The Agreements You Didn’t Know You Made

Have you ever met someone for the first time and felt you knew them instantly?

Have you ever stayed in a relationship longer than you wanted to—and longer than was good for you?

Do you feel you have bonds with certain people that are stronger than circumstances could explain?

Have you ever gone through a cycle in your life where everything just worked? Or a cycle where nothing you could do seemed to work out?

If you answered, “yes,” to any of these questions it may be that you are bumping up against a soul-level agreement.

Soul Agreements

Soul Agreements are agreements we make outside of our physical time and space, agreements we make at the soul level—not the personality level. These are agreements that have great power and can determine our reality, our experience—whether we want them to or not.

Soul Agreements are often made before we enter into a lifetime but they can be amended during our lifetime. We might also make entirely new agreements as we move through a lifetime.

The key is that we need to realize that, as I mentioned earlier, these agreements are not made at the personality level. In fact, as far as the personality is concerned, these agreements may be unwanted, even antithetical to who we believe we are or what we believe we are about.

Keith’s experience

Keith came to me because of a strange dissatisfaction and discontent that he couldn’t explain. He had divorced his wife after a great deal of soul-searching. He felt certain that what he and his wife had experienced at first was a soul connection, that they had had the experience of real love. But it hadn’t lasted.

The divorce was painful and disruptive (as divorces tend to be) for himself and for his children. But because he felt his partner had become largely absent in the relationship because of some addictive behaviors—except when she was angry and abusive—he felt strongly that he was doing the right thing.

Nevertheless, he could not seem to find contentment and satisfaction in his new life—he was dogged by guilt. He wondered if he should have stuck it out, made it work. It didn’t help that his wife was bitter and resentful, seemingly unable to move on.

When Keith told me what was going on for him, I asked him how long he had been married. He told me, 14 years. Immediately I saw that he had had a Soul Agreement to be married for seven years. He had actually gone above and beyond to make his marriage last! When I told him this, told him that he had given seven additional years to a marriage that had, essentially, run its course, he brightened.

I was also able to tell him that his wife had likely descended into addiction at just about the seven-year mark. He was amazed because that, indeed, was what had happened.

Depression and the role of victim

I also told him that, had he stayed any longer, he would have, himself, descended into depression and a subservient role as a victim opposite his wife’s role as victimizer. This would have provided his children with a dysfunctional model for relationship. As it was, he had the opportunity to provide his children with a new, functional, model for relationship—and give himself an opportunity to experience love.

He walked out of my office that first time with a light heart, his shoulders back, a smile on his face. In subsequent sessions we were able to clarify work relationships that had gotten off track and threatened to victimize him, also.

In a matter of weeks, he felt he had a whole new life.

The story of K.

K. came to me beaten down and discouraged. He had made it to the role of CFO only to end up with a troubled relationship with his CEO. After years of trying to please his CEO, and feeling as if he couldn’t do so, no matter how hard he tried, his CEO terminated him. He was devastated.

When I explained that his CEO’s behavior had actually been abusive, and that his CEO had made him a scape goat, projecting his own experience of frustration and fear of failure onto him, and that he simply could not have succeeded in the position, he experienced tremendous relief.

Here’s what K. wrote to me after our first meeting:

“I got more out of one visit with [Fran Gallaher] than two years with an executive coach. She corroborated most all of my perspective with [old company] and [former boss] but provided much enlightenment that makes it easier to understand, accept, and move on. That was only a small part of our visit; the rest was preparing for and looking forward to the future.”

K. T., Denver, Colorado

My own experience

Growing up, I was both attracted and repelled by the idea of becoming a Catholic nun. I read biographies and autobiographies of nuns, dressed as a nun one Halloween, while at the same time learning to curse and drink and, according to my parents, become “boy crazy.”

I became pregnant at an early age, married, and put to rest the idea of becoming a nun.

A few years later, I devoted myself to meditation and spiritual study. I was able to enter deep meditative states and, one day, in a meditation, I found myself becoming aware of a moment in the past where my mother, distraught after having four miscarriages, promised God that if she could carry her current pregnancy to term, she would devote her child’s life to the Church. If her baby was a boy, he would become a priest. If her baby was a girl, she would become a nun.

I called my mother and asked if she had done this. Startled, she said, “yes.” Then, “How did you find that out?”

It has to be said that my mother knew I was a little, shall I say, non-ordinary, so when I said I simply discovered it in a meditative state, she accepted that explanation without argument.

I was able to reject the promise she had made on my behalf because, I believed, she had no right to make any such agreement. My own guilt about my past was able to dissipate and I stopped feeling as if I had made some disastrous wrong turn. I was able to begin to decide what I wanted in my life, and become more self-directed, rather than carrying out a role my mother had determined for me—before I was even born!

What about you??

Are you curious what Soul Agreements underlie your life?

Do you feel as if your life is your own, your expression truly representative of who you really are?

Do you ever feel you are somehow fulfilling a vision of who you are that is not your own? That you are more someone’s spouse or parent or child or “right-hand man”—or even someone’s screw-up—rather than your own person?

Intuition clarifies. It can provides me with information that can’t be accessed any other way. Intuition—mine and yours, once you have an understanding of what it is and how it works—can provide guidance and information that can get any of us unstuck from the wrong relationships, the wrong roles, and the wrong or outdated agreements.

And intuition provides a short cut. It eliminates weeks—even months or years—that traditional coaching or therapy requires.

Do you have that kind of time?

Exactly.

We should talk. Let’s dive deep and discover what Soul Agreements might underlie your life!

DM me: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/frangallaher/ or email me: [email protected]