I had a friend pass away from cancer a few weeks ago. For most of her life she struggled to “find her place.” In her mind, it never felt like she was doing what she came to do. It was a cause of great despair and grief. Her mother had passed away when she was only a few days old. Her father remarried not long after. Jayne didn’t know this was not her mother until she was seven when a young boy taunted her and said her mother was dead. Finding out that the woman, who she thought was her mother. was not, set up a lack of trust and a feeling of not belonging that followed her through her life, even though she had worked hard at healing it.

In the final months of her life, she came to find peace. She found deep love, caring and a sense of belonging from the siblings she had separated herself from. She said to me, “I realized that the wall I thought was from them, was mine. The love was always there. I just didn’t know it and couldn’t let it in.” I told her, “This is what your soul came to learn. You passed!” She smiled, “Yes, I know.”

I saw her the night before she died. Her sister and a friend were keeping vigil. I stroked Jayne’s hair and whispered in her ear, “You get to go home now. You’re complete.”

The idea of path and destiny are sometimes confusing. I had a woman in a consult asking if the job she had was part of her soul contract. I looked at her and said, “It’s not like that.” Often there is something the soul is choosing to learn. For Jayne, it was to know that she was loved. I had another friend whose was to learn that it was okay to have comfort. Usually, the things we struggle with the most is what our soul came to learn. We can wonder why it seems to keep coming up. It’s not that we “just don’t get it.” It’s that we are really working to get it. For me, I’ve come to realize that my soul chose to learn that doing something just because it gave you joy was not selfish.

As far as path, how we get there has a lot of choices along the way. There is often no one right choice as we will continue to work on the thing our soul came to learn. It is right, that the teacher will show up when it is time or when we ask for it. And that is the key, to learn to ask for what we need. To not stay in situations that don’t serve us and to know that this is soul school. Being in a body is a bit messy and we can be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, in all of it, we are here to learn to grow and reconnect to our essential essence. And then we get to go home.