When my grandmother died, my family shared a collective sigh of relief. There was no mourning in our house, not even from my mother. I was 16 and I felt like God had given me a gift. I would never have to see that woman again.
Reading the paragraph above is probably shocking to most people. After all, most people love their grandmother. Family is something that is universally considered sacred, to the point that if you don’t mourn the passing of a family member, it’s viewed as their being something wrong with you, not the deceased. And yet we also know that very toxic people do exist, and that those toxic people do in fact have families.
According to the theory on Soul Families, I will definitely be seeing my grandmother again. She will be in my life, one way or another for all of eternity. This is a very popular concept in the New Age community and I can understand why. In theory, it solves a lot of problems. If you believe in reincarnation, but you also believe that when you die your family members will be on the other side waiting for you, how could that possibly work? Might your grandmother have already reincarnated and now she’s enjoying life with a whole new family? If you follow that logic, perhaps biological family isn’t that special at all.
I was curious of where this concept of “Soul Family” originated from, but was unable to get any answers. Possibly, it originated with Edgar Cayce, but I’m only speculating on that. If you know the answer, please comment below and let me know!
One thing I did find interesting in my search for answers is that Michael Newton states in his books that a soul family is not the same as a biological family. Some members of your biological family may be in your soul family, but probably most wont. It’s the people you feel most connected to, which may or may not include your family members.
According to Newton, think of it less as a “soul family” and more of a “soul classroom”. You start off together as a group of new souls and progress up the grades, eventually graduating. Just like in real life, most of your friends are going to be your fellow classmates. Maybe you and your cousin are in the same grade together. However there may also be some people you don’t really like or get along with well. Some students may have transferred from another school and may only be in your class for one year. I’ll be addressing these “transfer students” in just a moment.
I like the “Earth as school” analogy, but I think it’s a concept a lot of people get confused about. Just because “everything is a lesson”, doesn’t mean that it’s all “fated” or “written in stone”. One might argue that I chose to have my grandmother so that I could experience what it was like to have someone like that in my family, or perhaps to clear some karmic baggage from a previous lifetime where I was an awful grandmother myself. But the problem with that is that it completely takes away the free-will of my grandmother. Her choices were hers alone. It had nothing to do with what I wanted.
Simply put, you are not responsible for the actions of other people. Period. People do not choose to be awful to you “for your benefit” or because “you were asking for it”. If there is one thing we are meant to learn in this world, it is that we are meant to learn kindness. It would never be part of God’s plan for a person to say “I’m going to reincarnate as a cruel person in my next lifetime so that I can learn what being cruel is like, and also teach my children what it’s like to have a toxic family”. It makes zero sense and is counter-productive to what we are trying to accomplish here.
I’ve written about this before, but when we entertain that line of thinking we engage in a process called “spiritual bypassing”. Life can be very very hard and it can take many years of therapy to properly deal with the wounds we are dealt with along the way. Having negative feelings about negative experiences is appropriate. There is no “expiration date” on trauma. Smiling through the pain is not the same as real healing.
As someone who is on the other side of a lot of trauma, I can tell you that I do feel like a survivor. I look back on the things that I’ve been through and I feel proud of the way I handled those situations. I can also see how previous negative experiences paved the way for me to know how to deal with things that probably a lot of people wouldn’t have known how to deal with. But that’s simply called surviving. Other people made choices that affected my life. The hope is that they’ll make better choices, but whether they do or don’t is their choice, not mine.
This brings us to the discussion of “old souls” and “Walk-ins”. Remember how I mentioned that in the classroom of life that sometimes a student may transfer in? These are referred to as “walk-ins”, and very often they are old souls transferring into a young soul classroom.
I really wish there was more information about walk-ins. This seems to be a niche topic and a lot of the information out there seems to be more describing cases of possession as opposed to walk-ins. A walk-out is when a soul incarnates here on Earth but then realizes that the environment and the choices that other people are making around them are so harsh that they wont be able to learn anything useful in this lifetime. They may have experienced a NDE, trauma, or abuse, and simply be unable to handle it. An older soul then volunteers to take over, allowing the younger soul to go back to source.
From what I’ve read, typically this happens when a person is pretty young. You don’t see a complete personality change like you would in the case of a possession. The walk-in may have the memories of the previous soul, or they may not. There is not always a seamless “blending in” when the new soul takes over though. A walk-in happening at the adult stage is going to be more noticeable than one happening to a young child.
Walk-ins typically feel very disconnected to their family. There may be a feeling that your family isn’t really your family. Your likes, dislikes, interests, and habits may very well be at odds with the rest of your family. You may be the most psychologically healthy person in your family, yet the only one in therapy. Being the type of person who volunteers to do unpleasant tasks in order to spare someone else from having to do it is probably the most telling sign of possibly being a walk-in.
Although this is going to be a topic I’m going to continue to explore, as of this writing, there just isn’t a lot of information on walk-outs or walk-ins. For those that suspect they may be a walk-in, part of your mission here may mean accepting that a lot of the spiritual ethos out there simply doesn’t apply to you. It may be your role to find the information yourself and to share it with outhers.
And this brings me to my final point I’d like to emphasize. It’s true that everything is a lesson and that everything is learning, but that doesn’t mean it’s by your own design. It also may not be your lesson. In some cases you may be the teacher and it’s up to the other person to decide what they learned from the experience or if they learned anything at all.
Sometimes we pop into people’s lives (be it family, friend, or workplace) to show them that a different way is possible. That’s it. We can be the example, and then it’s their choice if they want to try to be better.
Life on Earth can be very difficult, but if you can, choose to be the example that shows there’s another way.