Love as a Catalyst for Change: Soul Contracts & Past Life Regression

What if the most painful love of your life was a soul contract — a pre-agreed meeting designed not to complete you, but to break you open in exactly the way you needed? That is the question past life regression and LBL therapy raised for the woman at the centre of this story from Memories of the Afterlife. She had tried everything else. What she found in regression was not comfort, exactly. It was something rarer: a framework that finally held the weight of what she had been through without collapsing.

Nothing explained it. And nothing released it.

Then she lay down on a therapist’s couch in New York, closed her eyes, and followed the guidance of Paul Aurand, a certified LBL therapist and contributor to Memories of the Afterlife (2009), edited by Michael Newton. What she accessed under deep hypnosis was not a memory in the ordinary sense. It was a recognition — of something she had agreed to long before she was born.

The man who had broken her heart was not her adversary. He was her co-author.

The LBL Session That Reframed Everything

Paul Aurand works with life between lives regression, a hypnotic method developed by Michael Newton that guides clients through death and into the spirit world, where they access memories of what happens between incarnations — the planning sessions, soul groups, council meetings, and pre-birth agreements that shape each lifetime.

The therapist reported that this particular client came in carrying a story about herself as someone love had defeated. She had constructed a careful narrative: she had loved unwisely, she had been left, she had been changed by it. The relationship was the wound. The man was the cause. Time was supposed to be the cure.

Under LBL hypnosis, the client recalled entering a between-life state in which she was reviewing her upcoming incarnation. What she found there restructured everything. She saw herself and the soul she would come to love in this life — not as victim and perpetrator, not as star-crossed lovers — but as two souls in conversation, working out the terms of a very specific arrangement.

He would love her fully enough that she would drop her defenses. Then he would leave. Because her soul’s most urgent work in this lifetime was waiting on the other side of that heartbreak, and she would never arrive there if she stayed comfortable.

The therapist reported that the client initially resisted this picture. It felt like a spiritual bypass — a way of dressing up genuine harm in the language of purpose. But as she stayed with the material, something shifted. The resistance gave way not to acceptance, but to recognition. Some part of her had always known this, she said. She just hadn’t had a framework for it.

Love, Karma, and the Soul’s Curriculum

What makes the concept of a love soul contract so challenging — and so quietly liberating — is that it requires an entirely different understanding of what karma actually is.

In the version most people inherit, karma is transactional: cause and effect, debt and repayment, what you do coming back to you in kind. It is a ledger. And in that ledger, painful experiences are punishments, or at minimum, consequences.

The therapist reported that what the client encountered in her LBL session told a different story. Karma, as it appeared in her between-life memory, was not a punishment mechanism. It was a relational curriculum — an ongoing conversation between souls about what each one needs in order to grow. The pain she had experienced was not the universe collecting a debt. It was the universe delivering exactly what she had asked for, from a level of herself she hadn’t been conscious of.

The client recalled under LBL hypnosis a review of previous lifetimes she had shared with this soul. The pattern was consistent: in life after life, she had chosen safety over depth. She loved carefully, strategically, with one foot always near the door. The soul who became her former partner had played many different roles across their shared history — friend, parent, rival — but in this lifetime, the assignment was different. He had agreed to be the one who made playing it safe impossible.

He loved her without reservation. He loved her in a way that required her to love back the same way, because anything less felt like a lie. And then he left. Not because he stopped loving her, but because, at a soul level, that was the agreement. His departure was the curriculum.

The therapist reported that this reframe did not make the client feel better in the simple sense. It made her feel true. There is a difference.

What the Spirit World Knows About Heartbreak

One of the things that surfaces consistently in LBL accounts — across Newton’s decades of casework and in the therapist cases documented in Memories of the Afterlife — is the quality of compassion that characterizes the spirit world’s approach to human suffering. Souls are not judged for how they handled their pain. They are not told they wasted time, loved the wrong people, or should have recovered faster.

The between-life review, as Aurand’s client experienced it, was characterized by something she described as «total understanding.» Her guides and council members did not approach her pain as a problem. They approached it as material — the raw substance from which her growth had been made.

The therapist reported that at one point in the session, the client witnessed what her former partner had agreed to carry in exchange for the role he played. This is one of the more unexpectedly moving dimensions of LBL work: the recognition that the souls who agree to play difficult roles in our lives often take on weight themselves in the bargain.

She saw him, before they were born, understand what his assignment would cost him. He would spend much of his own lifetime with a low-level grief he couldn’t name — the sadness of a soul who knows it has done something necessary but not kind. He would not consciously understand why. His soul had taken that on willingly, the client recalled. Because it loved her.

This is the dimension of a love soul contract that tends to dismantle the story of victimhood most completely. The people who cause us the most profound pain are not always our opponents. Sometimes they are our most committed allies, willing to be the villain in our chapter because they care too much about our growth to let us stay comfortable.

The client cried for a long time after accessing this information. Not from grief, the therapist reported. From recognition.

What a Soul Contract Means for How We Love Now

There is an obvious question that arises when someone encounters this kind of material: does understanding a painful relationship as a soul contract mean you should accept mistreatment? Does it mean nothing can be done wrong because everything is agreed to?

The answer that emerges from Newton’s method — and from Aurand’s case in particular — is a clear no. Understanding the soul-level architecture of a relationship does not remove free will or moral responsibility. It does not make harm acceptable or mean that every difficult experience is serving a noble purpose. What it does is invite a different quality of engagement with your own history.

The therapist reported that after the session, the client described a fundamental shift in how she understood herself in relation to love. She had spent years operating from a wound — protecting herself from a depth of feeling that had once undone her, using the heartbreak as evidence that loving fully was dangerous. The LBL session did not tell her that love was safe. It told her that the capacity she had developed through that loss — the ability to feel deeply, to be changed by connection, to remain open even after rupture — was precisely what her soul had come to this lifetime to cultivate.

The heartbreak had been the method. She was the result.

According to Newton’s method, the spirit world does not encourage souls to transcend love or graduate out of it. It deepens into love across lifetimes, and each incarnation adds new facets to a soul’s capacity for connection. The woman in Aurand’s case had not been punished by love. She had been educated by it.

What This Means for You

You do not have to believe in past lives for this to be useful. You do not have to accept the entire framework of soul contracts and between-life planning sessions to take something from this case.

What Paul Aurand’s client found under LBL hypnosis was a way of understanding her most painful experience not as evidence of her failure, but as evidence of her capacity. The love had been real. The loss had been real. And both had served something she could now consciously choose to carry forward.

There is a question this case leaves with you, regardless of your beliefs: what if the relationship that most changed you was not a mistake? What if the love that hurt you was not evidence that you chose wrong — but evidence that you were capable of choosing deeply?

The soul, according to those who work with past life regression and LBL therapy, does not waste experience. Every incarnation is curated for growth. Every connection that reaches us deeply has reached us for a reason, even when — especially when — we cannot yet see it.

For the woman who spent forty years believing love had defeated her, the LBL session with Paul Aurand did not simply reframe a relationship. It reframed her. She left his office with something she hadn’t had in years: genuine curiosity about what loving next might make of her.

That is what a soul contract looks like from the inside. Not a cage. A curriculum.

---

Ready to explore your own between-lives experience? Find a certified LBL therapist →

Related Articles

• Animal Souls and Past Lives: What a Goose Revealed
• Soul Mate Contracts: When Love Breaks You Open
• Violent Past Lives: How Karma Heals a Warrior Soul
• Experiencing the Council of Elders: A First-Person LBL Account
• Free Will and Past Life Regression: Moving Past Regret

---

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, Reincarnatiopedia earns from qualifying purchases. This helps support our research and publishing at no extra cost to you.