing this and she's 88, you know now, and it's like and so it's just interesting to me because the fear was there and that fear has created so much anxiety in her. And it's like don't think like that, just live life and enjoy the moments that you have. Right, because her time will come when her time is there. Not because you think it will happen when her time is there, not because you think it will happen, but yeah, definitely it's.

Speaker 2:

It's a very tricky place to be when you're concerned or worried about what may happen, you know, because it's like then you go to um, what you think creates a reality, so we actually start pulling in that experience because we're aligning to that frequency of the universe to say I'm waiting for this to happen. The universe goes okay, well, here, let me give it to you. And then we're creating our own suffering and our own struggle and just the thought and the worry in its own way is its own suffering. So it really is starting to come out of this concept where our mind can create an entire world that isn't even happening.

Speaker 2:

Think how many people have panic attacks. Well, they're all snuggled safely in bed and then they have a thought that creates a panic attack and they're going through that emotion. But it's the mind that's projecting and going through memories and everything and releasing chemicals that causes an unsafe experience while you're safely nestled in bed. I just find that interesting and how powerful our mind can be either way, either really powerful on the negative side or really powerful in the positive side. But it's that thought catching and the retraining of our thoughts and our mind to say, no, I am safe, I am good yeah.

Speaker 1:

So, with that said, as we kind of bring this one in for a landing, I would love to know if someone was interested in really taking this soul contracts idea and applying it to their own life. Like, if they're ready to dive in, what piece of advice or tool would you give them to take this to the next level?

Speaker 2:

Definitely getting Sacred Contracts the book, because that really does help you dive in and there's a lot of videos to do it.

Speaker 2:

But, like I said in the beginning, it's looking at your own life, connecting your own dots, noticing, like the people who were involved, what situation, trauma or event that occurred and what was the outcome, what positive came out of that.

Speaker 2:

And then when you, when you do that, it actually helps you to heal it because you'll see it from that bigger perspective, right, but even right now, if you look at something that you're going through even though we don't know the end result of it in the moment but see what could possibly come forward from it, and so just having that in your own perspective can really help you play with it.

Speaker 2:

Because in the end, that's what it is where you're playing with this and what your contracts are, and know that you can end contracts, like if you have toxic people in your life and you're like I am done with this contract or I have learned this lesson, because the mind will keep you in this loop, but the soul is going to take you on a spiral, right, so it loops back around to say, hey, did you learn this, did you? How did you do? Did you learn it? It wants to remind you of the lessons that you're here to learn, and so the mind will keep you in an endless loop, but the soul doesn't do that. So tune into the heart and fill into it.

Speaker 1:

Beautiful. So, with that said, if you have enjoyed this conversation, if you have enjoyed learning about soul contracts, let us know. We'd love to see you over in our Facebook group to hear your top takeaway from today's conversation and to share what you learned or what you realized when you did this exercise that Chantel invited us into. And, of course, if you would like us to do a part two and dive even deeper into this, knowing that there is so much more to soul contracts than what we were able to share here, let us know. We would love to do a part two, but until next time, thank you for listening and may you awaken to the whispers of wisdom rising from within. Thanks for tuning in to today's show.

Speaker 1:

The Wisdom Rising podcast is sponsored by Moon Rising Shamanic Institute. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting app and be the first to know when we release a new episode. You can find us on Instagram, facebook, youtube and TikTok at Moon Rising Institute, or visit our website, moonrisinginstitutecom to learn more about our mission and find future opportunities to connect with our community of shamanic mystics. Opportunities to connect with our community of shamanic mystics. Once again, thank you for sharing space with us today, and until next time, may you awaken to the whispers of wisdom rising from within.