I am often asked why pain and misery exist if the Universe is truly one of love and acceptance. The truth is that our souls want nothing more then to evolve into a knowingness of unconditional love and acceptance and the best way to do this is through having human experiences. As humans, we forget the true essence of who we are and so what we do experience often seems painful but to our wise soul, those "painful" experiences are really just opportunities to grow and evolve as the spiritual beings we truly are

Before we are born into this life and before our souls incarnate into a body, we decide what lessons we want to take with us from this lifetime. The value of our souls having physical form in a body is to grow and evolve. Depending on what we decide to learn in this lifetime, we set the stage. Almost like an actor playing a role. We chose certain life circumstances so that we will have the opportunity to learn what we came here to learn. The best way to learn about something is to have the opposite experience of it. You don't learn trust best by living in a trusting environment. You learn trust by having the opposite experience. When a soul wants to learn about trust, the soul chooses to have an experience opposite that of trust. So, the soul chooses to experience fear. The best way for the soul to learn trust is by overcoming fear. When the soul wants to learn about abundance, it chooses experiences of scarcity to overcome. When the soul wants to learn about acceptance, it places itself it judgmental situations. When the soul wants to learn about Love, it decides to experience hate. And when the soul wants to learn about freedom, it chooses the experience of imprisonment. Think about it: You can never know what it means to be free until your freedom is taken away. If you want to know what your soul came here to learn, just look at the pattern of experiences in your life.

But just because your soul sets up certain life experiences to learn a particular lesson, it doesn't mean you will necessarily learn it. It is always your choice and free will to interpret and use an experience as you decide. But the universe is quite clever because you will keep encountering similar experiences until you do learn what you intended to learn. And the situations and experiences will keep getting worse until you finally do learn. A lot of people misinterpret this as karma but it is actually just one opportunity after another to learn what you came here to learn. Personally, I think that is great because if we don't get it the first, second or third time, there is always a forth, fifth and sixth. A good piece of advice would be to get your lessons the first time to avoid a great deal of pain and struggle.