I did a Kabbalah course last year.

It had some really cool framings that I hadn’t heard before for various spiritual and mystical and personal growth concepts.

One was about horoscopes. I’d only ever heard of horoscopes and star signs being used with a framing of ‘you were born in X month, and so your personality or situations will be Y’.

Kabbalah swaps that round: ‘you chose to be born in X month, so that you’d have the personality and situations that would be optimal for your soul’s growth throughout this life’.

Same with challenging family situations: Kabbalah believes that you chose to be born into that specific family, in order that you would have those specific family challenges, because they’re the ones that will best help you to grow.

I think it’s a pretty cool framing: giving you much more personal responsibility and empowerment than framings about ‘everything happens for a reason’. This is ‘you literally chose these exact circumstances and challenges because they’re the best for you in the long term’. I love that.