Renegotiating Pre-incarnational Contracts; Teaching NHI Consent

Hi friends. I’ve been on retreat, much of which was silent and without my phone (such a gift to be away from screens for many days) and am just coming back into the world. Everything feels very fresh and alive and I’m up late, getting down this idea that has been cooking for a long time. It feels clunky to write when I’ve been deep inside my own mind and interiority. Hard to put things into words. And also, I have no doubt that it’s time to get this out into the world, so here we go.

This is part of my own story and journey, and something I hear from many of my clients and friends. We have some challenging experience ranging from a seeming fated relationship to precognition to abduction, and struggle with the idea that all of this is happening because at some level we agreed to it. Soul contracts, pre-incarnational relationships and agreements, with other people, with the Dead, with non-human intelligence, with our own higher selves.

Here’s an example: I am taken in the middle of night for years. Taken from my body or from my bed. I find myself in a situation that feels terrifying, non-consensual. I try to resist. I am told to Be Not Afraid, or flooded with a positive emotional state and told that everything is being done for my own good. At some point I am told: “You agreed to this.”

And there’s something that rings true there. Something that has rung true in other areas of my life. Relationships, jobs, big and small but powerful moments in my life that seem fated or destined. And it’s so easy to agree. Yes, this relationship is really difficult, but it’s karmic. We’re working something out from a past life. I can’t leave. We have a soul contract.

The paradox and challenge here is that I think it’s true. I think we do perhaps have a plan for our lives, that we travel together with soul family through many lifetimes, that we play roles for each other including both the victim and the villain, and that we make agreements prior to coming in for our own soul growth and evolution. The problem with this is that if it’s true, if we did make agreements and sign pre-incarnational contracts, we did so from a state outside of this space/time. We made agreements not from within this physical body, psyche, self, but from a place of different (I resist saying higher) understanding.

If you know my work, you know that I am a champion for this body, this psyche, this self. I champion the inner child and the felt sensation of being a human on a planet. It’s very easy and even encouraged in our culture and in many of our ideas around a broad, amorphous “spirituality” that our goal should be to transcend the physical body. To ascend, to get out of here, to dissociate from the gross corporeality of the body with her needs and desires, amnesia and messiness. And there are definitely times to go up and out. Out of body experiences, contact with the unseen realms, dreamwork, receiving downloads, raising our frequency - these are all ways to get in contact with our very real multidimensional selves. But if we privilege that over the physical body, the felt sense and experience of embodiment, we’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle: incarnation is not a mistake.

This is made very clear through the reality of contact with non-human intelligence. To state it plainly: they come to us. Most of us don’t seek these experiences. They come to us. Why? There must be something important about the human state of existence. There must be something important about our humanity. There must be something important about incarnation.

One of the most powerful moments on my journey was having the courage to put up a boundary with an entity who kept coming to me. A being who afforded me a miraculous healing and then paralyzed me and filled me with an electric energy before I became unconscious. A entity who invaded my home and bedroom and all states and levels of my awareness and again and again paralyzed me and transmitted something into me. A mantis who, after one of these terrifying and non-consensual experiences told me, “you can now talk to the Dead.”

Well what if I don’t wanna talk to the Dead. I’m really busy and tired. Thanks but no thanks.

At the time I was regularly pitching and rolling with ontological shock and the last thing I wanted or needed was to have the Dead arrive for middle-of-the-night chats. So I reached out to a powerful friend of mine (the great David Coleman, if you know you know) and asked him for help setting strong protection and boundary. I had to get over the idea of the specialness of that relationship with the mantis being. Get past the idea that I owed him something or that because he could move between states of consciousness and reality with such ease, that he was better than me somehow. Get over the idea that even if I’d made some agreement with him between lives, it wasn’t ok to demand consent.

It’s so easy to project our own shadows onto these beings. So easy to turn them into angels and demons. So easy to think that they are somehow outside of how reality works. Outside of samsara. Outside of the rules of the game. What if they are like us? What if the evolutionary journey toward unconditional love, awakening, enlightenment, is the same for us as it is for them? What if the fact that they are disincarnate doesn’t exempt them from the laws of karma? What if we can teach NHI consent, and what if that has to happen, can only happen, from this place of incarnation and embodiment. And what if the act of claiming our consent becomes part of their evolutionary journey?

Clarity is kindness. No is kindness. Boundary is kindness. Demanding consent changes our relationships completely, both physical and non-physical. I’ve experienced it myself and seen so many clients and other experiencers go on this journey as well. The relationships - and make no mistake, that's what these are - start out terrifying. Our boundaries are shattered. Trauma happens, and we have to deal with all of the real challenges that come with that. Then we start to exercise our agency and sovereignty - here, now, from this human embodied existence - and the experiences change. They move from seemingly coming at us, happening to us, outside of our control, to something we have a say in.

All of this to say, even if we did make some pre-incarnational agreement, we didn’t make it from this body, psyche, self. It’s easy to be up in the soul space where we forget the too hot, too cold, suffering heartache nature of incarnated existence. Our humanity deserves consent, too, We deserve a say in the relationships we engage in, and we deserve to exercise our authority and agency. Sovereignty is our birthright, but we have to claim it. We can change our minds. We can shred or burn or rewrite our pre-incarnational contracts. For real. It’s totally possible. I’ve done it, as have so many others. We can end bad, non-consensual, non-respectful relationships. And we can agree to keep working with and communicating with beings who respect our boundaries and demands for consent. We can treat these experiences as relational, not transactional. We can teach NHI consent. We can move from victims to co-creators, and in the process afford those beings an opportunity to further their own evolutionary journeys.