Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs? (10 page)

No, no more
than rooting for the same team, though I know for some that is a spiritual experience. I’m talking about people who you interact with over a period of time. Your bowling team, people you compete with, eat and drink with, joke and commiserate and bitch with—that’s different from someone you just happen to sit next to. If you have season tickets and actually form a relationship with the person next to you over the course of a season or years, that’s different. That easily could make them part of this extended soul group I’m talking about. But not every kid selling peanuts, pennants, and programs will be spiritually related to you.

When we reincarnate,
we tend to do so in soul groups. I don’t mean that a whole bunch of souls get off the cosmic bus together like a high school baseball team showing up at an away game. I mean that in a somewhat staggered way (over generations—child, parent, grandparent, etc.) these souls will come to this side having long-existing connections with one another. The relationships will differ. Consider that your family, friends, and close acquaintances are being reshuffled, repurposed, recycled. Maybe that’s a crass way of putting it, but that’s the main idea. One time you are the child, another time you are the dad. Next time you’re not actually in the family, but your friendship is so close you seem like a family member. So it’s not like, if you’ve had sixteen or sixty different lifetimes, you’ll have that many individual sets of loved ones. For the most part, they will be the same spirits—each of us working with and helping those in our soul group to learn to love, grow, and evolve. For our own part, Shakespeare said it well: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Basically he means that the individual is like an actor who comes to the world to play a role. Robert Downey Jr. may play the role of Charlie Chaplin and years later play the role of Iron Man. Each of these characters might have different characteristics and mannerisms that the actor has chosen to affect—whether consciously or unconsciously. But the core of the actor is the same basic soul. Just as it’s said that our taste changes every seven years (so if you don’t like broccoli as a child, try it again later in life), so, too, our ideas can change; our tastes can change in only one lifetime, let alone several. So certainly the soul will not be static in its likes and dislikes—nor should it be, if we really are making an effort to evolve! But certain things are likely to remain and to be a core characteristic of that particular soul.

While we’re still
on this side, there are a lot of lessons we get to try over and over again. Not everything—sometimes we have just one chance in this lifetime to get it right—but in most cases there is a second chance, or even a third, fourth, and fifth chance. In many cases, too, getting it “right” is a subjective measure and might not mean as much as at least
trying
to get it right. In any case, nobody here gets to be the judge, even if they think they are. Since that includes me, I can’t really say who’s passing and who’s failing. I can only have my own opinion about that. And, to the best of my ability (bearing in mind I’m human), I try only to have an opinion about whether
I’m
doing things right or not. In most things, I think I’m doing a pretty good job. But as much as I joke about it, and as much as I’ve become used to the fact that we don’t get along, I’m really worried about the job I’m doing with my mother-in-law. I am aware that our relationship is karmic and that I’ve been presented with a challenge. There is a lesson for me there. I tend to joke that the lesson is that you can’t please everyone, but sometimes I worry that this answer is too glib and there’s something I’m missing. It really does worry me. And if I’m to be honest, it hurts me, and I wonder and worry if it also hurts her. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done all I can; sometimes I wonder if there’s something more I can do. Why can’t I get this straight? Whatever more may happen here, I know when I get to the Other Side, my questions will be answered, but I worry that I’ll also have to come back and try again to learn this lesson properly. I personally can’t answer the question of “what if,” but I can suggest an approach to our lessons here, and that is to try to keep an awareness that the challenges we meet are lessons, to keep your eyes and ears and mind open for solutions that might be different than the first thing that comes naturally to your mind. Try to look beyond the easy answer. If the answers were easy, it wouldn’t be much of a lesson—we’d all just be staying the same.

Oh, brother! That
is one of the biggest misconceptions of all time. It’s such a fairy tale—we’ll find our soul mate and live happily ever after! That’s a real load of you-know-what. Let me say it once: Soul mates are still work. You still need to show up, be invested, pay attention, give a little, take a little (or sometimes give a lot, take a little). When we’re on this side every relationship is first and foremost a human relationship, which is a messy proposition. It’s working at our lessons, balancing our karma. It’s not meant to be free from discord. I think a lot of people have the completely wrong idea about what a soul mate is—they think that you’re standing in a crowded room, like at a party or in Grand Central Station or something and your eyes connect and there’s a lightbulb that goes off, or sparklers, your ears pop, and you move in slow motion toward one another, run straight to the preacher or City Hall, get married, and live happily ever after. That’s so crazy. First of all, soul mates might not even be lovers—they may be brother and sister, sister and sister, parent and child, or friends. Basically, they can be any combination of two people between whom there is a healthy, beautiful, harmonious flow that seems to come naturally. When we connect with our soul mate it’s to take on some task that God wants us to get done. Often there’s no romantic element to it, just deep feeling for one another, deep respect, and deep commitment to whatever the work is. Whether or not the pairing takes the form of what we think of as a romantic relationship, it could be rocky at the beginning, there may be karmic things to be worked out before they can get down to business, so to speak. It might even take years to discover the ease and harmony we associate with soul mates. My husband, John, is so perfect for me. But nobody would have known that from our first ten years. We were on the road to divorce every other week, mostly due to outside forces. We were constantly fighting over friction caused by other people. It took an unbelievably long time to rid ourselves of that negativity, and sometimes I don’t know how we did manage to stay together and reach the profound happiness and joy in each other that we have now. Obviously the connection was very strong, even when it didn’t seem that way. I might look at another relationship and see a lot of strife and think judgmentally, “No way are
they
soul mates!” But that’s not fair—I have no way of knowing what the connection is, how deep and strong it is, what its purpose is, or what is required of this pair before they find an even keel. Another thing is, I think a lot of people overdramatize the soul mate thing. In some ways it’s really like the English would say, “That’s my mate,” like “my best buddy.” It’s that kind of closeness. The tendency to overdramatize who and what a soul mate is is what causes disappointment or might make someone think they don’t have a soul mate or haven’t met their soul mate.

To be honest,
usually not. There is, from time to time, the type of magical tale that we commonly associate with soul mates, though. When one of my clients was only eleven years old he was visiting his cousin who lived in another town. There he met a little girl a few years younger than him—she was only about eight. His cousin introduced the two of them and they were joking around like “how do you do,” and they shook hands. When he touched the little girl’s hand he literally got an electrical shock. When he was twenty-two, he met a girl. She seemed familiar to him. They talked for a while and realized they’d met before when they were children, that she was the little girl who had given him such a shock when he shook her hand. He told me he’d never forgotten that experience and knew in his soul that this connection, the shock, and their meeting again, was no coincidence, that there was something about her that was familiar to him at the core of his soul. They’ve now been married for thirty-five years.

All families are
karmic. We’ve all been here before and we come here again together for each soul to have a karmic life lesson. There may be an orderly answer to this question, but if there is, I haven’t been told. It seems to be individual. A family can seem close, but one significant event—a death, an illness, a betrayal, even something “accidental”—can completely rip that family apart. Some families, everyone is spread out all over the planet, kids all living in different towns, or even different countries, but still, they all show up for holidays or rally when there is a family crisis. In my own family, on my mother’s side, she and her two brothers were put in an orphanage when she was just five. She was on the girls’ side, her brothers on the boys’ side, separate. When they all got out, they stayed in touch. They married, and stayed married to their spouses to the end of their lives. They lived in different states yet they made the effort to keep in contact, called each other, visited. Who knows, karmically, why they had to go through what they did, having to live through such horrific childhoods in a terrible orphanage? But whatever the reason, it didn’t pull them apart; they stayed close in spirit even when they were far away from each other and got together when they could. Another family, they might all live right around the corner from each other but don’t even want to speak to each other. They might hold grudges for small disagreements and practically make up reasons not to speak. The kids will avoid their cousins’ weddings. Then some of them will be puzzled why no one wants to get together for the holidays. Well, you can’t have it both ways. You have to invest in the relationship if you want that warm, fuzzy feeling on special days. You can’t turn family off and on and expect it to resemble the fantasy. You need to stay engaged or there is no healing. I don’t mean to suggest that this is easy, or in some cases even doable. I definitely know of cases where someone has had to leave home and have no contact with their family of birth in order to find peace and healing for themselves. Maybe there really is nothing that can be done in this lifetime, or maybe they will reunite later and be able to do their healing then. But one party wasn’t ready for or up to the required challenge, and the other had to give themselves space from a situation that may have been toxic or dangerous. This is an interim solution—in some cases, even a necessity—but I believe that at some point they will have to try again.

All families are
soul-link groups. Before coming here, they have individually chosen to come back together to try to learn particular lessons or overcome challenges of many lifetimes. To be clear, I don’t just mean what is obvious to us here and now: that this family has been troubled through several generations. I mean lifetimes that may be separated by decades or centuries. We’re all familiar with the buddy system. Since grade school, when you went on any kind of outing, the teacher would pair you up, you held hands, and you and your buddy looked out for one another, kept each other from getting lost or separated from the group. In the adult world we’re familiar with various self-help groups, from Alcoholics Anonymous to diet clubs, where two people will be partnered up to keep an eye on each other or to be there to call if their partner is feeling tempted by alcohol or the chocolate cake they are trying to get out of their life. In a sense, the soul-link group of such families ideally acts like “buddies” to one another. They have a deep understanding of what the other (family) members of their group are going through. They live it themselves; it’s their shared personal context, even if some are stronger and some are weaker. But they all came here with memories of past wounds and weaknesses. Together, this lifetime, they have the chance to take their power back, heal their issues. They can work together as a team. If they accept God’s love and let it guide them, they can overcome.