Clearing Past Life Contracts and Vows through the Akashic Records

Past life contracts (also known as past life vows) are oaths, promises, pledges, commitments, declarations, or decisions that you made in past lifetimes regarding a specific situation. These contracts are outdated and limiting but you’ll continue to re-create them in your life until you consciously revoke them.

How do I know if my current issue/pattern/problem is related to a past life contract?

If you have a behavior, issue, pattern, or habitual state of thought/being that you’re unable to shift after repeatedly working on it, it might be linked to a past life contract or vow. It might also feel like you have a pattern of being or thinking that just doesn’t correlate or align with what you would do now. It might also feel like there’s something in your life that haunts you, or that you can’t seem to get past, or that makes you feel like a victim (even though you know deep down you’re not a victim). These kinds of indicators typically point to some form of disempowering contract you made in the past.

A past life contract or vow is always related to an unconscious pledge you made in a moment of emotional reactivity in a past life. By “emotional reactivity”, I mean a moment of anger, jealousy, intense fear, worry, or suffering. For example, let’s say that you had a lot of money in a past life and everyone seemed to love you only for your wealth. This caused you suffering and made you distrustful of other people and their motives. In that past life, you might have made a contract like “I will never have money again to protect myself from attracting people for the wrong reasons.” A contract might also take the form of a deeply-held belief, like “Having money means that no one will love me for me — so I will not have any money in future lifetimes to avoid this problem.”

A contract could also be a decision you made about yourself in relationship to another person or institution. Some vows are formal—such as religious vows of poverty or obedience—and others are more informal—such as vows of “I’ll never leave [insert person’s name]” or “I will always make myself small/invisible to avoid conflict.”

A few general vows that many of us have made include:

• vow of poverty
• vow of celibacy
• vow of suffering
• vow of silence
• vow of self-punishment through illness
• vow of self-effacement
• vow of servitude
• vow of obedience
• vow of revenge
• vow to block creativity

The “terms” of a contract are often phrased in the following ways (as you read through these, notice if any resonate with you at a gut level):

• I will take care of you forever
• I will never love again
• I will hate you/this forever
• I will be with your forever
• I will always put myself last
• I will always make myself small/invisible
• I will never speak up
• I will always punish myself through unfulfilling jobs
• I will never have enough money
• I will always be unworthy
• I will always be poor
• I will always obey authority
• I will never be a sexual being again
• I will never reclaim or use my own power
• I will always see myself as unworthy
• I will never trust my intuition, and I will always defer to an external source of authority (i.e., church, priest, guru, etc)

Healers and past life contracts

If you’re a healer, you may have made past life contracts or vows related to your healing gifts. These can include:

• I will always carry these souls with me
• I will always punish myself for being psychic/intuitive
• I will always cut myself off from my intuition
• I will always take care of these people/this person
• I will somehow right this wrong or get justice, regardless of my personal well-being and safety
• I will never teach again
• I will never let myself earn a living using my spiritual gifts

These vows are always spoken in the heat of the moment, or in response to a traumatic or negative experience you had in a past life. For example, if you were persecuted in a past life for being intuitive/psychic, you might have made an informal vow to never access or use your intuition again.

How do past life contracts manifest physically?

Beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and memories have energetic components. All thought forms leave traces of themselves in the energy field. At the same time, thought forms (including vows & contracts) tend to manifest in different physical ways. For example:

• a vow of silence might manifest as a feeling of tightness around the throat or recurrent throat infections/issues
• a vow of never moving forward might manifest as knee or leg pain
• a vow of putting yourself last might manifest as issues setting boundaries in relationships or being unable to recognize your own needs/desires
• a vow to never use your intuition again might manifest as total separation from Source and/or unwillingness to explore spirituality, which might keep you stuck in an unfulfilling job or leading a life that feels “incomplete”

Of course, the physical manifestation of a vow is not always an exact correlation to the vow’s theme. A vow of silence might also manifest as any other form of physical pain or discomfort. Very often, though, our physical symptoms can be symbolic in some way and related to the vows we’ve made in the past.

Past life contracts stuck in your energy field

Vows and contracts become embedded in your energy field and energetic DNA through the powerful intensity of their words and the beliefs you had when you made them. This is why vows often carry the words “never again,” “forever,” “always,” etc. This is also why contracts can become triggered and re-activated in your current lifetime, and why it’s almost impossible to shift your behavior and feelings until you consciously revoke them. Other forms of healing work – like shadow work, energy healing, Reiki, etc – can be helpful in alleviating the symptoms of a contract, but they can’t revoke a contract. That’s where the Akashic Records come in.

As we’ve been exploring, past life contracts get in the way of your spiritual development and enjoyment of the present moment. They can lead to issues such as self-sabotage, illness, problematic relationships, phobias, addictions, financial instability, and excessive self-sacrifice – to name a few.

However, you incarnated into physical form partly to experience free will. This means that you have the responsibility and freedom to choose if you want to continue re-creating these contracts or not. You can choose to clear and revoke your past life vows and create your life more consciously starting now.

Identifying a contract’s “benevolent intent”

Before contracts or vows can be revoked, one of the most important things I do with my clients is help them identify the benevolent intent of a contract. (We might also call this the secondary gain.) For example, with a contract of not having any money (or being able to make money but never holding on to it for long), the benevolent intent might be:

• protecting yourself from being loved only for your money
• protecting yourself from the responsibility of having to manage your money
• avoiding having to pay taxes
• keeping yourself in a state of high adrenaline/survival mode because you’ve learned that it’s the best way to stay “safe”
• protecting yourself from losing your money or from others asking you for financial help

Without this important step of identifying the benevolent intent, it can be difficult to try to revoke a contract successfully. Your internal system – including your nervous system – has to feel safe about revoking a contract. If your internal system senses that it will somehow “lose out” by revoking this contract, it will unconsciously put the emergency brake on and keep you re-creating the contract indefinitely.

Healing Journey to Clear Ancestral Contracts & Vows

I’ve created a comprehensive 40-minute guided healing journey where we sweep through each of your energy centers, or chakras, to clear and revoke any ancestral contracts, patterns, or burdens held there. To access this healing journey, go here: Clearing Ancestral Contracts, Patterns, and Burdens

With love,
Josephine