Every person who has been a part of your life came into it for a specific purpose, as we are all teachers who serve different lessons. That lesson could have been to have your heart broken. Maybe it was to be taken advantage of, to be given guidance in a time of need, or to illuminate hidden aspects of yourself that you need to heal.
You have these experiences with people because you have a soul contract with them. People come into your life (as you go into theirs) to fulfill an agreement that you both created before incarnating. Everyone has soul contracts as they build the map of your life experiences, and what you came here to learn.
Here we’re going to look at what soul contracts are, and how to navigate them. By the end of this article, you’re going to have a deep understanding of soul contracts and new perspectives toward the people in your life.
What are soul contracts?
Soul contracts are karmic relationships between souls. They’re a type of spiritual agreement to mutually experience something with another being, which serves a function for both parties. Soul contracts are the terms and conditions for your incarnation, and are orchestrated by higher powers and karmic energies.
Before you incarnate, you agree to certain experiences that you’re going to have in this lifetime. These experiences are agreed upon depending on what lessons your soul needs to learn, which is based on its own karmic print. Life on Earth provides the opportunity for different social dynamics to occur, and particular lessons to be gained through them.
Why do we have soul contracts?
Look at Earth as a spiritual classroom. Souls make agreements before incarnating here, which is like deciding the teachers you’re going to have during this lifetime. These teachers teach different lessons (and subjects) in different ways, but they all ultimately serve the soul’s evolution.
Everyone is interconnected within an intricate web of experiences. The nature of these experiences will be very different from person to person. Every major experience that you have was agreed upon by all parties involved in that experience.
Souls come into your life in the form of family, friends, lovers, acquaintances, clients, and people that you connect with for whatever reason. The relationships played out between different beings are orchestrated to facilitate new experiences that are dependent on the individual’s karma.
Everyone who enters your life does so to teach you a specific lesson, as you do by entering theirs. These lessons range considerably, from showing someone that they deserve love, to traumatizing them or even being responsible for their death.
Whether this is the relationship between a perpetrator and victim, or a politician and the people his policies affect, we have agreed to experience what we experience in this lifetime one way or another.
Understanding karmic entanglement
So let’s say you get into a toxic relationship with a narcissist, and you develop some pretty severe trauma because of it. You may have signed up for a lesson to love yourself more deeply and to have stronger boundaries which this experience facilitated. Perhaps the person who is a narcissist needs to learn not to abuse their power, otherwise, they will lose what they love.
This is an example of karmic entanglement. Everyone involved in the contract learns something that they need to learn, and that’s why these souls made that particular agreement. The experience that you have is matched with someone else’s experience who needs to learn a similar lesson.
Karmic entanglement can go well beyond a single lifetime. Souls often have many lifetimes where the contract stands because they haven’t yet figured it out: So they’re bound to continue repeating the same lessons in different forms. These souls will continue to enter each other’s lives with a different nature of relationship, but the same dynamic will take place until they both finally learn the lesson embedded in the contract. To learn more about karma, follow the link below.
Can you break soul contracts?
There is nothing that you can do about your soul contracts as they exist for a reason. Voiding a contract would void the lesson you need to learn, so you wouldn’t benefit from it anyway. By being aware of your contracts, you can recognize the different relationships that take place within your life, and navigate them with more ease and understanding.
You can not break soul contracts. The major events that happen in your life were supposed to happen for your own spiritual growth, and part of being a human is to play out those major events.
A soul contract does not interfere with free will. Look at a soul contract as the blueprint of your life experience, and the major lessons you’re here to learn. Within that blueprint, you can navigate your reality as you like due to free will, but you won’t be able to avoid the major lessons. Even if you could, you wouldn’t be able to progress without having that experience.
Types of Soul Contracts
Soul contracts come in different forms, and can also be with spirits and animals. Some contracts will be painful, with the intention of teaching you lessons of wisdom. Others will be nice experiences where someone helps you out. The nature of your experience with these beings are dependent on the lessons you need to learn.
Soul contracts often come in the form of positive karmic agreements (where the souls come into one another’s lives to help each other), and negative karmic agreements where you enter someone’s life to undergo a painful experience. Positive karmic agreements are designed to help you in some form.
A negative karmic agreement means you’re going to experience something traumatic or dark with the soul you made the contract with. Even though negative karmic agreements certainly aren’t desired, they serve the highest function of growth for your soul and also burn off negative karma. Here are some common soul contracts, and what they typically mean.
Soul mates (Positive karmic agreement)
People tend to think that a soul mate is the person that you fall in love with and spend the rest of your life with. This isn’t true. A soul mate is any soul that has a mutual contract to help one another out in this life. Look at it in a way where your souls are buddies, and entwine within this incarnation for mutual growth and learning.
Soul mates generally have many incarnations together, and the nature of their relationship is generally different every time. There is often a sense of familiarity with a soul mate. Whether the person is a lover, business partner, friend, or family member, you have a karmic bond with these souls, and the lessons gained exceed what can be taught within a single life.
Family contract (Neutral karmic agreement)
Family dynamics can be unique as they’re quite close relationships (generally) but also provide grounds for a whole lot of learning. You have a spiritual contract with all of your family members and have agreed to be a part of the family you’re in.
Your family may be completely dysfunctional, and part of your contract is to work through that. Maybe there’s some deep trauma within your family, or you have been through an intense situation with them. However, the family contract is usually a loving and caring contract where each person is there to support, help, and guide one another via a close/personal bond.
Romantic relationships (Neutral karmic agreement)
Soul contracts often occur in relationships, as relationships act as mirrors. Relationships act as a platform to do some serious healing, as you’re forced to look at yourself very closely as you’re in such close quarters with someone else. This is why soul contracts often take the form of relationships, to illuminate things that nobody else could show you.
Relationships can make you face fears, trigger you, and teach you valuable lessons that you wouldn’t learn outside of the romantic dynamic. These contracts are often made when there’s work to be done on the sacral chakra. With that said, these contracts can also be deeply fulfilling, and mutually benefit those involved.
Twin flame
The twin flame is said to be a mirror of your own soul. As such, there’s no better opportunity to learn about yourself, than by staring directly at it. These sorts of contracts can be extremely passionate and beautiful but yield the same amount of growth and learning. Twin flame connections are quite rare, but they can be as beautiful as they are delightful. When your twin flame comes into your life, you know some serious growth is going to occur, because they’re going to illuminate everything about yourself, no exceptions. They will strip you to the deepest levels of your naked consciousness, and you’ll be forced to look at all the dysfunction of yourself, inside out.
Victim/perpetrator relationship (Negative karmic agreement)
In some contracts you make, you will be the innocent victim of an occurrence. From unprovoked bullying, being robbed or sexually assaulted, to being a casualty of war. You agree to be an innocent victim in certain situations because you need to experience that suffering for whatever reason it serves.
You may also be a victim to burn off karma, and allow another soul the opportunity to be a perpetrator. If you’re the perpetrator, you may have a soul contract to help someone else burn off their bad karma, or to experience the abuse of power yourself. Of course, don’t go looking for either of these situations, but naturally, many people will make these contracts.
The mentor/student contract (Positive karmic agreement)
The mentor and student soul contract is when you have an agreement to teach an individual or to be guided by someone. Usually, people have agreements to be mentors for some people and students for others. This individual may be a student of yours or someone that you take under your wing to guide them.
The mentor contract is a position of authority, so there’s a lot of karma at stake here. You may also be on the student side of the contract where your contract is to learn particular lessons with the guidance of someone else. Whether you’re on the student side or the mentor side, it’s important to fulfill this role with grace, respect, and love.
The leader/follower contract (Neutral karmic agreement)
The leader/follower spiritual contract is when one soul has a contract to be in a position of authority, while other contracts are to be the follower. This agreement can be mutually beneficial when the leader cares about the followers and genuinely wants to help, but it can also go the opposite direction when they abuse their power.
People who are spiritual leaders, politicians, celebrities, influencers, and bosses tend to have a contract to be in the leadership position. This means they’re given a lot of influence and power to play with, and this affects everyone who follows them. People who are followers on the other hand can be guided and helped by their leaders. But there’s a shadow.
Those same leaders can also become dictators and authoritarian. They can become cult leaders, abuse their power to serve themselves, and harm or neglect the people who are in the follower position. If you have a contract to be a leader in this life, you want to make sure the agreement is positive for the followers, otherwise, you can accrue a lot of bad karma in this position.
The savior contract (Positive karmic agreement)
This savior contract is when someone enters your life to save you. They help you get out of a really difficult stop in your life, and pull you out of the gutter. Saviors often come into your life in the form of family, friends, strangers, and even animals. If you’re at the right place at the right time to help someone change their life, make sure you do.
Do you remember a time in your life when someone came into your life at the perfect moment to help you? How big of an impact did this have on your life? Maybe you’ve stepped into someone else’s life at the right time when they had nobody else to help them. This is an example of the savior relationship.
Soul contracts with entities
During my time working with shamanic healers in the Ecuadorian Andes, I learned a thing or two about contracts with entities. Beyond the occasional exorcism that I witnessed, people make contracts with all sorts of things lurking within the spiritual realms. More people than you’d think have attachments.
People often unwillingly make a contract with dark entities, which really creates a lot of destruction in their lives. Often, souls create these contracts as a trade (achieving something in this lifetime such as having a beautiful partner, fame, or wealth), while the spirit causes other forms of suffering in the person’s life, which feed from this dense energetic outlet.
Breaking contracts with dark spirits
If you have a contract with a dark spirit, there are actually things you can do to break the contract. It starts by reclaiming your sense of power and telling the entity that you’re done with it. Refuse to give into your dysfunctions (whether it be addiction, self-hatred, perversion, or whatever energetic outlet is feeding the entity. Turning yourself to the light can starve the entity and force it to let go.
It can be very difficult to break contracts with entities. Your suffering is generally part of the contract which is what dark spirits get out of it. If the entity is twisting you and causing problems such as deep grief, depression, or hopelessness, you can only break the contract by reconnecting with the light. If you can’t break the connection, shamanic cleansings and ceremonies can help.
Reasons why your soul makes contracts
Now that we’ve explored what soul contracts are and how they work, here are some reasons why your soul will make a contract. Every person you have entwined with along your spiritual journey has served a purpose in one form or another. See if you can recognize what some of the people in your life came for the purpose of.
Learning and growth
The primary reason why you make soul contracts with other souls is to gain wisdom. All experiences, whether they’re traumatic or beautiful teach you important lessons, and these lessons lead to soul growth.
Lessons come in all sorts of forms and often aren’t pleasant to experience (but necessary for your soul’s evolution). Someone robbing you might teach you an important lesson of caution, while someone giving you a hand when you’re down may show you that you are supported. Each contract serves a different lesson, but they’re all there to serve your growth.
For help and healing
Some people come into your life with the sole intention to help you. Have you ever had someone show up in your life and change your trajectory when you were at your lowest? Maybe you had a good conversation that lifted your spirit, or the person gave you assistance with something you were struggling with. These are all examples of soul agreements to help.
Soul agreements to heal have a positive karmic relationship. The person who is being helped obviously benefits from the interaction, while the person, spirit, or being who helps is given an opportunity to be at service.
Your soul contracts to help often involve healers. These healers can take the form of doctors, therapists, counselors, energy workers, shamans, or a good friend who wants to see you succeed. You can be on either side of this contract, so keep an eye out for people and animals that need help, as it might be your duty to help them.
As Guidance
Sometimes a being will enter life to give you some guidance. This guidance can come in the form of a person who motivates you to make a change in your life, someone who illuminates a path forward, or pushes you to become your best self. The purpose of a contract with a guide is to help you align with your soul mission.
Your soul contracts with guides often come in the form of teachers, mentors, coaches, and spiritual leaders, but family, friends, and lovers can also fulfill this role. You may also tap into spiritual guides to receive guidance and direction, but these are different types of contracts as they’re other dimensional aspects of your own consciousness. To learn more about spirit guides, follow the link below.
To burn off karma
If there are particular lessons you need to learn, you probably created some soul contracts to work on those lessons. For example, let’s say you had a lot of power in a previous life and abused it. In this life, you might make contracts with souls who strip your sense of power, or abuse you so that you learn what you imposed on others.
Don’t look at karma as a bad thing. Karmic energy is neutral and serves the purpose of orchestrating experiences for souls which guides them towards lessons that they need for their own development.
Embrace your soul contracts
Now that you have a better understanding of what soul contracts are, you are bound to have a more holistic outlook on the different relationships in your life, and the purposes they serve.
Always look for the lessons in every connection you have. Whether it’s a beautiful connection or a painful experience, look into why it happened, and what it’s forcing you to work on. Approach life from a perspective where every situation is orchestrated to help you grow into your full potential, regardless of what it is.
If you go through dark experiences, are you going to hold onto resentment and spend your life blaming the person? Or are you going to let it go knowing that the experience was signed well before you were born? Remember, at a soul level, you are responsible for every experience you undergo, and every experience serves a function.
On that note, to learn more about this phenomenon, go to the link below.
- Empowering yourself through radical self-responsibility: How to turn your misfortune into a blessing