Hello Karma, My Old Friend

And it's gone...

Experiencing your karma being lifted is liberating.

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The other day, I had a deluge of internal unresolved karmas come up. It was a dreadful experience. Heavy. Challenging both emotionally and mentally. It was an inner process that I hadn’t experienced in many years, and cascaded into various incomplete past ways of perceiving myself and the world, complete with all the memories to stoke the fire. It was the karmic reprise of the Simon and Garfunkel song lyrics, “hello darkness my old friend…” but with the variation of “hello karma my old friend.”

Sometimes an experience comes along and pulls the trigger on those karmas from the past that were buried but still alive. Those karmic zombies rise from the grave once more to be dealt with.

The thing about karma is that it can really affect your perception of what is taking place. There are many things that happen outside of you, but it is how you relate to those experiences that exposes the lessons you are here to complete, learn, and grow from, which is to say your karma. Changing the karma changes the perception, which changes the experience, and the outer situation naturally changes to match.

Many years ago I worked with a spiritual teacher who had extraordinary awareness and abilities. He could hold back the karma of those he worked with while they strengthened themselves spiritually, until the point where they could more easily handle it themselves from the higher consciousness. Working as closely as I did with him, actually living with him, he would often directly intervene on my behalf to hold back and dispense a lot of my karma in ways that were much more graceful than had I just been on my own.

I know it sounds pretty out there. I often wonder how I would relate to these stories if I hadn’t lived through them. I’d probably be skeptical, to say the least. And there’s a lot I haven’t even shared about my time with him, but because of those experiences, I’ve learned not to discount the extraordinary which seems beyond belief.

There were times that I would argue for my weakness until he would say, “I’ve been holding back this karma, but you are fighting for it, so here you go.” The visceral experience of the karma being dropped back on me was palpable. There was no mistaking the force and weight of it. And it was immediate. Oops. Big, dumb, stupid oops. It was an awful feeling to so tangibly experience the results of my own stupidity.

You probably wonder, “why would you do that???” Or think that if you were in the situation you wouldn’t argue for your limitations, and yet you are probably doing it in your life right now in some way. That is why karma is spelled s-t-u-p-i-d. We all have our areas of weakness that we try to defend.

Then would come the ask: “will you please take it away again?”

If he did lift the karma, it was just as real. Just as powerful. You would literally feel it just lift right off. It’s bizarre now to think back on that time as it all seemed so normal. All part of living in the mystical bubble that was my life. In many ways, I feel like my life could be a page out of Hermann Hesse’s book Journey to the East.

Going through this experience with my teacher is something that I can only attempt to describe, but it was quite incredible to be dealing with someone of that level of capability.

Sometimes, when he didn’t do it directly in the moment, the karma would lift off in the dream state, or in spiritual exercises, or other related activities. If I were to try and describe the experience, I’d say it is like there has been a weight on your chest, and all of the sudden someone comes and lifts it off. It has been there so long you didn’t even know it was there, but when it lifts…wow! You feel so much lighter.

There were some karmas that he gave back to me that took me years to work through, and then one day something would happen, I would handle the situation a certain way, have an “aha!” moment, and feel the karma lift.

It is often the difficult and challenging karmas that, when resolved, are the most gratifying lessons. So, if things get hard, be grateful. You are being strengthened spiritually and the payoff is worth it.

That reminds me that he would often ask, “Do you want the information or the experience?” I don’t know if it was meant as a threat, but it always felt like one to me. I would often verbally ask for the information, and then behaviorally ask for the experience. When it comes to the spiritual forces, actions speak much louder than words, so I would get the experience. I guess I “liked” the experience.

I wasn’t the best student, but I had two qualities that made up for it, endurance and perseverance.

That brings me back to the other night when I was an internal mess due to the pile of karma I stepped in. After all of these years, I have a number of tools in the toolbox to handle this type of eventuality.

So what did I do?