Did we choose this beforehand?
Considering our pre-birth contract
I have been tuning into Mayim Bialik’s podcast, off and on. It’s called “Break Down.” Mayim Bialik was on the tv shows, “Blossom” and “the Big Bang Theory.” However, she also holds a PhD and is a neuro-scientist.
In one of her recent podcasts, she had a guest stare who had a NDE - near-death experience. We often call them this, however, really, many account for having died and then returned to share the experience of the after life.
Lately, I have both read some books on mediums’ interactions with the spiritual world and heard other friends share with me their accounts of their near-death experiences.
In this podcast, with Elizabeth, she referred to how we select our parents and life situation before entering it. She called it “entering into your contract,” one that you agreed to.
I remember before my mother passed, also sharing with her this sentiment, the idea that we choose our parents before we pass. As someone had mentioned it to me.
Her response was—to snort and retort, “I wonder why I chose Grandma Bishop!”
The mother who abandoned her, it’s a fair question.
For me, the answer is much simpler:
I would have chosen this life and my parents for my mother. Even if I had to take my father, his alcoholism, the poverty and dysfunction. Even with my mothers’ own mental illness. Because with her, I won the golden ticket of maternal love. And also because—she needed me.
I also would have chosen her and this family to address intergenerational wounds of trauma in my extended family.
To go a step further, if I were to go further, and consider why I would have chosen a family so heavily shaped by suicide, I would have said this—
I would have selected this life and the pain and trauma I will endure, so I can use my wounds for good, for healing, of my ancestors. Because I do firmly believe that when we heal ourselves, we also heal our ancestors and relatives, our family members. I don’t even quite know how or if I can articulate how I know this, or why. But I do believe that. And I have felt it, through epigenetics/trauma healing through biofield tuning, for example.
But, I digress—I have found myself reading a lot about the afterlife recently. Beyond religious teachings, but shall we say from a spiritual realm and existence, not necessarily tied to organized religions or institutionalized religions.
I have faith and belief that we are energy and spirits, more than our physical bodies. Though I identify as a Mennonite (Anabaptist) and follow the teachings of Jesus, I also don’t believe that his is the only way to understand or commune with God.
I believe that many who find their way to God, may use different paths. But I am absolutely certain that people’s essences, their consciousness lives on. Removed from their body, sure, but they do not vanish or cease to exist.
I have always believed that but the older that I’ve gotten, it has gotten more clear for me. I have felt loved ones and the inevitability of our deaths have become less scary.
Death is simply a transition, it is a walking on, a passing on. Not the end of us, entirely.
We humans fear death—those of us who do—because we fear the unknown and the prospect of complete cessation of being, in any form.
But, I don’t. And for several reasons—
As my best friend and I frequently discuss—there are worse things than death. “Life” on earth as it is for some, my own family members included, can simply be a living hell.
And that is true for many—those who live with chronic pain or mental anguish, for example.
I hesitate to understand the appropriate or respect way to put this… Because I don’t want to suggest that I am glad my family members completed suicide. But I also know that I mostly struggle with it, as the one left behind on this earthly realm and all that death and suicide means for the survivors. But for them—I have no doubt and with every essence of myself, I know that they are at peace now. They are no longer suffering, and are in a transcendent state of calm and with God.
They are no longer the tortured, depressed, hurting, suffering, souls that I knew them to be, on this Earth.
I am not necessarily advocating for suicide but I do think part of the reason we—as a society and humankind—get so stricken by it is because we can’t understand a pain and hellish existence like that, one so terrible that you would voluntarily choose to exit, without ever really knowing what is beyond. At least, for sure. You could simply be ceasing to ever exist and isn’t that scary? Isn’t it better to stick around? Just in case? Is your life really THAT God-awful? To risk nothing? To risk Hell?
It’s easy for others to question that when their human existence isn’t Hell. When not being in pain, to feel nothing or be nothing feels much preferable. A respite.
In short, I think, like a former mentor of mine once said—
“Suicides are so hard for those left behind.” (She meant the family members.)
I agree. It is for us, but my family members? They are at peace.
I don’t believe also in any of this horse shit either that you sign up for eternity in hell in completing suicide, either.
I do not believe that God / the Creator punishes those who choose to leave this life, because He/She/They/Almighty recognizes better than any of us just the pain that these souls are in. They get it more than anyone on earth can understand, They understand the anguish that is depression and suicide desires, mental illnesses.
I want to advocate against people taking their own lives, sure. But I do ‘get it’, to some extent, as I have been there. I too have experienced suicidal ideations and been in some severe depression, and today, in a very different place—I am oh so thankful for it.
Today, as I walked out in the sunshine and enjoyed a relaxing salt therapy and lovely healthy lunch, coffee and chatting with dear friends, and now relishing my iced matcha latte and writing time, I am truly grateful for my life, that I am here, and that I am alive.
I am thankful that depression failed to convince me to exit, failed to make me believe it in its lies to me that the hell that I was in was the only reality that I would ever know, that this is all that life would ever be. Because it wasn’t. It is not.
I desperately wish my brother could known that and believed that as well, seen through the convincing lies of depression. Waited, stuck it out, holding our hope for more joy in life.
But mostly, it is for his daughter, again—
It is for those who are left behind.
It is then that I realize that part of my aim in life, and perhaps part of why I would have signed this “contract,” when others lives seem much easier and so much more preferable is this—
The tragedy is that suicides happen, and often. Too often.
I hope they don’t. But they do. And they will continue to happen.
I wish they didn’t and I will do what I can in my small corner of the world to try to prevent them.
But—
More importantly, I want to be there with stories of survival and suicide support for those who find themselves, like me, in this situation—
Broken and hurt by the choices of loved ones, who consciously opted out of this life.
If I have anything to offer this world, it is that—it is this—
My tragedies gave me greater capacity to understand that we could endure and withstand events that broke our hearts and traumatized our minds and bodies and shattered us. And find our way through that, to a different and someways even better point in life than we started—in terms of our own mental health.
My trauma and losses taught the need to listen to and really hear other people’s stories, of their hurt and grief, that broke them.
Through my own pain, I have cultivated greater empathy and compassion, being able to hold space for others and their losses. This is why it is especially heart-breaking when people say to me—
“What my trauma is, it doesn’t compare to yours…”
“My loss is nothing like all of yours were…”
Invalidating our own experiences and not owning story is just…not fair to others. And it is not fair to ourselves.
It is yours. It has affected you and shaped your story.
I could just as easily point to or find someone else’s story and understand that theirs was more or greater than mine is or ever could be…that it is different in ways that I could never relate to—but, honestly—
What good does any of that BS serve? These endless games of oppression Olympics? The trauma police? The constant competition of who had it greater? Comparisons like this serve no one, unless they are used to help us hear and understand one anothers’ pain.
So, I think I chose my contract to say—break me to the point where I am forced to make better choices in my family line, to address it all—in order to feel the pain, and to address the intergenerational trauma and wounds.
And in doing so, may I be transformed and hold greater space for others stories. May I advocate for greater compassion and attention to our traumatic and lived, embodied experiences, to my friends, my students, my colleagues. Those who are reading this, and are a part of my little corner of the world.
“What we dwell on is what we become.” ~Oprah Winfrey
