Born to Remember

Remembrance: A Journey from Birth to Awakening

The Contract Before Birth

My arrival was guided by something older, deeper, and far more intentional than human logic could grasp. I came as part of a soul contract—a timeless agreement made long before I ever took my first breath.

We all choose, before we’re born, the blueprint of our experiences. It’s not about fate in the way people often talk about it—it’s about sacred alignment. Each joy and each ache, every abandonment and every embrace, is chosen with love and purpose. The human life is the dream; our real self, the eternal self, agrees to forget in order to remember again.

That forgetting, as painful as it sometimes is, is the journey itself.

My childhood was not easy, not because of some random cruelty, but because my soul required it. Rejection. Neglect. Conditional love. Deep Fear. They weren’t punishments—they were the curriculum. I came here to learn something specific. My syllabus included letting go, practicing detachment, walking through forgiveness, and choosing self-embrace no matter what storms I was handed. Every moment of confusion was preparing me to wake up. Even in the chaos I was held. Each experience was chosen by me, for me.

I now see it all for what it was. Nothing was out of place. Everything had a place. I was being guided through layers of forgetting—so that I could awaken from within it. Not to escape the human experience, but to live it with eyes wide open. There’s a kind of quiet revolution that happens when you begin to live your life from the awareness that you are more than your form. It doesn’t look dramatic on the outside, but inside, mountains move.

For decades I was inside the dream, thinking it was all real: the fears, the stories, the roles. But then I started to remember. It didn’t happen in a single moment—it unfolded in stages. With every heartbreak and breakthrough, with each time I fell and got back up, a little more of my true self returned. Not because I added something new, but because I was peeling away what I was not.

At 43, I stand with reverence for it all—the beauty and the ache, the doubt and the surrender. The child who felt unloved, the teen who searched for belonging, the woman who began to see—all of them were me, and all of them were necessary.

Living this human dream from an awake state was the point all along. It was never about escaping the pain. It was about seeing it clearly and knowing: this too is love. Love in its most complex disguise. A divine plan playing out through the rawness of human life.

Now I know: I can let go. I will be held.

And the remembering isn’t just for me. That’s the other part of the contract—once we remember, we’re meant to reach back. To light a lamp for the next one still walking through their night. To remind them, gently or fiercely: You are not lost. You are only forgetting. And soon, you will remember.

The Illusion of Others, The Reflection of Self

There’s a moment in every awakening where the illusion begins to crumble—not just intellectually, but viscerally. You begin to see what was always hidden in plain sight. That the people around you—your parents, your siblings, your partner, your children, your friends—aren’t just others walking beside you. They are mirrors. They are soul invitations.

At first, this is hard to grasp, because it feels so real. The emotions are so sharp. The love is so deep. The anger is so raw. The grief is so heavy. You look at those around you and instinctively feel the pull to reach out, to rescue, to fix, to guide. That desire to help is genuine. But I’ve learned something crucial on this path: if you reach out to help while you’re still disconnected from your own remembrance, the help you offer cannot bear the fruit you long for.

Why? Because the emotional stirrings that others evoke in us are not just signals to rush toward them—they are sacred arrows pointing us back inward. Toward the soul. Toward the truth. Toward the hidden remembering that says, Before you serve another, you must return to yourself.

This is one of the deepest illusions in the human dream: the belief that we are here to change others before we’ve seen our own reflection clearly. That illusion keeps us entangled in roles—rescuer, fixer, helper—when what is truly being asked of us is to see. To remember. To awaken first.

When we act from a state of disorientation—disconnected from who we truly are—our efforts to help often come with expectation, subtle control, or unconscious pain. We offer advice with an emotional hook. We support others in ways that secretly ask for validation or a specific outcome. And then we’re hurt when it doesn’t play out the way we hoped. That’s not service. That’s survival.

But when help comes from remembrance—from the grounded knowing of who you really are—it moves differently. It carries no agenda. It seeks no applause. It simply pours. Like water from a full cup, it flows without effort and leaves both the giver and the receiver nourished. It feels light. Clean. Free.

I’ve had to learn this lesson over and over. There were times I tried so hard to fix family dynamics, to heal others’ wounds, to hold up people who weren’t asking to be held. And time after time, it didn’t lead where I thought it would. Not because I was wrong to care—but because I hadn’t yet returned home to myself. I hadn’t fully remembered.

And that’s the cosmic irony: the ones we feel most compelled to help are often the ones whose presence is meant to help us awaken. The child’s tantrum that stirs old wounds. The parent’s disapproval that echoes your inner critic. The partner’s silence that forces you into your own stillness. It’s all sacred design. They’re not detours on the path—they are the path.

Now, I’ve come to see service in a new way. It’s not something I do—it’s who I am when I remember. The more I live from that remembering, the more my very presence becomes the offering. No performance. No proving. Just presence.

This shift changed everything.

It changed how I parent, how I love, how I listen, how I hold space. It even changed how I let others fall. Because from remembrance, I know that even their falls are sacred. And sometimes, the most loving thing I can do is not intervene, but witness them in their own becoming—just as I was witnessed in mine.

This is the paradox of love in an awakened life: we realize that others are real and yet they are also symbolic. They are dream figures and divine catalysts. They are both reflections and fellow travelers. And we love them best not by losing ourselves in their story, but by anchoring in our own.

That’s when help becomes holy. That’s when service becomes soul.

Because it’s no longer about changing the dream.
It’s about waking up inside it—and then extending your hand from that place of truth.