Is there punishment for suicide?
QUSTION: Masters what would happen in the afterlife to someone who died by suicide? Is there a punishment for the soul? Does a soul prior to being reborn also choose and decide how their body will die? ~Natasha, Singapore
ANSWER: The only place where there is judgment is within the duality of planet Earth. Judgment is needed for negativity. Negativity is required for the concept of punishment to exist. So, once the soul leaves the body and returns to its essence of unconditional love, it is impossible for judgment and punishment to occur.
Given all the above, a soul who has terminated a human life by suicide returns to an environment where that action is never judged, condemned, or subject to punishment. The soul evaluates what they learned from the lifetime, including all the factors contributing to the decision to end that human life.
Suicide may have been a chosen lesson for themselves or an agreement with the ones they left behind. It may also have resulted from a sense of overwhelm, a feeling that they could not tolerate one more moment on Earth. Or it may have been the result of something such as addiction, so that even though they died by their own hand, it was still somewhat of an accident.
Terminating a life experience can also be a form of running away from their chosen tasks because they are perceived as being too difficult and the soul no longer wants to work to understand why they were chosen. Once they return to the Other Side, an evaluation of what happened helps them decide what they might wish to try to complete in a subsequent life.
Souls choose many things about their upcoming lives, possibly even how they wish to return Home. But remember, each soul has total freedom of choice and can change their mind mid-action. Sometimes this results in their having a near-death experience that changes the direction they were going.