What is the soul and why should you care? Put simply, your soul is what gives you consciousness. And without it, you’d be unable to function. That should certainly be enough to make you care. But there’s so much more. To recognize the many ways your soul makes you who you are, it helps to understand your soul’s cosmic journey.

Your soul influences your beliefs and behavior, and carries with it memories of all your many past lives.

The past-life resonances your soul brought with it into this lifetime are the source of your fears, phobias, and limiting beliefs. They’re also responsible for your talents and abilities, and the personality that makes you the unique individual you are.

Every soul’s cosmic journey begins as part of the universal consciousness that permeates every corner of the cosmos.

Sometime in the last several thousand years, along with thousands of members of its soul family, your soul left that universal consciousness to come here to planet Earth to embark on a voyage like no other.

Thanks to reincarnation, your soul has had the opportunity to spend many lifetimes learning what it means to be human.

Your soul’s prime directive is to evolve. And to do so, it has to come to the Physical Plane many times over in order to grow from each experience. Multiple incarnations of hardship and suffering, as well as love and joy, make you the unique person you are today.

Your soul’s journey has been long and arduous. Yet it has also been rich in experience.

From the earliest lifetimes in which your soul did little more than learn to survive, all the way up to your current incarnation, your soul has travelled the world seeking out increasingly complex lessons.

Lives as a midwife or herbalist will have taught you important lessons in the healing arts that show up in the present as a desire to heal and help others. Being a leader in earlier incarnations will have imbued you with an air of authority now. Empathy is the result of lives spent taking care of the sick and dying.

If you’re driven to learn, it’s often the result of a deep level of curiosity that stems from lives as an academic or as an explorer. If you love to dance, sing, write, paint, sail, bake, or grow plants, the interest is there because you’ve done it previous lifetimes and have carried those talents and likes with you into this current life.

Your soul’s cosmic journey has taken you from the Stone Age to the Space Age, and to every part of the world.

Throughout your many incarnations, you've been rich, poor, male, female, gay, straight, and every color of the rainbow. Every life experience has led your soul to where you are now. Click To Tweet

If you find yourself longing to better understand your purpose in this life, you first need to know who you were. Past lives, as I’m fond of saying, explain everything.

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Learn more about your soul’s cosmic journey in Ainslie’s new book, The Old Soul’s Guidebook.