The word ‘karma’ hit the headlines recently by way of a celebrity couple’s breakup. Karma is easy to blame when it comes to our challenges and suffering. We try to walk away from bad karma, but it’s like a rubber band that hits you on your face just when you thought you were in the clear.
According to the Dictionary.com, the Sanskrit word ‘Karma’ means action, work, deed: fate. and in Buddhism, it’s seen as the sum of a person’s actions in one life, which determine his form in the next. Have you ever wondered what actions or deeds you might have done in the past as you are confronted with life's challenges? These thoughts have made me do my own soul searching on a quest to learn more about karma and how it works, because I have always felt that I was paying an endless karmic debt, and no matter how many good deeds I did, the debt was never paid back in full.
We all play the "Karma Game". We are like Nintendo’s Super Mario wandering through the game field that we planned before we were born. It has good karma and bad karma coins scattered around it for us to discover and collect. Somehow we lost the instructions of this game when we got here and hence it might feel like we’re playing this game blindfolded. We might aim to trade our karma coins by taking balancing karmic actions, but they are very tricky, because we experience things differently. It’s like balancing different sides of a checkbook, but you’re actually handling several different currencies that keep constantly changing their value. An example might help illustrate my point better. Let’s say that your partner cheats on you, if you cheat back you might still feel that your partner owes you. Hence we might feel like an endless stream of balancing actions are required and therefore the karma game is very time-consuming and can be emotionally draining. If we can’t cleanse the karma in this life, it might even be that we choose to continue the balancing actions during our next life and choose to reverse our roles. We are desperately trying to reach a new level where we are no longer subject to the laws and endless cycles of karma.
Somehow we lost the instructions of this game when we got here and hence it might feel like you’re playing this game blindfolded. We might aim to trade our karma coins by taking balancing karmic actions, but they are very tricky, because we experience things differently. It’s like balancing different sides of a checkbook but you’re actually handling several different currencies that keep constantly changing their value. Let me give you an example about this, let’s say that your partner cheats on you, if you cheat back you might still feel that your partner owes you. Hence we might feel like an endless stream of balancing actions are required and therefore the karma game is very time-consuming. If we can’t cleanse the karma in this life, it might even be that we choose to continue the balancing actions during our next life and choose to reverse our roles. We are desperately trying to reach level where we are even and there is no more karma that binds us.
I believe that there is a faster way out of this karmic cycle and that is through learning and healing grace. We can aim to use karma for our growth, as this helps us to relate to our challenging life experiences differently. We can start viewing our life through soul-centered eyes and focus on learning the karmic lessons. But if we keep ignoring the lesson, the abundant universe will offer us new opportunities to learn it over and over again. Once we integrate its wisdom into our life, the karmic pattern starts to lose its hold over us and we can finally become free from it.
