My friend said the other day, “I’m so tired of people saying I manifested this cancer!”  It’s a Blame The Victim philosophy, she pointed out, why the heck would she manifest such a harrowing ordeal?

            I believe in our ability to manifest the life we choose so naturally I had to look at myself.  Why would I manifest my son’s death?  Nothing could be worse than that, right?  Granted there are different kinds of harrowing ordeals and they need not be compared.  This is a question I asked myself soon after he died, nearly four years ago.  What gift was he, and I before I was born, offering me in this heart shattering experience?

            There’s a difference between what we manifest in this physical lifetime and what we chose for ourselves before we were born, when we were with our soul group, in our power.  They both contain gifts for our soul’s growth but they’re different.  I would venture to say that some of the worst experiences we have in our lives are not things we manifested, but rather things our souls’ chose before birth. 

            Imagine spiritually sitting around with our soul group brainstorming, “what is it going to take to help me learn X?”  “Maybe I’ll need to get metastasized breast cancer?  Or maybe I’ll need to experience the death of my son?”  My son and I could have been ‘sitting’ there together and he could have said, “I’ll give up my life so you can grow spiritually!”  A gift.  Yuck!

            The same could have occurred for someone like my friend.  She could have been sitting around with her soul group, brainstorming.  “What’s it going to take for me to learn this life lesson, X?”  “Oh, maybe if I get stage 4 cancer, that will help me learn it!”  A gift.  Just as yucky!

            Every harrowing experience we endure in our lives may be ‘gifts’ our soul groups chose with us before we were born, ‘gifts’ to help us grow spiritually.  The physical world is full of beautiful things and harrowing traumas.  Living through them can enable us to learn spiritual lessons, get closer to the enlightened state.  That doesn’t mean they’re easy.  Theoretically, those people who are suffering the most difficult life experiences are living through spiritual gifts which give them the opportunity for massive spiritual growth, even jumping timelines (see recent guest blog by Gabriel Dennison Chandler Manifestations & Jumping Timelines.

            So, the next time you catch yourself judging someone for being homeless, violent, a criminal, disabled, or depressed, remember that they are doing huge spiritual work, for themselves, and possibly for us.  They may be giving us a spiritual gift, helping us learn compassion, helping us learn to love.

            Quite possibly when we experience physical accidents, physical illness, even severe mental illness, our soul group may have set that up with us as an opportunity to learn to slow down, take space to sit still, to just ‘be’, to meditate, and challenge restrictive beliefs.

            Every experience we have, no matter how heinous, offers us spiritual ‘gifts’.  The trick is to open ourselves up to what the ‘gift’ may be.