Thank you.

Your husband asks a very good and important question, though.

We can go into as much detail as you like, but just briefly, the five main reasons for planning big challenges before birth are balancing and releasing karma, healing, which refers to healing energies from past lives that weren't healed then, and so they're carried back into the body for healing now, Service to others, experiencing contrast, which means experiencing not love.

And you want that because it gives you a deeper understanding of what unconditional love really is.

And the fifth one is correcting false beliefs or feelings about oneself, such as beliefs that one is powerless or unworthy or worthless.

There's also a lot of the planning of challenges revolves around the desire to cultivate certain qualities that are important to the soul.

I call these divine virtues.

Why? Why is it more difficult than other places in the universe?

But before we get into all of that, why don't we start with the three events that you had in 2003 that really set you on the path that you're on today, and we'll go from there.

Yeah, sure.

So as you said, back in 2003, I was in the corporate world.

I was self-employed as a marketing and communications consultant and did not enjoy that at all.

On the contrary, I often had the feeling that If I fell off the face of the Earth, my clients wouldn't even know that I was gone.

They would just plug somebody else in and carry right along.

I also had this nagging sense that I had come to Earth to do something quite specific, but I didn't know what it was, and I didn't even know how to figure out what it was.

But so I'm curious, do we get to choose all our main events or just some of them?

Mm-hmm.

And yet the wisdom that comes out of it becomes part of the soul for literally all eternity.

So in John's case, as he comes into a remembrance of himself as a holy, eternal soul, from the soul's perspective, this results in a more profound self-knowing, a greater self-awareness of oneself as love, as the energy of love.

The suffering that John endures by being shamed by people, from the soul's perspective, is very, very brief, very transitory, but that wisdom, that more profound self-knowing soul, has that now for all eternity.

Why plan these incidents? Why, why plan anything? What's the point? What's the purpose?

Well, one of the reasons we, we discussed a moment ago, and that is to balance karma, but there are several others that are very important.

One is healing, and an example of that is a woman, Penelope, who's in the chapter in Courageous Souls on deafness and blindness.

Penelope planned before she was born to be born completely deaf.

Hmm.

The question is, how much less harmful are they?However, if I am asked personally by a person who smokes cigarettes, "Should I completely switch to vaping e-cigarettes?" I would say, "Yes, absolutely.

It's very likely that your risks of health effects are much lower, and stop vaping those e-cigarettes as soon as you possibly can 'cause that's the only way you're really going to minimize or get rid of that risk." Um, what are the health, uh, risks of using e-cigarettes? Well, I'll start with addiction because we ended with that on cigarettes.

So depending on what e-cigarettes you're using and what concentration of nicotine and how you use it, e-cigarettes can actually have, uh, much more, uh, nicotine, uh, than cigarettes.

In addition, uh, we don't have conclusive evidence about coronary disease, about respiratory disease, uh, about cancer, or about diabetes.

Um, we do have preliminary evidence that is quite suggestive that, uh, there are respiratory symptoms that we see, so coughing and wheezing, for example, are, uh, higher amongst people who vape than amongst people who do not vape e-cigarettes.

Um, and people who vape nicotine, the heart rate goes up when you're, when you're vaping.

Um, is this something that could be considered in Canada?