What is Karma… Really?

When you ask most people what karma is, they say, “Because you have done something wrong in in this life or a past life, you will have to pay the price by difficult things happening to you.”  I have even heard people say, “I hope karma gets you.” And Google also believes this version of karma saying, it means that what happens to a person, happens because they caused it with their actions.

It does not surprise me that this is our view of karma because we live in a dualistic mind that views the world through the lens of good/bad, right/wrong. And our minds are based on a heck of lot of guilt and blame, which fuels this view of karma. That is why it is so easy to see karma as a punishment. When was the last time you heard somebody say about someone, “When this wonderful thing came into their life, it was because of their good karma?” 

But what is karma really about? 

I am not an expert in life. I don’t think anybody is, while they are still in a body, for we all have blind spots. And I am just like you. I am slowly brailling my way to the truth that lies outside of my dualistic, struggling mind. When I am in that place of clarity and wisdom, it makes sense to me that karma is a teacher, an aspect of this schoolroom called earth that we find ourselves in. 

We all were born in great innocence and then took on the conditioning of the environment we lived in when we were growing up. To live exclusively inside of this conditioning is to miss the fact that we don’t so much create our reality as reality is a benevolent, intelligent teacher. 

The more you wake up to life you see that you are not responsible for your life as much as you are responsible to it.  In other words, this is all about listening to the experiences life is giving you rather than feeling that you, or somebody else is to blame. When you see that you are not the one causing the difficult things in your life to happen and instead see that these challenges are always your teacher, you come out of the heaviness and shame that a limited idea of karma can generate.

As Eckhart Tolle says, “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”  

Or as Rumi says, “If God said, ‘Rumi pay homage to everything that has helped you enter my arms, there would not be one experience of my life, not one thought, not one feeling, nor any act, I would not bow to.” 

In both quotes they are inviting us into the truth we don’t so much create our experiences (and thus can blame karma for them); life does! And our job is to learn how to show up for it as it is.

The easiest way to see this is to imagine life as a spiral. In this schoolroom of life each one of us are destined to take on the challenges that are designed to become our teachers. The first rungs of the spiral, which for most people are the first 30 or so years of their life, are where you learn the basics, with your parents, siblings, peers, teachers and religious advisors becoming the delivery system of the beliefs you’re destined to take on. On these rungs of the spiral, you oftentimes don’t have a clue about what is really going on and you are usually trying to control what you are experiencing. 

But if you’re here to awaken, something begins to happen in your 30s and 40s (and sometimes older for we all begin to awaken when were supposed to) where you start asking what life is all about. As you move up the rungs of the spiral you begin to pay attention and you see that over and over again you are experiencing very similar things. The actual delivery system – a relationship that goes bad, a difficult boss, a disconnect from your family, a challenging diagnosis – may be different but what they bring up inside of you is familiar.  

This is when you begin to move from life happening to you to life happening for you and you realize if you listen, every single challenge has gifts embedded in it. Your challenges are not here because you have done something wrong, or ‘they’ have done something wrong, or God has fallen asleep on the job. Instead, they are your teachers.

It is my experience we learn gradually and as we move up the rungs of the spiral, gathering pieces of clarity, we oftentimes feel the heartache of seemingly losing these insights, but this is never the truth. In reality, as soon as you see something clearly, it starts working its magic deep inside of you and when you come around to the same teaching again on another rung of the spiral, you more quickly see through the eyes of clarity, until eventually you can access this truth most of the time. 

For me, karma comes from the merciful nature of the universe. Life offers us, through a variety of experiences, insights we hadn’t yet fully understood before. So, I invite you to change karma from punishment to a fierce but benevolent teacher and see how this brings more ease, clarity and trust into your life.