Courageous Souls: Do We Plan Our Life Challenges Before Birth?

After reading this book, I have no more questions about how I planned my life. I also gave up blaming anyone for anything. it is completely clear that I requested my best soul friends to participate in my life. Out of their great love for me they agreed to play certains roles for me to support my soul's learning and my soul's evolution. This book shows there is nothing to forgive as you asked for every situation in your life. Maybe you only need to forgive yourself for being so hard on yourself. Robert Schwartz has a clear style. it is easy to read. This book will change your life....it is a must.

If you truly want a shift in your perceptions, read this book. If you truly want to move away from judging others, read this book. If you want a soothing balm for your weary soul, this will sooth and rejuvenate. It is beautifully written, thought provoking, profound and moving. It spoke to me at just the right time in just the right way and I will never forget what Mr. Schwartz has laid out so amazingly on these pages. I have honestly never read anything like it, the only other comparison I have run across are Dr. Newton's books on this subject. This one is put together in an altogether more approacable way. WHAT IF this is all true, WHAT IF these are the explanations that have so defied our LOGICAL reasoning of human behavior since the beginning of time - why else all the suffering and pain? WHAT IF this beautiful, perfectly orchestrated scenario where EVERYTHING has a purpose, no matter how it looks on the "outside" were in fact, the true reality. Just for the mere fact of expanding your awareness, shifting your perspective if only a tiny bit - this book would be well worth the money spent. The ideas contained within it's pages are enough to actually change the world, and I don't say that lightly. If we all REALLY understood that we all came from the same loving source, are made up of the exact same powerful energy, will return to the same source and we are only here to learn love in all of it's wonderful manifestations, where would all the hate, fear, anger, jealousy fit it. It wouldn't. I submit to you, one day this book will be on every table in every home, it might be a 100 years or so, but one day !!!

In "Courageous Souls" Robert Schwartz not only discusses the concept of pre-birth planning, but he also provides an in-depth look at both the pre-birth planning process (which occurs while in spirit before each incarnation), as well as the various reasons a soul may have chosen the particular challenges they're dealing with in this lifetime. What I found particularly interesting were the personal interviews the author did with several participants & the subsequent sessions with various mediums/psychics to assess each person's pre-birth planning sessions. Together these sessions provided background information regarding each person's challenge & the reasons their soul chose that challenge for this lifetime. The types of challenges discussed include: physical illness, parenting handicapped children, drug addiction & alcoholism, death of a loved one, & accidents. Reading this book allows one to consider a whole new way to look at life's challenges - a way where each challenge does in fact serve a purpose, and a high purpose at that! A way where there is no reason to blame or judge or hate - because we're able to recognize that each person on this earth is also serving a purpose. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in spirituality & the concept of pre-birth planning - it's truly inspiring. P.S. This book also offers the names & contact information for the psychics/mediums who worked with the author on this book - a great addition for those of us who would like some assistance in accessing our own pre-birth planning sessions!

"There is a need to create limitation, as the soul uses limitation in your realm for growth. As you experience limitedness, there is a need to overcome frustration, work within one's own parameters, and focus energy--an energy that cuts through the density in your realm and creates spaces of light and a higher vibration." - From Courageous Souls At some point, everyone on Earth has asked "Why?" in the face of difficult circumstances. Why did my fiancé die in a car accident? Why is my mother an alcoholic? Why is my son Autistic? Why do I have cancer? Why is my brother a quadriplegic because of a diving accident? Why do some people die at the hands of serial killers or suicide bombers? Like existential detectives, many of us try to wrap our heads around life challenges and, ultimately, find out "whodunit?" Was it because of a nasty devil wanting to afflict? Is a capricious god punishing me--or is the wheel of karma catching up? Is negative thinking the root of my illness? What if NONE of these scenarios was the case--but, in fact, we CONTRACTED our life challenges before incarnating? In his book Courageous Souls: Do We Plan Our Life Challenges Before Birth?, author Robert Schwartz takes readers behind the veil of forgetfulness into the conversations and decisions that have taken place "between lives". Interviewing about a dozen people who have experienced loss, illness, accidents, and addictions, Schwartz explores the idea of agreements made before birth to learn and experience certain life lesson--and coming to know our true selves. In addition, the author facilitates sessions between these individuals and several mediums. These mediums access the Akashic Records (an etheric "book of life" that records every thought, word, and action) for information on pre-birth planning sessions or "channel" messages from their spirit guides about specific agreements. Echoing the case studies of hypnotherapist Dr. Michael Newton, author of the books Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls--as well as the children's book The Little Soul and the Sun by Neale Donald Walsch-- Schwartz maintains that Earth is place of duality where powerful creators incarnate in order to learn through opposites. A candle surrounded by brilliant light can only experience darkness by entering it. "Who but the most power of souls could conjure an illusion that appears real to its very creator?" he asks. While we're on the other side, we consult with members of our soul group and guides and agree to perform certain roles--all for the purpose of soul growth and experience. By incarnating on the Earth plane--being born--we enter a "river of forgetfulness", as Caroline Myss describes in her book Sacred Contracts. We forget so we can have a powerful "remembering". If we accept that each human has contracted particular life lessons such as parenting a disabled child, losing a loved one, participating in an addiction, or experiencing an illness, then the concept of being a "victim"--

Robert Schwartz is an eloquent spokesman for his explorations in the realm few of us have even considered, much less explored fully: the concept of pre-birth planning as a convention of souls who make decisions about incarnation - place, time, circumstances, and challenges - that will heighten the overall improvement of not only their repeated growth in the process of rebirth but also the gift to the betterment of mankind. Schwartz' manner of writing is so tender and so lacking in preaching that he gradually draws the reader into his realm of thinking in a way that allows us to suspend any doubt or prejudice we may have about spirituality or after life or universal karma. He uses conversations with people who share their experiences of living with such 'handicaps' as physical illness, parenting handicapped children, deafness and blindness, drug addiction and alcoholism, accidents, death of a loved one and alters the word 'handicapped' to 'challenges'; 'Challenges are mirrors that reflect to us our feelings about ourselves. In that sense, they are gifts. Wisdom allows us to recognize them as such.' In addition to discussing the above challenges with particular people who have them, Schwartz introduces us to mediums and channelers who channel the souls of the people we meet, allowing Schwartz to relay to us the conversations between the spiritual world and the physical world. In this very quiet manner Schwartz offers an explanation as to why 'untoward events' happen: his conversations with the various people he shares (for instance the autistic child or the parent of that child) allow us to consider that these choices are made in the spirit world prior to our birth and that these challenges offer the opportunity to separate the physical self-centered being from the choice to make the situations examples of growth, and of revealing love to those around us. Schwartz takes no credit for the information he presents in this book. His drive is to open doors to us the readers to consider his findings and philosophy as a means to learning more about how life and the spiritual world are enmeshed. 'I have learned from the wise nonphysical beings with whom I have spoken...Through them I now understand the immense power of this most elemental truth: that we are not our bodies...If you also know that you planned your disability, that it indeed has a deep significance, then your life may become a quest to uncover that meaning. Suffering is lightened, emptiness replaced with purpose.' Writers such as Robert Schwartz challenge our inside the box thinking, encouraging us to suspend prejudice and the state of being uninformed to enter the arena of growing spiritually. The beauty of this enormously moving book lies in the simplicity of the style Schwartz has chosen to communicate. This is not a sensationalized series of speaking with the 'great dramatic séance', this is instead a welcome to another way of viewing our lives - this one and the ones that hav