I’m currently reading the amazing book Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden.

Without giving too much away, it’s important to share that before she married her husband, she initiated a prenup with the help of the family lawyer. She and her husband signed it before they got married. At one point, her husband asked for a modification that would eventually become important as the marriage dissolved.

Reading this reminded me of the many employment agreements I helped to negotiate for my clients when I was a recruiter. Some of them approached $1 million in compensation and had lots of nuances to consider. There was compensation for upside results, of course, but also consideration for the possibility of a less-than-acrimonious exit.

Which led me to thinking about another kind of agreement.

A sacred contract.

Depending on your belief system, and because I’m currently down the rabbit hole of near-death experiences, I’ve been feeling a really strong connection to Divine Love and Wisdom. I actually stole that phrase from a book title by scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. It feels like the right concept of God for me right now.

With prenups and employment agreements, everything is written down. Copies are made. Decades later, you can pull out the agreement and see exactly what everyone agreed to. The terms are right there in writing and, theoretically at least, harder to dispute.

But what if there is another kind of agreement?

What if we have a Sacred Contract?

What Is a Sacred Contract?

The way I think about a Sacred Contract is the idea that before you inhabited the body you’re walking around in right now, you had some sort of agreement with Divine Love and Wisdom about what you wanted to learn and how you wanted to grow and evolve this time around.

This would include agreeing to the challenges you would face and what gifts, abilities, and skills you would develop and use throughout your life, with relationships, and in your career … your form of service in the world.

A sacred contract about your divine purpose. Read more on Purpose in this blog.

EXCEPT … the issue is that it’s a Sacred Contract written in the spiritual world that we’re living out in the physical world.

I don’t have anything I can pull out of my desk drawer and reread to remind myself of what I agreed to do here on Earth.

And I think that’s where some of the self-imposed pressure might come from.

The earthly confusion.

The questions like:

• What is my purpose?
• Why am I here?
• Am I doing this thing right?
• Why do I seem to keep repeating the same limiting patterns or actions that feel anything but sacred?

Perhaps the better question is:

Do we have a way to reread our Sacred Contract?

Do we have a way to remind ourselves of why we’re here and what we’re meant to be doing?

I don’t know that I have the answers but I do know it would be fun to explore the ways we might connect with this Sacred Contract and use what we discover to adjust our thinking, our actions, our careers, and our lives.

How to Discover Your Sacred Contract

Maybe we can’t actually pull our sacred contract out of a desk drawer but perhaps we can look for clues.

1. Consider What Sacred Means to You

Start with the word itself. What does sacred actually mean to you?

According to the internet, the real meaning of sacred is “set apart”. Rooted in the Latin word sacer, it describes anything pulled away from the ordinary, common, or profane and dedicated to a higher, untouchable purpose, divine presence, or ultimate value.

Lots to consider in that definition.

Look at the word sacred in the context of your life and career.  Journal about what it would mean if you really did have a Sacred Contract.

What would change if you believed that, at some level, you chose to come here and experience this particular life following this particular career path?

Not that you chose every terrible thing that has ever happened to you. I am not suggesting that.

But what if you believed that your life and career, with all its twists and turns, might contain opportunities for learning, growth, and was always working for your benefit in some way?

2. Look for the Clues Already in Your Life

I think there is a lot of information in the things we’re already doing.

• What choices have you made in your career?
• What skills, gifts, and abilities are you very certain that you have?
• What experiences keep showing up?
• What patterns, for better or worse, seem to follow you?
• What have people always come to you for?
• What have you been drawn toward, even when you weren’t sure why?

Look for the breadcrumbs that life has been leaving you along the way.

3. Pay Attention to What Makes You Feel Alive

This may be the most important breadcrumb to me.

A Sacred Contract implies that, somehow, we knew what we were getting into. That we chose this particular earthly adventure for ourselves.

All of the learning. All of the growth. Even the hard parts.

And perhaps what brings us joy, what moves us, what connects us to other people, and what feels sacred are the signposts.

Clues that help us create a prototype of what our sacred contract might have said when we agreed to it in another place.

Create Your Own Sacred Contract

Step 1: Spend some time answering these questions:

• What am I good at?
• What brings me joy?
• What fills my heart with so much love that it expands and brings me to tears?
• What do I enjoy doing?
• What connects me to other people?
• What feels healthy?
• What feels sacred?
• What breaks my heart?
• What am I drawn to fixing, healing, or supporting?

Don’t rush through them. See what surprises you. See what themes start to emerge. And then…

Step 2: Create the Earthly Version of your Sacred Contract.

The good news: This isn’t a legally binding agreement. There is no spiritual lawyer sitting across the table asking you to initial page three.

Think is simply your best guess about the agreement you might have made before arriving here on Earth.

Fill in the blanks based on what you’ve discovered. (or get the pdf HERE)

Maybe we can’t actually pull our sacred contract out of a desk drawer.

But we can learn to recognize it in the things that keep calling us forward.

Maybe our job isn’t to figure out our one true purpose once and for all.

Maybe our job is simply to keep listening and noticing what is being shown.

To trust ourselves enough to follow the breadcrumbs.

Wouldn’t you agree?