Circulating around new age circles for several years is the idea of pre-birth planning. This isn’t what your mom and her OB or midwife do at prenatal appointments. It’s what your soul does between each lifetime to outline the myriad of potential challenges and opportunities you will agree to encounter in order to further your soul’s growth and complete your karmic lessons.
Now, after studying this concept for a while, and finding that soul plans are revealed by astrology, I’ve come to the understanding that we all have two levels of soul plan that we are working on:
1. the spiritual-self plan for each individual lifetime, and
2. a plan for the soul's entire eternal purpose that spans all lived and potential lifetimes
The former is what gets developed in pre-birth planning. The latter is the role or type that your soul is meant to be, throughout all lives, in all times. Some might think that soul types are evolutionary or progressive, meaning that we all get to experience each one of the types, have karmic lessons pertaining to each type, and when we’re done going through each type, then we’re done reincarnating.
I’m not sure about that. It’s possible, I guess – although no one really knows what’s actually true with these kinds of spiritual concepts -- but I’m starting to think it’s not likely.
Other writers posit seven soul types and you have probably heard of them. The types are:
The natural, empowered leader with confident self-authority (king type)
The determined challenge-meeter, with courageous heart (warrior type)
The articulate communicator, with insights on our commonality (sage type)
The creative inventor, with experimental imagination (artisan type)
The inspiration source, with desire for the highest good (priest type)
The compassionate caretaker, with drive for the common good (server type)
The knowledge integrator, with affinity for logic and learning (scholar type)
There is a completely unsubstantiated but intriguing idea that there are more server soul types than any other. So assuming that caretaking is your soul's eternal purpose, each lifetime would be planned to learn different aspects of that purpose, such as caretaking:
of friends
of children
of the indigent
of the disabled
of yourself
of a marriage
of the elderly
of the planet
of animals
through farming / providing sustenance
through spiritual protection
through teaching, especially at primary level
through justice / physical protection
and so on. If you are a caretaker / server soul, some lifetimes might be planned for learning more than one aspect of caretaking, and maybe this life during which you are reading this blog it is to learn more about:
compassion
selflessness or being of service
interpersonal commitment
working with balancing self and other
working on releasing resentment
paying forward or paying back
all of which are aspects of caretaking as the prevailing theme of your soul’s type.
Soul Types and Karmic Lessons
I’m told that in the West we have the wrong idea about karma—that it’s not the punishment and reward dynamic that can be found at the root of the Abrahamic religions. We don’t reincarnate as servers in one lifetime because in a past life we misused the power and authority of being kings or warriors.
We live multiple lifetimes as servers if that is our eternal soul type because we are learning all aspects of what it is to be a server, the good and the bad. Negative lessons are not, in a karmic sense, really negative. They are simply the teaching of the contrast to the positive by way of experiencing that side of the soul’s growth.
This may well be a personal construction that’s not shared by others.
And I want to be clear that this operates on a spiritual level, though not necessarily on the human consequences level. There certainly are consequences to harmful, destructive behavior on the human level of morality and the deprivations that future generations experience due to the corrupt choices of past generations.
In my belief system, the soul wants the full range of experience, dark to light, and makes no judgments about negative and positive in the way that 21st century new agers or monotheists do. It's just all learning and experience for the energy form called the soul. All experience in each lifetime contributes to soul growth because each experience and lifetime increases awareness and fulfills the overall soul-type’s purpose.