A reader recently asked me an interesting question about reincarnation. When we’re choosing our parents before we incarnate, do we take into consideration what our bodies are going to look like? Do we know ahead of time if we’re going to be attractive, tall, short, or have certain medical conditions? Or do we just choose our parents and take whatever body we get?
It’s a great question because there are actually a few things going on during the process of choosing an incarnation.
First, your higher self is primarily concerned with your life intention, which is the main experience your soul wants to have during a particular lifetime. Your higher self will look for parents who are going to help you achieve that intention, either through their support or through the challenges they present.
For example, if your intention is to learn how to become independent, you might choose parents who are overly controlling so you’ll have to learn how to stand up for yourself. Or if your intention is to experience unconditional love, you might choose parents who are naturally loving, nurturing, and supportive.
The parents are selected primarily for the influence they’re going to have on your life, not necessarily for what they look like.
But that doesn’t mean physical appearance is never considered.
What Will Your Body Look Like?
When your higher self is considering potential parents, it can get a general idea of what their offspring might look like based on their genetics.
If both parents are tall, there’s a good chance you’ll be tall. If both have dark hair and brown eyes, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll inherit those characteristics.
But your higher self doesn’t get to sit down with a catalog of body parts and pick out the exact nose, eyes, chin, and cheekbones it wants.
Wouldn’t that be nice, though?
Instead, you’re choosing parents whose DNA will combine to create a physical vessel for you to inhabit. And there are a lot of possible combinations.
In most cases, the exact appearance of the body isn’t terribly important to the soul’s intention.
If you came here to learn compassion, for example, it probably doesn’t matter whether you’re five feet tall or six feet tall, have curly hair or straight hair, or look more like your mother than your father.
Your body just needs to be capable of providing you with the experiences you came here to have.
When Appearance Is Part of the Plan
There are some situations where the higher self will deliberately look for parents who are likely to produce a child with certain physical characteristics.
Let’s say a soul wants to experience what it’s like to be exceptionally attractive. Perhaps it wants to see how physical beauty affects relationships, opportunities, self-esteem, or the way other people treat it.
That soul might choose two very attractive parents in the hopes of inheriting those characteristics.
Or perhaps a soul wants to experience life as a person of a particular skin color because the social and cultural experiences associated with that identity are important to its life intention.
In that case, the higher self would select parents who could provide that experience.
There could also be intentions that involve being unusually tall, unusually short, or having some other physical characteristic that influences how the person moves through the world.
So yes, sometimes appearance matters quite a bit.
But even when a higher self is hoping for a particular physical outcome, there’s no guarantee that’s exactly what it’s going to get.
What About Medical Conditions?
This is where things get a little more complicated.
Some medical conditions are hereditary, so when a higher self is considering a set of parents, it may be aware that certain health issues could be passed down genetically.
Sometimes that possibility might even be part of the reason those parents are selected.
For example, a soul that wants to explore resilience, perseverance, or what it’s like to depend on others for assistance might choose parents whose genetics make a particular medical condition more likely.
But I want to be very clear about something here.
Just because someone is born with a medical condition doesn’t mean their soul deliberately chose to have it.
There are plenty of medical issues that arise unexpectedly, and they aren’t necessarily part of anyone’s original life intention.
Let’s say a soul chooses two healthy parents who seem like a great match for its intended lifetime.
The mother becomes pregnant, and everything is going along just fine. But then she’s involved in a serious car accident that causes her to go into premature labor.
The baby is born much earlier than expected and develops medical complications as a result.
Did the higher self know that was going to happen when it chose those parents?
Not necessarily.
The original plan may have involved a healthy, full-term baby. But circumstances changed, and now the soul has a different physical vessel than the one it was expecting.
The same thing can happen with infections during pregnancy, complications during childbirth, spontaneous genetic changes, or any number of other situations that affect fetal development.
Not everything that happens to a person was planned before incarnation.
Free Will Changes Everything
One of the things I often explain to people about reincarnation is that your higher self can make all kinds of plans before you arrive, but once you’re here, free will takes precedence.
Your higher self doesn’t get to control every decision your parents make. It doesn’t control every accident, illness, or unexpected circumstance that might affect your development.
And it certainly doesn’t get to control every choice you’re going to make once you’re born.
You might develop an illness later in life. You might have an accident that changes your physical abilities. You might undergo surgery, gain or lose weight, or make decisions that dramatically alter your appearance.
None of those things necessarily have anything to do with your original life intention.
And if something happens that makes your intention harder to achieve, your higher self doesn’t throw up its hands and declare the incarnation a failure.
It adapts.
Maybe you came here intending to become a professional athlete, but an unexpected medical condition makes that impossible. You might end up becoming a coach, a teacher, or someone who helps others overcome physical challenges.
The original path may no longer be available, but there can still be other ways to fulfill the intention.
And sometimes an unexpected experience sends you in a completely different direction, one your higher self hadn’t originally planned.
That’s part of the adventure of being human.
So Did You Choose Your Body?
The short answer is that you chose the parents who would create your body, and you may have had some idea of what that body would look like based on their genetics.
In some cases, physical appearance or the possibility of certain medical conditions may have influenced the selection of those parents.
But your higher self isn’t necessarily choosing every freckle, every facial feature, or every health issue you’re going to experience.
There are too many variables, and free will can change the trajectory of a lifetime in ways that weren’t anticipated.
Your higher self is primarily interested in the experiences you’re going to have while you’re here, not whether you ended up with the exact body you expected.
The body is simply the vessel that allows you to have those experiences.
And sometimes you get a vessel that’s a little different from the one you thought you were signing up for.
