PunishmentLiving in a body is hard work.  I point this out to my clients and students often because we tend to dismiss it out of hand.  But it is the truth that as spiritual beings living an embodied experience, the body takes a great deal of effort to manage and maintain.  It brings us huge rewards and a great deal of pleasure and joy and amusement as well so it all balances out in the end.  But when clients come to me asking about Past Live and Karma, they aren’t looking at the positives, they are looking at all the negatives, letting the accumulation of years and disappointments and hurts add up to a feeling that they or someone they love are being punished for something that doesn’t seem to have any cause in their current situation.  So it has to be for something that has happened in the past, right?  And therefore it can be corrected by some action now and then ‘wallah!’ everything will be all better and happily ever after….

And this could be the case for some people out there in the world.  I’m not ruling that out.  But in the decades that I’ve been working with the Akashics and working with clients and students, I haven’t found any.  What I find is that first, being in a body is hard work.  There’s no magic wand that will fix that and no magic recipe for getting around it.  It’s good work and rewarding work and worth every minute, but in the low times it can be hard to feel that.  Meanwhile, I have not yet found in anybody’s records that they were forced into an embodied life as a punishment.  Becoming embodied is a choice that we each make and we preplan the event down to the last minute detail in order to give us the best chance possible to achieve all the goals, learn all the lessons, and have all the experiences we want to in the brief time we are here.

Which is not to say that our lives are predestined or that everything we have experienced in our lives was preplanned.  Quite the opposite.  Free Will is a gift that all of us have been given and therefore the old adage is quite true “life happens while we’re making plans.”  All the preplanning we do is to help us achieve our goals in spite of and because of free will, ours and everyone elses.  And the reason we choose to become embodied is not so we can force ourselves to learn hard lessons like forcing a dog’s nose into his piddle so he won’t pee on the floor ever again, but because everything here is concentrated, condensed and immediate.  When not embodied we are free form, integrated, and communicate our emotions and thoughts immediately so that everyone feels and knows them at the moment they occur.  Everything we are is part of everyone else and so mitigated and ameliorated by everyone else.  In order to work concentratedly on ourselves without distraction, we come into a world, into a life where we are forcibly distanced from everyone else through physical matter: bodies.

Living an embodied life makes everything our own.  We feel all of our feelings intensely even with mitigation from others.  We experience each moment directly and fully without distraction other than the distractions we allow into our lives.  We are fully and completely present unto ourselves in every minute of every day in our bodies.  And our choices, our actions, and our reactions are very much ours alone in a way we do not experience when we are at home in the Akashics.  It is an amazing opportunity and a gift that we choose to accept when we become embodied, not a punishment.  It’s difficult, it’s exhausting, it’s in our face every moment of every day, but we’re only here for a very brief amount of time.  So take the opportunity to live every moment.  You aren’t being punished, you’re being given a chance to become.  Who will you be today?