Souls Plans: What Fear Can Teach Us

Many spiritual authors, whether mediums or researchers who report the experience of others, have noted that loved ones who appear often seem markedly younger than when they passed. People who have had an NDE (near death experience) will report, for example, that they met an elderly relative who looked surprisingly youthful, and yet who was instantly recognisable. One man told me his grandmother passed in advanced old age, but when they had a joyful (if brief) reunion in heaven, she seemed to be around thirty and brimmed with vitality. 

In short, I believe that each soul has a choice as to how to present themselves to us. During my OBE, I met a little boy who looked to be the age of four or five. His presence was immediately beguiling, innocent, and entirely non-threatening. I believe he had a choice as to how to present to me, and his choice was guided by kindness. Loved ones might choose something familiar to us, or else something different but nonetheless comforting. 

The vagaries of advanced age or physical or mental limitations are not needed, or experienced, on the Other Side. There, we have no use of aches and pains. We are not hunched over, or confused, or corroded with cancer. It is often reported that a loved one will present to us as they looked and felt in their prime (however they define that).

It goes the other way, too. If you have lost a small child, or a baby, they will come to you in a way that you will signal their very essence. Your soul and theirs will greet each other with love and recognition. 

Photo by Yoksel Zok

I keep reading that we’re in an era where our consciousness is rising. But look at the divorce rate. Marriages are breaking down. Families are being split. Children are lost in the mix, carrying a pain they can’t articulate. 

Allow me to offer a perspective on marriage. Here, marriage is a primary gateway for families to begin and for society to keep humming along (of course, it’s not the only way). For many people, marriage comes with social, legal, and perhaps faith-based guidelines. It is imbued with many spoken and unspoken expectations.  

From what I saw from the Other Side, marriage is a vehicle through which myriad, significant spiritual lessons unfold. From the moment a potential couple meet, to the timing and manner in which they depart, opportunities for divine growth never stop. Every day offers choices: to show the ways in which we love each other, and ourselves. How we can live and forgive, or whether we communicate in harmony or conflict. We might  be happy, in general, or grow so accustomed to low-level misery that it becomes the norm. And any children who come into this marriage are both knitted into these dynamics, and further create their own. A web of interaction grows and expands. Each soul interplays with the others. With it, comes opportunities for extensive growth.

And if this couple has designed Soul Plans in which they divorce (or perhaps find another way to live together, while maintaining largely separate lives), there is growth along the way to that decision. Perhaps they see divorce as necessary, despite their heartache, but they fear backlash from their extended family or community. Each person’s reaction and way of coping will be highly individual (often from day to day) and each will stretch out of their comfort zone to consider new ways of being and doing from their old life. 

Photo by Yoksel Zok

What do you think fear can teach us?

Our souls relish the chance to taste this human experience in all its shapes and flavors. On the Other Side, we do not know fear; we exist in a realm of unparalleled harmony and complete love. Therefore, we know only the theory around fear; we need to come here to feel it and understand it on a practical level.

The experience of fear, then, is something available to us as humans. And as we know, fear exists along a winding and long-tailed spectrum … from, say, a mild fear of spiders, to fear of failure, or being abandoned. Others dread dying alone or penniless. Yet another fear might be emotional: fear of emotional independence, or fear of confrontation. That last one goes beyond discomfort with immediate disagreement, and whisper, “Will I still be loved or accepted if I speak my mind?”

These anxieties can be incapacitating, so please know I don’t seek to be flippant. From the soul’s perspective, though, they are experiences that add texture to this role of Jon or Jane Doe we are currently playing. We come from the Other Side to experience these limitations.

Sometimes we choose to live with fear. We make accommodations rather than dealing with it. Other times, it becomes so debilitating, that it impacts our lives and relationships in ways we are forced to confront. The suffering can spur us into action, or calcify around us.  

As children, we fear monsters under the bed. 

As teenagers, we fear not being accepted. But what about a different type of fear, such as fear of success? What fears are you accommodating in your life? What if you designed the source of fear to appear, to gift you the opportunity to decide how to handle it? The (late) writer Ambrose Redmoon famously noted: Courage is not the absence of fear, but the judgment that there is something more important than fear.

There are also opportunities for growth to be the partner, parent, sibling, or child to someone wrestling with deep fears. How do you cope with it, and how does it stretch you as an individual? How is the dynamic altered in your relationship, and how does each of you transform spiritually? Does one become more patient and compassionate? Or do things take a different turn?

Our souls are always whispering to us our innate connection to the Other Side. In moments of fear (or any other reckoning) we can call on support from Home to get us through. 

This post is part of our series of blogs on soul plans by Alicia Young. You can read her previous posts HERE.

ALICIA YOUNG

Alicia Young is an Australian broadcast journalist and author who met her guardian angel at age three. She has written six awarding-winning nonfiction books (and is working on her seventh title). The latest, Visit from Heaven: A Soul’s Message of Love, Loss & Family recounts a transformative experience in which she met the soul of a little boy on the Other Side. Today, she speaks and consults on Soul Plans around the world, both privately and to groups (often virtually, in a Covid-19 world). Learn more at www.soulplans.net. Alicia welcomes your questions at: [email protected] (her central email address). This column does not seek to substitute professional support.