Hi there,
It’s lovely to be back after a little break. I hope you’re doing really well.
All the way back in 2007 I had a life-changing experience which completely altered the course of my life in such a profound way. In fact, it’s true to say that had it not been for that experience, I might not be the holistic therapist that I am today.
What am I talking about? My soul plan reading, or soul contract reading as it is also known.
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know that a big part of my holistic life coaching practice involves delivering Soul Plan readings for others.
I trained as a practitioner in 2015 and have never looked back. Of all the services I offer, it’s the one I love delivering the most because it makes the most profound difference to people’s lives.
I’ve done hundreds of readings over the years, and I never cease to be amazed at how accurate a window it gives into a person’s life and experiences i. e. their soul journey – and what a profoundly positive difference it makes to their view of themselves and their life – just as it did for me all those years ago.
People always walk away from these readings with so much clarity, where before there was confusion … they feel reassured … and any feelings of regret or guilt about what’s going on in their lives just disappear in an instant… because they realise that their life is playing out exactly as it was always meant to be. It’s like the lights have been switched on and suddenly everything becomes crystal clear.
Now if you’ve had your soul plan reading with me, I think you know exactly what I am talking about because you’ll have had that very experience. I still invite you to stay tuned because in this episode, I’m going to be sharing more about this amazing body of work … and something I’ve never done before….and that is share some of the things on my own soul plan.
If you’re new to soul plans then, by the end of this episode you’ll have a really clear idea of what a Soul Plan reading can do for you.
So, this is Harinder, Holistic Life Coach, and you are listening to the Bringing You Back into Balance podcast.
So, let’s start with the obvious question. What exactly is a soul plan or a soul contract as it’s also referred to?
Your soul plan is the sacred contract you made before you came into this lifetime. It holds the spiritual blueprint of your life in this current incarnation. It’s like a map … a map that contains the vibrations of all the physical and spiritual experiences that your soul set out to have during your lifetime. Your soul chose this map and is using it to create your reality in each and every moment of your life.
Let me back up a little bit and give you some context … As you’re listening to this podcast, I’m guessing you accept the idea (or can at least keep an open mind to the fact) that our true essence is as spiritual beings. We are all, in our true essence, tiny sparks of the Divine … We’re born into a human form … we live for a period of time in this lifetime … and at the point of death, we leave behind our physical body … However, the spiritual, divine part of us does not die … it is eternal … and it returns to the higher realms after death.
Now, apparently we are playing a fancy game with the universe…. it’s called the game of separation … In the beginning, when our time/space paradigm was created there was one mighty outbreath of God … at that point our tiny souls separated from Source and were catapulted as far away from that starting point as it was possible … And, ever since then our souls have very gently been trying to take us back to that place of oneness with Source from which we all originated. We were separated millenia ago and we are all trying to find out way back home to God.
Every time we come into incarnation on this planet, we attempt to move closer to this original Source energy. Each time we come down here to planet Earth we pick an aspect of our Soul to work on … Imagine the Soul as a rough unpolished diamond … all its edges are clouded and rough … Each time we come down to Earth, our aim is to polish one of those rough edges until it becomes smooth, pure and bright. In this way, lifetime after lifetime we attempt to gradually make our way back to the total perfection that we came from … and when we reach that point, we don’t have to keep coming back here … the cycle of reincarnation is complete. We have reached enlightenment. The game is over. We have won.
Now if that is the setup then that means that every single lifetime we live has been very carefully designed to help us do our next bit of soul growth.
This means that our lives are not random events…where we are plonked on the Earth having a random set of experiences with a random group of people. No, each lifetime is very carefully designed to give us the optimal opportunity to do our next bit of spiritual growth.
Think about this…before you incarnated, you sat down with the Lords of Karma, beings from the angelic realms, your ancestors, members of your soul family and anyone else who is showing an interest in your spiritual growth, and you purposely designed this very life you are living now. You chose the lessons that you wanted to work through. You chose the qualities you were going to bring in to help you with these challenges and you chose the general direction you wanted your life to go in.
Now, here’s the amazing bit … all of this information – this plan if you like – has been encoded into the phonetical sound of your birth name. Your name is not an accident. It was purposely chosen by your Soul and intuitively sent to your parents before you were born. Sound is creative. And so, every single sound contained within your birth name is magnetically drawing experiences into your life… the exact experiences you need for your next bit of soul growth.
When we do a soul plan reading, we decode what these specific energies are.
We look at 4 main areas: Life Challenges; Drives; Talents & Qualities; and your Life Purpose.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
The challenges are the learning environment that we deliberately set up so that we would be prompted to grow and develop. I think we can all agree that it’s the discomfort, the suffering, that prompts us to change, otherwise we tend to stay exactly where we are. Discomfort prompts us to seek answers and find ways to do things differently. For example, a soul may choose a deep pattern of disempowerment where it keeps getting bullied by others so that it can learn to stand up for itself and reclaim its power. Or a soul may choose to set up a difficult relationship dynamic with someone who keeps tempted it to engage in warfare because it is here to learn to stay aligned with peace.
The point of any challenge … physical, mental, emotional, financial and spiritual … is for us to evolve … we’re not supposed to stay stuck in the challenges but to work our way through them and get to the learning as quickly as possible. So firstly, your soul plan reading gives you instant clarity on what you are here to learn so that you can understand your challenges and see them for what they are…not sources of mindless suffering but prompts for spiritual learning and growth. And, if that isn’t insightful enough you also get a very clear set of recommendations to help you to actively work through your challenges, so you quickly move to a place of ease and empowerment.
For example, someone who is here to learn to step into their power needs to first heal their trauma, they need to learn to say ‘no’, they need to process their anger, they need to learn to set and maintain clear boundaries and to find ways to reclaim their power in everyday life situations.
More often than not conscious awareness of this is all that’s needed … I see huge shifts in people simply from the understanding of why their challenges are there. And, here’s the really wonderful thing…once the learning has been done the challenges simply disappear. Their work has been done. If you’ve been bullied and disempowered all your life imagine the power that would come from realising that the bullies have been programmed into your life, and will continue appearing in your life, until you learn to muster up the courage to stand up for yourself. That is all you need to do and the problems start to disappear.
Next we look at the physical and spiritual drives in a person’s life. Like a river, life flows in a certain direction. We are always being prompted to move towards something. These are the goals we have set ourselves … the things that our soul is seeking to accomplish … things we want to learn to do in order to evolve. For example, we may have a goal in this lifetime to learn to trust, to trust in the flow of abundance from the Universe. So, early in life we may encounter situations where our trust is first broken, for example we have not received enough love and nurture so we grow into adults not trusting that anything will be there for us. As soon as we start trusting then the abundance starts to flow. Again, this realisation is deeply empowering. It takes us out of victim mode….poor me…my parents neglected me and I’m still upset with them for that….to, oh okay, they were just creating the reality I needed for me to show my spirit guides that I do trust the Universe…I am worthy of love and if I learn to trust that good things can and will come my way, they will.
The third area that your Soul Plan will shed light on is the innate gifts and talents your soul has brought into this lifetime. These are the things you are naturally brilliant at doing. These are usually qualities you’ve perfected in previous lifetimes … and have brought into this life time to help you work through your challenges and materialise your drives. People find that if they consciously align their life to their gifts and talents, they effortlessly manifest success.
I love sharing people’s gifts and talents with them. Sometimes they are very aware of their gifts and their soul plan is just a confirmation of what they already know deep inside. But for others, especially if they’re still working through heavy challenges, these positive qualities may be suppressed. It’s wonderful to see people light up with the knowledge that they have these special attributes and talents … it always delights and inspires them.
And finally, the fourth component of a soul plan reading … this is the big one: your life purpose. Your soul plan clearly presents your soul destiny. This is the real meaning of your life, the deepest soul truth about why you came to Earth in the first place….what you are here to do in the world. For some people these are things that need to be expressed out in the world. For example, in my holistic life coaching practice I come across lots of service souls who are here to connect with their own power and are on a soul mission to make the world a better place. For others, their life purpose is more internal – they are here to learn to move to a place of greater self-acceptance, self-compassion and self-love. Or, move from naivety or foolishness to a place of wisdom and responsibility. These are just two examples. There are many more.
So, as you can hear your soul plan truly switches on all the lights in your life. There is no more confusion, no more needless suffering, no more indecision and definitely no more going round in circles with you wondering what the hell am I supposed to be doing here.
It’s truly incredible how it all works and comes together to help someone move forward with grace and ease.
Now it’s always easier to understand something if it’s presented in concrete rather than abstract terms … so let me do something I’ve never done before….briefly take you through my soul plan.
As I said at the start of this episode, my reading took place 17 years ago. It was 2007 and at that time I was a busy mum of two young children, working at the London Borough of Hounslow as Head of Research & Statistics. My life was fairly settled but it hadn’t always been that way … I’d had some big struggles with my mental health in the decades prior … I’d suffered from generalised anxiety & panic disorder.
What I learnt about myself on that day in 2007 was just incredible. Now looking back and not only remembering that day but also what has happened since, I can see just how pivotal that day was for me. It completely reshaped my life.
My soul plan reading with done by a wonderful woman and very powerful healer called Sandra Ditta Herrman. She’s sadly no longer with us. I’d done quite a lot of one to one and group healing and training with Sandra so when she said, ‘Harinder, I’ve learnt something new - could I do a session on you?’ I jumped at the chance and said ‘yes please’.
Well, she asked me for my full name so she could draw up my soul plan and invited me in for a reading.
I first thing I remember as we sat down to look at my soul plan, was her very accurately recounting some of my difficult childhood experiences. She told me that my challenges in early life were related to two big soul lessons: 1) I had to experience death/loss so that I was forced to raise my spiritual consciousness, learn to value life and do something constructive with it, and 2) I was here to learn wisdom and resiliency through overcoming a deep programme of hypersensitivity and emotional reactivity. Both of these challenges created a huge amount of disruption and chaos in my inner world, but their purpose was to help me learn to become emotionally resilient and to respond to any situation that life presented calmly, objectively and from a higher spiritual perspective (i.e. from a place of wisdom).
Wow! I was stunned. That made a lot of sense to me. I’d definitely experienced these energies in my younger life. I’d had one very traumatic brush with death. When I was 13 my grandma passed away very suddenly during a trip to India that we’d taken as a family. I loved her so much, she’d been the absolute centre of my world until that point and her sudden death shook me to the very core.
I had felt so distressed and alone in my grief. I really felt like I was drowning in a sea of emotions – but in my darkest moments …in the depth of my suffering, where I had nowhere else to turn, I did the one thing this programme was designed to do…and that was connected closer with God. I found my consciousness rising and my aspiration to connect with God on the very day my grandma died. That day I sat on the veranda in India next to the body of my dead grandma was the very first day I did the Japji Sahib (the morning prayer of the Sikh faith) from start to finish. That experience of death did indeed kickstart a very close relationship with my faith. And, that was what my soul planning was all about at that point in my life.
After the trauma of my grandma’s passing, I experienced years of PTSD, panic and anxiety. I struggled a lot back then because there were no counsellors and anxiety wasn’t talked about in the way it is now … I had loads of love and kindness from my parents…my brother…my wider family but very little support for what was going on. But I’d find that every time I’d have a breakdown … and there were several of those during my younger years … I remember one especially difficult time during my O’ levels when I became really unwell … every time that would happen and I’d get desperate… it would make me reach deeper and deeper into my spirituality … I’d come across someone or something that would expand my understanding/perspective on life, on spirituality and it would lead me to a higher perspective and, over the years, to greater wisdom.
Now looking at my soul plan with Sandra I discovered that was exactly how the energies of the death-to-life soul lesson work. The trauma makes you reach towards higher learning, towards higher or more peaceful states of being … towards Spirit. It’s all about raising your consciousness.
My second major challenge in life, I learnt, came from being hypersensitive. Again, this was completely spot on! I’d always felt so fragile and lost all the time. I thought I was weak…that there was something wrong with me … I’d become overwhelmed so easily, that sometimes just managing day-to-day life was a struggle. My sensitivity also contributed to high levels of anxiety. Looking at my soul plan, I realised … actually it’s not my fault … I couldn’t have helped this … it was the way it was supposed to be … there was nothing wrong with me, it was just the way I was built. My hypersensitivity provided the negative context of my life from which I was meant to learn and grow. The point of the challenge was to learn how to manage my sensitivity … not to let it flatten me.
If you’ve had your soul plan reading done, you’ll know that we talk in terms of numbers. The numbers represent the energies at work in a person’s chart.
In my chart I have the numbers 8-8. My challenge in relation to the negative aspects of these energies, I was told, was around people-pleasing. Wherever I went I was absorbing energy from other people … just like a sponge … Not only was this feeding into my own stress levels, but it also made me overly giving and self-sacrificing. Because I was picking up on everyone else’s emotions, I was overly focused on making sure everyone else was okay, regardless of what was going on in my own inner world. This number brought wobbly boundaries and was overly passive and compliant.
This was so true for me! My entire upbringing was about being obedient and compliant … always doing whatever was expected of me, always putting myself out to accommodate others … always doing whatever other people asked with a smile on my face, no matter what the personal cost. I now understood that the lesson for me here was to learn to be grounded … to heal the trauma that was sitting in my heart and my stomach, so I could connect to other people’s pain from my heart… and not just stay up in my head all the time as that was my safe space. I needed to learn to be less self-sacrificing and have better boundaries with others. This was what would take me from the negative to the positive aspects of these 8-8 energies.
The other big soul lesson for me, I was told, related to the numbers 22-4. This lesson was around learning to balance my mind, body and soul so that God/Source/Spirit could work through me. The challenge that came with this was around being deeply unbalanced in my early life – focusing too much on one aspect of my being while neglecting the other aspects. Again, this was spot on! I’d always been pretty connected to my spirit … BUT for a long time my mind had been crazily out of control … and as for my body, well that had hardly got a look in – it had been totally disregarded. I can honestly say there was a time when I didn’t even realise I had a body! I was that disconnected from myself….I was so ungrounded. These energies also meant I had a programme running where I was convinced there was something horribly wrong with me … I had to deal with a lot of toxic and misguided thoughts about myself. Once again, the reading was amazingly accurate as I could relate everything that was being said to my lived experience. The 22-4 experience was also about learning to trust in life, in the Universe. Sandra clearly told me that the key to unlocking my fortune in life was trust. The more I could do that the more good would flow into my life and the more I could move into the role of a healer – someone who allows Source energy to work through her. I couldn’t believe I had the potential to do that. I felt so broken back then.
Sandra then went onto to present my gifts and talents. These were the energies I had brought into this lifetime and could and should be using in service to the world.
I discovered 1) that I was highly empathic. I had the ability to immediately tune into other people’s energies and know exactly how they were feeling. I was very good at relating to others … like a chameleon I could mould myself to whoever I was with, and this would give me the ability to get on with lots of different people.
And 2) the numbers 16-7 in my chart meant that I was good at relaying complex spiritual information to others. I was able to tune into higher guidance from spirit and then communicate the channelled information I was receiving in a very accessible, very grounded way.
Both of these energies, the empathy and the spiritual communication, would, I was told, make me a very good therapist … once, that is, I had mastered the lesson of bringing my mind, body and soul into total balance. Sandra said I was a natural born healer. I remember, at the time I couldn’t believe this! Me?! I felt like such a nervous wreck at the time that this sounded absolutely ludicrous…I remember laughing in disbelief, trying to wrap my head around what I was being told. But, you know what, if I’m honest there was some deeper part of me that knew what she was telling me was the truth.
And finally … we came to my soul purpose. What I’d actually come here to do.
My soul plan showed that firstly I was here to heal my heart chakra. I needed to clear out all the low frequency energies that had accumulated from lifetimes of loss and grief … AND I had to stop hiding parts of myself from others. I needed to embrace and integrate all aspects of myself – the light and the dark – so I could show up more fully as myself. This meant I needed to do some serious shadow work … bringing the hidden parts of myself out into the light … and I have to say this is something that I’m still working on today.
And, the cherry on the cake was my 9-9 dragon energies which sit in my soul destiny…my life purpose. Sandra told me that I was a highly evolved soul who was here to use my spiritual gifts in service to humanity. My entire life was about gradually moving from a place of disempowerment to a place of empowerment and God realisation …or enlightenment. The Universe was just waiting for me to quieten down my very negative, noisy egoic mind so that my body and my life could be used for channelled service. Ie. so that God could work through me.
Now, I have to say, all of this information just blew my mind! I remember coming out of the reading on that day in a state of complete disbelief. Me?! Here to serve humanity?! Working as a channel for God. Reaching enlightenment. What the hell? But you know what, as I just said there was a some deeper part of me that totally resonated with everything I was being told. It was true. This is who I am. But, I clearly had a ridiculous amount of work to do on myself first.
Well, slowly, I began to realise that my soul plan reading had not only given me a clear insight into the purpose of my challenges, more importantly, it had shown me how to move through them as quickly as possible. I might have spent another 40 years trying to figure out what to do … but no, I now had a clear idea! Weirdly, a lot of the issues I was struggling with mentally and emotionally simply disappeared after that 2-hour session. But the big issue for me was around my sensitivity. I knew I had to find ways to manage it so I could stop feeling so overwhelmed all the time. One of the first things I did that made a huge difference to me was to learn how to cleanse, protect and ground my energy. I also consciously started to manage my energy better … I learnt to say ‘no’… to have more solid boundaries and not to sacrifice my health & wellbeing for others. Once I started doing that, I began to feel much better.
The biggest and most dramatic shift I felt on that day was the complete transformation in my sense of self. I’d always thought of myself as weak and flawed … I was always so anxious and worried all the time … I didn’t feel that I was robust like other people … But now I realised who and what I actually was … I wasn’t someone who was failing at life … Sandra said I was going through certain experiences (the anxiety, the panic, the desperation) in training for a higher mission. That was so powerful for me to hear … this knowledge reframed my entire existence. I walked out of her healing centre a few inches taller.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that through Sandra life had given me a template within which to direct my life going forward. It had given me a clear understanding of what I was here to do … and with this came a newfound confidence in myself and the path I was to tread. And … as is so often the way, the universe stepped in and brought new opportunities to me. I didn’t have to go out looking for them.
Shortly after the session, one of my team members at work lost her mum. She was devastated and was talking about it a lot … and I remember telling my manager that I didn’t know how to support her properly. My manager suggested I do a training course – counselling Level 1 listening skills.
I thought that was a good idea… I needed to clock up some CPD so I took the course, and you know what … I absolutely loved it. I thought to myself I can do this … I could actually be a therapist. After finishing the Level 1 course, I decided I wanted to do the next level of training to become a counsellor. By then it was becoming crystal clear to me that I wasn’t meant to be spending my days sitting behind a desk staring at a screen crunching numbers …
So, not long afterwards, in 2008, I resigned from my job. There was no clear plan. No end goal. I just took a leap of faith …. Sandra had told me that I had to learn to trust life and that the Universe would support me so I thought okay….I’ll trust that I’d be led to where I needed to go, and that it would all work out … and slowly but surely it did!
I retrained as a therapist and here I am today … running a very busy private practice.
So that’s my story … about the profound impact that my soul plan reading had on me and my life. It wasn’t by chance Sandra offered to do my soul plan reading on that day back in 2007. The Universe obviously wanted me to wake up and get on with what I had said I was coming to planet Earth to do…get on and align with my soul destiny…get on with my mission. And, I have to say the ease with which my retraining unfolded, and my private practice came about shows that the universe had indeed got my back. I feel so blessed to do what I do. The joy it gives me is off the chart.
Okay…so that’s enough about me. Let me ask you … are you looking for clarity? A sense of direction? A deeper understanding of yourself, your challenges and your spiritual purpose? What would it mean for you to know what your soul has come here to accomplish?
If you would genuinely like some answers, then I invite you to consider having a Soul Plan reading.
When you book a session with me, I’ll ask for your full name as recorded on your birth certificate, any official name changes, your known as name and your date of birth. These details allow me to generate your chart. We’ll then meet over Zoom … for around 2 hours to discuss your chart and explore how the energies are showing up in your life. You’ll also receive a detailed written report to take away with you. The information in this report remains relevant throughout your entire life… you can take it out at any point and you’ll be able to track back whatever is going on in your life to your soul plan – and find understanding/wisdom/recommendations to move through that experience, that challenge gracefully and quickly. You will also get a recording of the session to refer back to. We cover a lot of information in that two hours and it can be hard to take it all in in one go so I believe having a recording helps people to fully understand, assimilate and integrate the sacred information they are being given.
So, have a think about it.
If you’re interested, send me an email (you’ll find the email address in the show notes) and I’ll get straight back to you.
I believe in synchronicities so it may not be by chance that you’re here listening to this podcast today. Maybe you found your way here for a reason.
One thing I can say with great confidence … if you decide to have a reading, it will positively change your life in ways you could never dream of. It definitely did that for me. And, from the feedback I’ve had over the years, it’s done that for very many other people too.
Okay…so let me wrap it up there.
But before I go, remember, take excellent care of yourself, because you and I both know that if you don’t, no-one else will.
Bye for now.
It’s lovely to be back after a little break. I hope you’re doing really well.
All the way back in 2007 I had a life-changing experience which completely altered the course of my life in such a profound way. In fact, it’s true to say that had it not been for that experience, I might not be the holistic therapist that I am today.
What am I talking about? My soul plan reading, or soul contract reading as it is also known.
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you’ll know that a big part of my holistic life coaching practice involves delivering Soul Plan readings for others.
I trained as a practitioner in 2015 and have never looked back. Of all the services I offer, it’s the one I love delivering the most because it makes the most profound difference to people’s lives.
I’ve done hundreds of readings over the years, and I never cease to be amazed at how accurate a window it gives into a person’s life and experiences i. e. their soul journey – and what a profoundly positive difference it makes to their view of themselves and their life – just as it did for me all those years ago.
People always walk away from these readings with so much clarity, where before there was confusion … they feel reassured … and any feelings of regret or guilt about what’s going on in their lives just disappear in an instant… because they realise that their life is playing out exactly as it was always meant to be. It’s like the lights have been switched on and suddenly everything becomes crystal clear.
Now if you’ve had your soul plan reading with me, I think you know exactly what I am talking about because you’ll have had that very experience. I still invite you to stay tuned because in this episode, I’m going to be sharing more about this amazing body of work … and something I’ve never done before….and that is share some of the things on my own soul plan.
If you’re new to soul plans then, by the end of this episode you’ll have a really clear idea of what a Soul Plan reading can do for you.
So, this is Harinder, Holistic Life Coach, and you are listening to the Bringing You Back into Balance podcast.
So, let’s start with the obvious question. What exactly is a soul plan or a soul contract as it’s also referred to?
Your soul plan is the sacred contract you made before you came into this lifetime. It holds the spiritual blueprint of your life in this current incarnation. It’s like a map … a map that contains the vibrations of all the physical and spiritual experiences that your soul set out to have during your lifetime. Your soul chose this map and is using it to create your reality in each and every moment of your life.
Let me back up a little bit and give you some context … As you’re listening to this podcast, I’m guessing you accept the idea (or can at least keep an open mind to the fact) that our true essence is as spiritual beings. We are all, in our true essence, tiny sparks of the Divine … We’re born into a human form … we live for a period of time in this lifetime … and at the point of death, we leave behind our physical body … However, the spiritual, divine part of us does not die … it is eternal … and it returns to the higher realms after death.
Now, apparently we are playing a fancy game with the universe…. it’s called the game of separation … In the beginning, when our time/space paradigm was created there was one mighty outbreath of God … at that point our tiny souls separated from Source and were catapulted as far away from that starting point as it was possible … And, ever since then our souls have very gently been trying to take us back to that place of oneness with Source from which we all originated. We were separated millenia ago and we are all trying to find out way back home to God.
Every time we come into incarnation on this planet, we attempt to move closer to this original Source energy. Each time we come down here to planet Earth we pick an aspect of our Soul to work on … Imagine the Soul as a rough unpolished diamond … all its edges are clouded and rough … Each time we come down to Earth, our aim is to polish one of those rough edges until it becomes smooth, pure and bright. In this way, lifetime after lifetime we attempt to gradually make our way back to the total perfection that we came from … and when we reach that point, we don’t have to keep coming back here … the cycle of reincarnation is complete. We have reached enlightenment. The game is over. We have won.
Now if that is the setup then that means that every single lifetime we live has been very carefully designed to help us do our next bit of soul growth.
This means that our lives are not random events…where we are plonked on the Earth having a random set of experiences with a random group of people. No, each lifetime is very carefully designed to give us the optimal opportunity to do our next bit of spiritual growth.
Think about this…before you incarnated, you sat down with the Lords of Karma, beings from the angelic realms, your ancestors, members of your soul family and anyone else who is showing an interest in your spiritual growth, and you purposely designed this very life you are living now. You chose the lessons that you wanted to work through. You chose the qualities you were going to bring in to help you with these challenges and you chose the general direction you wanted your life to go in.
Now, here’s the amazing bit … all of this information – this plan if you like – has been encoded into the phonetical sound of your birth name. Your name is not an accident. It was purposely chosen by your Soul and intuitively sent to your parents before you were born. Sound is creative. And so, every single sound contained within your birth name is magnetically drawing experiences into your life… the exact experiences you need for your next bit of soul growth.
When we do a soul plan reading, we decode what these specific energies are.
We look at 4 main areas: Life Challenges; Drives; Talents & Qualities; and your Life Purpose.
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
The challenges are the learning environment that we deliberately set up so that we would be prompted to grow and develop. I think we can all agree that it’s the discomfort, the suffering, that prompts us to change, otherwise we tend to stay exactly where we are. Discomfort prompts us to seek answers and find ways to do things differently. For example, a soul may choose a deep pattern of disempowerment where it keeps getting bullied by others so that it can learn to stand up for itself and reclaim its power. Or a soul may choose to set up a difficult relationship dynamic with someone who keeps tempted it to engage in warfare because it is here to learn to stay aligned with peace.
The point of any challenge … physical, mental, emotional, financial and spiritual … is for us to evolve … we’re not supposed to stay stuck in the challenges but to work our way through them and get to the learning as quickly as possible. So firstly, your soul plan reading gives you instant clarity on what you are here to learn so that you can understand your challenges and see them for what they are…not sources of mindless suffering but prompts for spiritual learning and growth. And, if that isn’t insightful enough you also get a very clear set of recommendations to help you to actively work through your challenges, so you quickly move to a place of ease and empowerment.
For example, someone who is here to learn to step into their power needs to first heal their trauma, they need to learn to say ‘no’, they need to process their anger, they need to learn to set and maintain clear boundaries and to find ways to reclaim their power in everyday life situations.
More often than not conscious awareness of this is all that’s needed … I see huge shifts in people simply from the understanding of why their challenges are there. And, here’s the really wonderful thing…once the learning has been done the challenges simply disappear. Their work has been done. If you’ve been bullied and disempowered all your life imagine the power that would come from realising that the bullies have been programmed into your life, and will continue appearing in your life, until you learn to muster up the courage to stand up for yourself. That is all you need to do and the problems start to disappear.
Next we look at the physical and spiritual drives in a person’s life. Like a river, life flows in a certain direction. We are always being prompted to move towards something. These are the goals we have set ourselves … the things that our soul is seeking to accomplish … things we want to learn to do in order to evolve. For example, we may have a goal in this lifetime to learn to trust, to trust in the flow of abundance from the Universe. So, early in life we may encounter situations where our trust is first broken, for example we have not received enough love and nurture so we grow into adults not trusting that anything will be there for us. As soon as we start trusting then the abundance starts to flow. Again, this realisation is deeply empowering. It takes us out of victim mode….poor me…my parents neglected me and I’m still upset with them for that….to, oh okay, they were just creating the reality I needed for me to show my spirit guides that I do trust the Universe…I am worthy of love and if I learn to trust that good things can and will come my way, they will.
The third area that your Soul Plan will shed light on is the innate gifts and talents your soul has brought into this lifetime. These are the things you are naturally brilliant at doing. These are usually qualities you’ve perfected in previous lifetimes … and have brought into this life time to help you work through your challenges and materialise your drives. People find that if they consciously align their life to their gifts and talents, they effortlessly manifest success.
I love sharing people’s gifts and talents with them. Sometimes they are very aware of their gifts and their soul plan is just a confirmation of what they already know deep inside. But for others, especially if they’re still working through heavy challenges, these positive qualities may be suppressed. It’s wonderful to see people light up with the knowledge that they have these special attributes and talents … it always delights and inspires them.
And finally, the fourth component of a soul plan reading … this is the big one: your life purpose. Your soul plan clearly presents your soul destiny. This is the real meaning of your life, the deepest soul truth about why you came to Earth in the first place….what you are here to do in the world. For some people these are things that need to be expressed out in the world. For example, in my holistic life coaching practice I come across lots of service souls who are here to connect with their own power and are on a soul mission to make the world a better place. For others, their life purpose is more internal – they are here to learn to move to a place of greater self-acceptance, self-compassion and self-love. Or, move from naivety or foolishness to a place of wisdom and responsibility. These are just two examples. There are many more.
So, as you can hear your soul plan truly switches on all the lights in your life. There is no more confusion, no more needless suffering, no more indecision and definitely no more going round in circles with you wondering what the hell am I supposed to be doing here.
It’s truly incredible how it all works and comes together to help someone move forward with grace and ease.
Now it’s always easier to understand something if it’s presented in concrete rather than abstract terms … so let me do something I’ve never done before….briefly take you through my soul plan.
As I said at the start of this episode, my reading took place 17 years ago. It was 2007 and at that time I was a busy mum of two young children, working at the London Borough of Hounslow as Head of Research & Statistics. My life was fairly settled but it hadn’t always been that way … I’d had some big struggles with my mental health in the decades prior … I’d suffered from generalised anxiety & panic disorder.
What I learnt about myself on that day in 2007 was just incredible. Now looking back and not only remembering that day but also what has happened since, I can see just how pivotal that day was for me. It completely reshaped my life.
My soul plan reading with done by a wonderful woman and very powerful healer called Sandra Ditta Herrman. She’s sadly no longer with us. I’d done quite a lot of one to one and group healing and training with Sandra so when she said, ‘Harinder, I’ve learnt something new - could I do a session on you?’ I jumped at the chance and said ‘yes please’.
Well, she asked me for my full name so she could draw up my soul plan and invited me in for a reading.
I first thing I remember as we sat down to look at my soul plan, was her very accurately recounting some of my difficult childhood experiences. She told me that my challenges in early life were related to two big soul lessons: 1) I had to experience death/loss so that I was forced to raise my spiritual consciousness, learn to value life and do something constructive with it, and 2) I was here to learn wisdom and resiliency through overcoming a deep programme of hypersensitivity and emotional reactivity. Both of these challenges created a huge amount of disruption and chaos in my inner world, but their purpose was to help me learn to become emotionally resilient and to respond to any situation that life presented calmly, objectively and from a higher spiritual perspective (i.e. from a place of wisdom).
Wow! I was stunned. That made a lot of sense to me. I’d definitely experienced these energies in my younger life. I’d had one very traumatic brush with death. When I was 13 my grandma passed away very suddenly during a trip to India that we’d taken as a family. I loved her so much, she’d been the absolute centre of my world until that point and her sudden death shook me to the very core.
I had felt so distressed and alone in my grief. I really felt like I was drowning in a sea of emotions – but in my darkest moments …in the depth of my suffering, where I had nowhere else to turn, I did the one thing this programme was designed to do…and that was connected closer with God. I found my consciousness rising and my aspiration to connect with God on the very day my grandma died. That day I sat on the veranda in India next to the body of my dead grandma was the very first day I did the Japji Sahib (the morning prayer of the Sikh faith) from start to finish. That experience of death did indeed kickstart a very close relationship with my faith. And, that was what my soul planning was all about at that point in my life.
After the trauma of my grandma’s passing, I experienced years of PTSD, panic and anxiety. I struggled a lot back then because there were no counsellors and anxiety wasn’t talked about in the way it is now … I had loads of love and kindness from my parents…my brother…my wider family but very little support for what was going on. But I’d find that every time I’d have a breakdown … and there were several of those during my younger years … I remember one especially difficult time during my O’ levels when I became really unwell … every time that would happen and I’d get desperate… it would make me reach deeper and deeper into my spirituality … I’d come across someone or something that would expand my understanding/perspective on life, on spirituality and it would lead me to a higher perspective and, over the years, to greater wisdom.
Now looking at my soul plan with Sandra I discovered that was exactly how the energies of the death-to-life soul lesson work. The trauma makes you reach towards higher learning, towards higher or more peaceful states of being … towards Spirit. It’s all about raising your consciousness.
My second major challenge in life, I learnt, came from being hypersensitive. Again, this was completely spot on! I’d always felt so fragile and lost all the time. I thought I was weak…that there was something wrong with me … I’d become overwhelmed so easily, that sometimes just managing day-to-day life was a struggle. My sensitivity also contributed to high levels of anxiety. Looking at my soul plan, I realised … actually it’s not my fault … I couldn’t have helped this … it was the way it was supposed to be … there was nothing wrong with me, it was just the way I was built. My hypersensitivity provided the negative context of my life from which I was meant to learn and grow. The point of the challenge was to learn how to manage my sensitivity … not to let it flatten me.
If you’ve had your soul plan reading done, you’ll know that we talk in terms of numbers. The numbers represent the energies at work in a person’s chart.
In my chart I have the numbers 8-8. My challenge in relation to the negative aspects of these energies, I was told, was around people-pleasing. Wherever I went I was absorbing energy from other people … just like a sponge … Not only was this feeding into my own stress levels, but it also made me overly giving and self-sacrificing. Because I was picking up on everyone else’s emotions, I was overly focused on making sure everyone else was okay, regardless of what was going on in my own inner world. This number brought wobbly boundaries and was overly passive and compliant.
This was so true for me! My entire upbringing was about being obedient and compliant … always doing whatever was expected of me, always putting myself out to accommodate others … always doing whatever other people asked with a smile on my face, no matter what the personal cost. I now understood that the lesson for me here was to learn to be grounded … to heal the trauma that was sitting in my heart and my stomach, so I could connect to other people’s pain from my heart… and not just stay up in my head all the time as that was my safe space. I needed to learn to be less self-sacrificing and have better boundaries with others. This was what would take me from the negative to the positive aspects of these 8-8 energies.
The other big soul lesson for me, I was told, related to the numbers 22-4. This lesson was around learning to balance my mind, body and soul so that God/Source/Spirit could work through me. The challenge that came with this was around being deeply unbalanced in my early life – focusing too much on one aspect of my being while neglecting the other aspects. Again, this was spot on! I’d always been pretty connected to my spirit … BUT for a long time my mind had been crazily out of control … and as for my body, well that had hardly got a look in – it had been totally disregarded. I can honestly say there was a time when I didn’t even realise I had a body! I was that disconnected from myself….I was so ungrounded. These energies also meant I had a programme running where I was convinced there was something horribly wrong with me … I had to deal with a lot of toxic and misguided thoughts about myself. Once again, the reading was amazingly accurate as I could relate everything that was being said to my lived experience. The 22-4 experience was also about learning to trust in life, in the Universe. Sandra clearly told me that the key to unlocking my fortune in life was trust. The more I could do that the more good would flow into my life and the more I could move into the role of a healer – someone who allows Source energy to work through her. I couldn’t believe I had the potential to do that. I felt so broken back then.
Sandra then went onto to present my gifts and talents. These were the energies I had brought into this lifetime and could and should be using in service to the world.
I discovered 1) that I was highly empathic. I had the ability to immediately tune into other people’s energies and know exactly how they were feeling. I was very good at relating to others … like a chameleon I could mould myself to whoever I was with, and this would give me the ability to get on with lots of different people.
And 2) the numbers 16-7 in my chart meant that I was good at relaying complex spiritual information to others. I was able to tune into higher guidance from spirit and then communicate the channelled information I was receiving in a very accessible, very grounded way.
Both of these energies, the empathy and the spiritual communication, would, I was told, make me a very good therapist … once, that is, I had mastered the lesson of bringing my mind, body and soul into total balance. Sandra said I was a natural born healer. I remember, at the time I couldn’t believe this! Me?! I felt like such a nervous wreck at the time that this sounded absolutely ludicrous…I remember laughing in disbelief, trying to wrap my head around what I was being told. But, you know what, if I’m honest there was some deeper part of me that knew what she was telling me was the truth.
And finally … we came to my soul purpose. What I’d actually come here to do.
My soul plan showed that firstly I was here to heal my heart chakra. I needed to clear out all the low frequency energies that had accumulated from lifetimes of loss and grief … AND I had to stop hiding parts of myself from others. I needed to embrace and integrate all aspects of myself – the light and the dark – so I could show up more fully as myself. This meant I needed to do some serious shadow work … bringing the hidden parts of myself out into the light … and I have to say this is something that I’m still working on today.
And, the cherry on the cake was my 9-9 dragon energies which sit in my soul destiny…my life purpose. Sandra told me that I was a highly evolved soul who was here to use my spiritual gifts in service to humanity. My entire life was about gradually moving from a place of disempowerment to a place of empowerment and God realisation …or enlightenment. The Universe was just waiting for me to quieten down my very negative, noisy egoic mind so that my body and my life could be used for channelled service. Ie. so that God could work through me.
Now, I have to say, all of this information just blew my mind! I remember coming out of the reading on that day in a state of complete disbelief. Me?! Here to serve humanity?! Working as a channel for God. Reaching enlightenment. What the hell? But you know what, as I just said there was a some deeper part of me that totally resonated with everything I was being told. It was true. This is who I am. But, I clearly had a ridiculous amount of work to do on myself first.
Well, slowly, I began to realise that my soul plan reading had not only given me a clear insight into the purpose of my challenges, more importantly, it had shown me how to move through them as quickly as possible. I might have spent another 40 years trying to figure out what to do … but no, I now had a clear idea! Weirdly, a lot of the issues I was struggling with mentally and emotionally simply disappeared after that 2-hour session. But the big issue for me was around my sensitivity. I knew I had to find ways to manage it so I could stop feeling so overwhelmed all the time. One of the first things I did that made a huge difference to me was to learn how to cleanse, protect and ground my energy. I also consciously started to manage my energy better … I learnt to say ‘no’… to have more solid boundaries and not to sacrifice my health & wellbeing for others. Once I started doing that, I began to feel much better.
The biggest and most dramatic shift I felt on that day was the complete transformation in my sense of self. I’d always thought of myself as weak and flawed … I was always so anxious and worried all the time … I didn’t feel that I was robust like other people … But now I realised who and what I actually was … I wasn’t someone who was failing at life … Sandra said I was going through certain experiences (the anxiety, the panic, the desperation) in training for a higher mission. That was so powerful for me to hear … this knowledge reframed my entire existence. I walked out of her healing centre a few inches taller.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that through Sandra life had given me a template within which to direct my life going forward. It had given me a clear understanding of what I was here to do … and with this came a newfound confidence in myself and the path I was to tread. And … as is so often the way, the universe stepped in and brought new opportunities to me. I didn’t have to go out looking for them.
Shortly after the session, one of my team members at work lost her mum. She was devastated and was talking about it a lot … and I remember telling my manager that I didn’t know how to support her properly. My manager suggested I do a training course – counselling Level 1 listening skills.
I thought that was a good idea… I needed to clock up some CPD so I took the course, and you know what … I absolutely loved it. I thought to myself I can do this … I could actually be a therapist. After finishing the Level 1 course, I decided I wanted to do the next level of training to become a counsellor. By then it was becoming crystal clear to me that I wasn’t meant to be spending my days sitting behind a desk staring at a screen crunching numbers …
So, not long afterwards, in 2008, I resigned from my job. There was no clear plan. No end goal. I just took a leap of faith …. Sandra had told me that I had to learn to trust life and that the Universe would support me so I thought okay….I’ll trust that I’d be led to where I needed to go, and that it would all work out … and slowly but surely it did!
I retrained as a therapist and here I am today … running a very busy private practice.
So that’s my story … about the profound impact that my soul plan reading had on me and my life. It wasn’t by chance Sandra offered to do my soul plan reading on that day back in 2007. The Universe obviously wanted me to wake up and get on with what I had said I was coming to planet Earth to do…get on and align with my soul destiny…get on with my mission. And, I have to say the ease with which my retraining unfolded, and my private practice came about shows that the universe had indeed got my back. I feel so blessed to do what I do. The joy it gives me is off the chart.
Okay…so that’s enough about me. Let me ask you … are you looking for clarity? A sense of direction? A deeper understanding of yourself, your challenges and your spiritual purpose? What would it mean for you to know what your soul has come here to accomplish?
If you would genuinely like some answers, then I invite you to consider having a Soul Plan reading.
When you book a session with me, I’ll ask for your full name as recorded on your birth certificate, any official name changes, your known as name and your date of birth. These details allow me to generate your chart. We’ll then meet over Zoom … for around 2 hours to discuss your chart and explore how the energies are showing up in your life. You’ll also receive a detailed written report to take away with you. The information in this report remains relevant throughout your entire life… you can take it out at any point and you’ll be able to track back whatever is going on in your life to your soul plan – and find understanding/wisdom/recommendations to move through that experience, that challenge gracefully and quickly. You will also get a recording of the session to refer back to. We cover a lot of information in that two hours and it can be hard to take it all in in one go so I believe having a recording helps people to fully understand, assimilate and integrate the sacred information they are being given.
So, have a think about it.
If you’re interested, send me an email (you’ll find the email address in the show notes) and I’ll get straight back to you.
I believe in synchronicities so it may not be by chance that you’re here listening to this podcast today. Maybe you found your way here for a reason.
One thing I can say with great confidence … if you decide to have a reading, it will positively change your life in ways you could never dream of. It definitely did that for me. And, from the feedback I’ve had over the years, it’s done that for very many other people too.
Okay…so let me wrap it up there.
But before I go, remember, take excellent care of yourself, because you and I both know that if you don’t, no-one else will.
Bye for now.
