The geopolitical world is ramping up all sorts of challenges right now and people are starting to feel a sense of urgency, a feeling that we need to act and have our voices heard. But what should we do? What can we do? Does social activism even work? Do oligarchs care if millions of people all over the world take to the streets, protesting at the demise of democracy? No. But we do; large marches help us to remember that we’re not alone, or helpless, or hopeless. So, what can we do? We can ask, ‘What am I supposed to be doing in the world right now? What can I do? What is my purpose?’

In order to answer these questions in an authentic, powerful way, we need to feel empowered and to know who we are. This blog is about that.

Being Empowered

Let’s imagine we’ve finished doing all our own personal work. We no longer get triggered and we are able to embrace life with a positivity and face intense, negative challenges with an empowered strength in ‘charge neutral’. We don’t get slimed. We have pristine boundaries and we own our stuff in real time so we don’t get ‘stuck’ in it. This is personal empowerment and it comes after having finished our personal work. If you’re not empowered and getting triggered, you haven’t finished your personal work. In order to be effective in self-regulating and owning your power, you need to have finished about 85 percent of your personal work.

Personal Work is: Wounds, Mind, Ego

If we have been traumatised for nearly all, or most of, our lives we don’t really know who we are. This is because trauma is the great deceiver, the experience that tells us that we are ‘less than’ or ‘unworthy’, and that abuse is ‘normal’ and that it’s ‘ok to repeat it’ into the next generation. This is living unconsciously. Carl Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” When we bring that conscious awareness to our wounding and heal the traumatised parts of ourselves through therapy/healing work, we free ourselves (and the next generations) from what happened to us, and our understanding of who we are changes.

Mentally, we can be caught in a trap of ‘thinking is my identity’. Descartes, wrongly, said ‘I think, therefore I am’. It would have been more true for him to have said ‘I know, therefore I am’. To know is to have experienced and to own that in your body. To think is to listen to a voice in your head that deceives and is not your friend. The mind is a construct and a lie. The sooner we stop listening to the mind, the sooner we will be free of its tyranny and embrace a more authentic way of being that resides in “knowing”, not “thinking”. This is what I call ‘mental discipline’ and is a key part of our personal work.

The ego is important for self-care and boundaries, but when it extends beyond the self, it is negatively impacting your understanding of the world and of yourself. Experiencing an ego death can be a healthy thing, especially if you are a narcissist oligarch.

So, once we have done our personal work, we can begin to experience ourselves as we really are. So, who are we really? And how does that help us to know what we are meant to be doing in the world at this time?

Who We Are

Identity is a fluid thing, constantly changing as we evolve. But our identity is also different depending upon the context that we find ourselves within, meaning that we identify as who or what we are in context with others, through belonging. We belong to ourselves, our partners, our families, larger groups with which we identify and to the collective itself. We also belong to the source of higher and higher levels of consciousness and to the entirety of Life and Divinity itself.

Within the individual soul, there are three main levels to our identity. These are; what (not who) we are in this lifetime only, who we are over many lifetimes at a soul level, and archetypal identities that we adopt (sometimes over several lifetimes) that we use to deliver and discover our true identities through the act of living. Let’s look at them in turn.

This-Lifetime Identity

The individuated ‘this lifetime’ identity is the first of these three and is our life-story, our place in time, our relationships and our work. But these pieces are ancillary to who we really are. These pieces tell us what, not who, we are and are restricted to this lifetime only. Once we have cleared our wounding, tamed the ego and mastered mental discipline, then we have cleared our blocks to knowing our truer identity, and that means that we can reach into higher levels of our consciousness to ask, ‘Who are we from a multi-lifetime perspective?’

Multi-Lifetime Identity

Who we are over many lifetimes is the second of the three identities or aspects that can come together to forge the ‘self’, and this identity is held at the (immortal) soul level. This identity is the most important of the three because it is a reflection of how much we have evolved, which is the most true understanding of who we really are.

This identity is also the most important because it connects us with that most evolved self that we are, in between lives, and connecting in that way reveals to us one of life’s mysteries, in an experiential way. When we connect with that most-evolved part of ourselves, we are connecting with that consciousness and ‘drawing it down’ into physical reality, into our lived experience and into our bodies. Knowing who we are (from a multi-lifetime perspective) in this lived way is how to live a most authentic and empowered life, fully conscious of our awakened self and integrating that into our everyday. We are all being asked to do this now.

Accessing the most evolved parts of ourselves also reveals to us our true desires and goals as they feed directly into our ‘purpose’. Understanding one’s purpose, as chosen by us between lives, would be a worthy goal for each of us because that is where our calling, and so our true happiness and meaning, will be found.

Knowing our calling in life is one of the most rewarding personal experiences we can have. In discovering and enacting our calling, we experience a profound sense of ‘right relationship’ with life, a sense of being ‘in service’, of owning our power, of being in step with the flow of, and in co-creation with, life. Authentic joy is found in this state.

Archetypal Identity

The third of three identities is the ‘archetypal’ identity, meaning the identity that we have adopted for ourselves over several (but not all) lifetimes that will facilitate us in carrying out whatever we’ve chosen for ourselves in this lifetime. Examples of this archetypal identity might be ‘artist’, ‘healer’, ‘mother’, ‘warrior’, etc. These identities are ‘borrowed’ by the soul and ‘practiced’ over lifetimes as the work being learned is perfected. These ‘frameworks’ are tools, not our true identity.

Once this archetypal ‘framework’ identity is mastered and has delivered whatever that soul needs, it is released and another is chosen. Often more than one archetypal identity can be undertaken at a time.

Soul Contract: What are We Meant to Be Doing in the World Right Now?

As we work our way through our lives, evolving and learning more and more about who we are in certain contexts, we discover that we can feel ‘pulled’ or ‘called’ to doing different things or being in certain ways in the world. This ‘pull’ or ‘feeling called’ in certain directions comes from a ‘roadmap’ of sorts that we put together for ourselves before we were born. In between lifetimes, we put together a plan for how we want our next lives to go, building upon what we have already done, or didn’t do, in our other lives so far, all with the aim of furthering our evolution and raising our consciousness. This ‘roadmap’ helps us to hone ‘purpose and meaning’, and in order to do that we must align our choices with our identities. So, how do we do that?

The things that give our lives purpose and meaning are the ‘soul-choices’ that we have pre-planned for ourselves before birth. These idealised plans for what you want to experience in any given lifetime are energetically encoded for us in what I have come to call ‘Soul Contracts’.

The Soul Contract contains the energetic resonance of whatever life you have decided for yourself (before you were born) and it is imprinted in our energy bodies, so that we can feel that resonance and therefore use it as a compass, or a guide. The soul-urges that we feel in our bodies, in our lives, are the pulling strings of this Soul Contract encoded within your soul, guiding you to live out the best evolution you could imagine for yourself in this lifetime. So, when you feel that you are veering off target, or that you are right on target, you will notice shifts in the body that indicate this to us. We can have feelings that say “there’s something missing in my life”, or “I’m in exactly the right place and the right time, right now in my life”. This is the Soul Contract ‘speaking’ to us energetically, keeping us on course.

Guidance from the ‘Council of Elders’

The Soul Contract we forge in between lifetimes is done with the assistance of a collection of Helping Spirits that I’ve come to call our ‘Council of Elders’, who are who are meaningful to us personally at a soul level. Often your ‘significant-at-a-soul-level’ loved ones that you will incarnate with here in the world can be present in these discussions with the Council as well. This Council, often a collection of around eight to fifteen (mostly divine) spirits, all with different perspectives and guidance, help us to forge a path for ourselves that will best help our souls to evolve.

They may advise us to ‘not take on too much’, so that we don’t get sucked into overwhelm and freeze responses, or ‘existential disappointment’ if we don’t manage to achieve what it is that we are yearning for, as per our encoding in our Soul Contract. The saying ‘you’re not given more than you can handle’ comes from the agreements made between you and your Council of Elders through these interactions. Your soul puts forward ideas for the purpose of that lifetime, and how, when and with whom your lifetime will occur, and then that is discussed by all of you, with your Council’s loving guidance.

Accessing Your Soul Contract

So, presuming that we’d like to have access to this Soul Contract, to know ourselves and our purpose better, how might we go about that?

Our Soul Contract is ‘encoded’ at a level of our consciousness. In order for us to access our Soul Contract, we need to have first removed blocks to that level of our consciousness; these blocks are ‘emotional wounding’ (our personal work), ‘mental ill-discipline’ (when the mind controls us, not the other way around), and ‘inflated ego’ (when we think our identity extends to outside of ourselves). Removing these blocks requires us doing our personal work to remove the wounding, getting mentally disciplined so that our minds do not control us and to experience the ego death and allow a more authentic identity to arise in its place. Once these pieces are done, then we can ask our Higher Selves for the information contained within our Soul Contract.

If we do not yet have experience communicating with our Higher Selves, or with accessing our higher levels of consciousness (higher resonance), we can access the Soul Contract in another way. The information is encoded in our energy body, so our physical bodies are also encoded with those frequencies as well. If we have ‘indicators’ of what to look for, we can ask our bodies for this information. Practicing asking our bodies for information is always something that everyone can benefit from, in helping with their journey of personal growth.

To find the ‘indicators’ giving us insights for what is in our Soul Contract, we can look to our archetypal choices. What archetypal choices have we made for this lifetime? Many people already know what these archetypal identities are, but exploration of a few more of them might reveal hidden identities that we weren’t yet aware of. For instance, we may already know that we are ‘mother’, or ‘artist’, or ‘innovator’. But if we ask our bodies (or our gut) if we are another archetypal identity we might find that we are also something else. Other examples are ’healer’, ‘caretaker’, ‘teacher’, ‘leader’ or ‘seer’.

By hitting upon an archetypal identity that we knew or only now are discovering, we can ‘sit with’ that identity and ask our bodies to show us how we might have been, as that identity, showing up in the world? ‘Prayer’ is a lot like talking and ‘meditation’ is a lot like listening. When we ask our bodies to reveal something to us about ourselves, it’s best to listen without thoughts, and wait. Knowing that we show up as ‘mother’, for instance, and then asking our bodies to reveal more about that to ourselves, can show us that we don’t just mother our own children, but that we mother other people’s children, or that we see our work as ‘our baby’, or that ‘mothering’ feeds into our way of showing up in the office, or in our relationships, etc.

Finding what archetypal identities we have chosen will help us to identify what work we have chosen for ourselves in this lifetime, at this time, because encoded in our Soul Contract choices will have been the role of that archetype.

What We are Being Called to Do Now

The world needs support and many of us are feeling the call to be that support, but we don’t know how.

Looking at our archetypal identities for this lifetime can help us to see parts of what is in our Soul Contract, even if we cannot see the Soul Contract directly. Our Soul Contract contains the full list of what it is that we have chosen to do in this lifetime to support the world. Accessing the archetypal identities first is a good start to revealing the full Soul Contract.

We might find that we have skills that we feel ‘a calling’ to share with the world, but that that calling had been hidden underneath our feelings of ‘playing small’, or ego, or wounding, or that simply our personality says ‘that’s not for us’. The personality is a mix of the emotional and the mental bodies, both of which are mortal, so the personality is not our true identity and should not be allowed to be a compass for our growth. Wounds, mind and ego must be released in order to prevent blocks from us accessing our essential selves. Who we are is indelibly encoded in our souls and accessing and delivering that into the world is our work right now.

The questions we can ask ourselves now are, ‘What would my soul be doing in the world right now, if my mind, ego, wounds and personality were out of the way?’

And, ‘Given the world right now, what is my soul asking of me to do?’

Blessings on you all and blessings on the work.