Surrendering Karma

I like to bring things into focus through analogy.
I am going to resist analogy and see how things go....

Through this process I have been dealing with karma. We all do.  This is what kundalini presses; it seeks to clear our field of those old knots so that we can become the perfect channels for this divine bliss.  Our perception of that energy is distorted in direct proportion to those issues that remain unresolved in us.  Some of these issues come from other lifetimes.  Maybe we have been gifted with a memory that helps us to understand its source. I know that in my path, I do not get to see the deal before its complete.  I only get explanation in the form of a memory once I have managed to resolve something.  My path is to learn to FEEL.  By learning to FEEL into a problem or unresolved hurt, I am better able to get to the root cause and to the feelings that helped to create that karma in the first place.

One thing to keep in mind is that karma creates chemistry.  Along with your unresolved issues, your karma, you can, in the case of a karmic relationship, feel a draw to someone who has a similarly unresolved issue within them.  By not being able to see beyond this draw, it seems that the draw is somehow cosmic, even fated.  By learning to become aware of what it is that karma does to us, we can consider that what we feel may be more about what lies undone that something that is fated or the result of the stars.  I know that in my past I have allowed myself to be blinded to the reality of the situation.  There were in truth signs all around me, and I chose to see those signs in a way that only furthered the karma rather than standing back and considering that there might have been another reason for the draw.  As I began to stand back and consider the possibility that all of this was based more in karma than the perfect match, I found my perceptions changing.  I began to see this person very differently.  Even looking at old photos made me stand back and wonder what on earth was going on.  I even had a friend who confided in me that perhaps what I was pursuing might not have been the best thing.   Even so, I knowingly looked beyond what he was trying to tell me.  Now some 17 years after the fact, I have been able to look at that scenario with very different eyes.  Perhaps, then, there are different ways of working through karma that does not involve becoming so entangled...its not that relationships aren't important, no.  They are.  Its one reason why we are here.  The question becomes what kind of relationships are we entering into?  

Lets consider two things first.  Lets think about the way things ARE and the way we react or feel about them.  This, I believe, is the source of all negative karma.  Its simplistic, but follow me for a moment. Very often through the lens of the egoic self, we react based on our suspicion is a certain way, or a picture that is less than complete at the time. We can very easily make any number of assumptions that we THINK we are seeing happening.  Often, absent more information, it might look like the world has it out for us, or that events wound up being hurtful to us.  Resting in our insides, we do not ask questions or probe deeper.  Because perhaps we are afraid that the world is out to get us, everything seems to be this way, again, absent looking deeper.

Lets say that as a child someone treated you in a way that you felt was hurtful.  Lets say that this person was your parent.  Lets further consider that this parent had to make a decision based on a limited set of choices.  Lets say that in this case that this parent chose to move the family from the old home to a new one.  Lets look at how this made you feel.  Maybe because of how attached you were to the old home, to the place and to your friends, it wound up making you feel dispossessed of all that was familiar to you.  This hurt.  All kinds of things could spring from this one event inside of you. Your own turn of mind will play into this in a huge way because some other children might have been largely unaffected because their turn of mind was, perhaps, more aligned with their parents in a way that was unquestioning.  In this case, the child might have trusted the parents that this was going to be a great adventure and that everything would work out.  This was one way it could have worked out, but for the sake of our discussion here, lets say that you wound up with a cluster of unresolved hurts as a result of someone making a decision that impacted your life. On the one hand, you felt like you could not speak up about you felt.  After all, you were just a child, right?  So you leave your friends, your old home and journey to a very different place.  Because of how disjointed you felt, you did not make friends easily.  This became a confirmation in your heart and mind that this move was not a good idea.  Inside, a cluster of hurts formed that weren't anything you felt you could resolve. for in your heart, to resolve this would mean going back to your own home, not packing up and moving across half the country to an entirely different world.  Perhaps you lay some blame on your parents for how your life was turning out even though you had not in fact spoken up to let them know how you felt.  It is so easy, though, to look back on all of this to see how uncomfortable you were in this new place, and how it all went back to that hair-brained idea to move.  Because of how you felt or believed your family dynamic to be, you could not really speak your mind so you just shoved it down.  All of this are positions in your own being that may or may not conform to what happened around you.  So much of this was how you FELT. 

All of what I have thus far described is a reaction to a series of events, and the reactions often reflect karmic attachments to hurt and pain along certain lines that are specific to the individual. We know that there are many possible outcomes based on a person's choice for how to deal with it. There are so many permutations possible.  Its possible that on the outside you acted resilient, made new friends, seemed to fit in well while all the while not feeling like you fit at all, and harbored a deeper sense of being disjointed that only served to drive that issue deeper into the dark of your awareness. For another person, all of this could have been seen as a grand adventure.  It could also be a mixture of both.  For another person, the reaction could still be different from any of these.  Its not just "turn of mind" but also how your own karma's are alive in you that often leans you in one direction or the other in terms of how you choose to SEE and then REACT to the events happening around you.  There are all kinds of possibilities, as I am sure you are aware.

Now the result of this decision is that as you grew up, you would attract situations and people to you who would serve to activate this unresolved issue in you.  This is the magic of your being. It is also the role that karma plays.  It is neutral, but our feelings are not.  Over and over, we would be attracted to things that match us in that vibration, sometimes, oftentimes, without realizing that this was happening.  You may have even selected a mate without even realizing that this person might do things that would serve to make your old karma come alive.  This is how life seeks to bring these issues to the fore. It does not say "you must deal with this" because your own free will comes into play, and free will is huge.  Its why we are here, experiencing individuality and individual awareness. So at some point something inside of you needs to be able to feel into yourself, get the memo, and realize that there is this old hurt lying inside of you. In order to clear things up, we have to cut through the feeling for a moment in order to see both sides of the situation, and to do this requires shifting our discussion for a moment.  Before looking further, lets look at the other side of this coin, which goes back to the original act of deciding to make that move across the country that led to all of these feelings in the first place.  The problem is that the ego is indeed a source of great suffering.  That little self, uncared for, adrift.....all the while that self is unaware of the larger realm of being surrounding it, supporting it, for the very reason that its so focused on seeing patterns and identifying and making judgements about those things in the world. On the one hand the ego is a filter for keeping out the infinite, and on the other end, the ego can wind up feeling stranded, alone, and this can lead to all manner of hurts.  How then to deal with this?


Beyond Your Karma Land

Your father, lets say, had been working in a job that had resulted in his having limited resources.  What he wanted for his family and for himself was to have a better life.  He very much liked where he lived, and he liked his job, but he also had a drive in him to better his and his family's life. This meant he spent a couple of years looking around the area for similar jobs that might give him the advancement that he felt he needed.  Not finding this, he looked next at jobs in other areas.  Finally, it turned out that there was a position that was open that would provide what he felt his family needed.  The only problem was that it meant moving a thousand miles away.  He and your mother talked about this.  It was often the source of conversations between them late in the evening. Because your mother was a stay at home mom, she would not need to find a job, so this made the decision to move easier.  Your family had to weigh uprooting the family in order to find a new life over staying in what was familiar.  A whole bunch of things were taken into consideration in the midst of this big decision.  In the end, your mother and father had to decide based on the best information they had at the time.  All along, their desire was for you to have a better life. For you, though, all you saw was that your old life and friendships were ending and you were having to face this very uncertain future.  Maybe you felt robbed, without a voice, or any number of things that have to do with how your own karma leans.  And karma certainly does lean.  All different types of people will have different reactions depending on this one factor.  When you consider that most karma lies buried, most people are unaware of how they are being activated by that karma.  They might just feel its JUST them.  Well it is, but its also this unresolved feeling inside that most often has to do with love.  Maybe the move felt like you were not considered important enough to ask or talk to about it.  Perhaps the result of losing friends was hard, and you felt alone.  All kinds of negative results can flow from this as a result of an ego that has had its feelings hurt.  Since the ego cannot see into the infinite, it cant allow you even a peek into that part of your experience which might show you how different things might be a year from now, or how events will wind up working in your favor.  It cannot see how a misfortune in the front end could wind up being a great fortune later.  It is the small self, the ego.  It is made to serve its reality and its validity within the self.  if we get too hung up on ego, we will get too focused on what it tells us is the problem. 

Karma, if we look at it this way, represents not being able to meet eye to eye with the events around us.  Ego can get buried in its feelings and assume any number of things about why things are the way they are.  We each will respond differently to the situation.  Twenty years later, you feel like that move was the worst thing in the world, and sometimes in family meetings, you find yourself exploding in anger over this and expressing how upset you were and are over this.  Your father becomes defensive because he feels like he is being dealt with unfairly.  All he ever tried to do was to make the best decisions for the family and here one of his children was acting as though they didn't appreciate all the things he tried so carefully to do.  He knew deep inside that all of this was anchored in his love for you and the rest of your siblings.  But deep inside you have been holding onto this hurt and this hurt tells you that he really didn't give you what you needed, that he really didn't love you the way you needed to be loved, for had he loved you as you needed him to, he would have kept you right where you were so many years ago.  Things like this all emerge as a result of an investment that the ego makes.  Letting go and allowing that karma to be surrendered is the single fastest way to heal the hangup or glitch in the self.  This is a fundamental element of growing up spiritually.  The way we surrender is through grace.  It means taking all those things that your ego feels invested in and letting them all go.  Only then does your awareness change, as will your perception of the infinite field of bliss.  There will be less in the way, essentially, to block the view and experience of the cosmic.

So your father acted out of love, and had only a certain number of options in the moment.  Looking back on it, you are able to see a hundred different ways your father could have run things so the result was different.  This process is second-guessing and its very easy to do in retrospect.  Its very easy to sit back and spin endless scenarios that would have been better choices.  the more you do this, the more it seems that maybe he just didn't consider your feelings at all (after all, look at how abundant these other options are!).  The truth is that you had hurt feelings that caused you to become blinded to the reality of the situation.  So instead of seeing things clearly, you began to see based on the taint of your own hurt and pain.  This gave you a certain sense of victimization, perhaps, and this further changed your consciousness in this regard.

When letting go of this karma, I think its very helpful to just see things for how the person with whom we are involved, says they felt. Bringing not just your emotional awareness but your more rational awareness is important.  Within you lies a very detached part of your being called the Observer.  This part of you can be incredibly non-invested in the drama unfolding, and it is this part of you which can help fuel great change in your learning to dissolve or evaporate karma. If someone says that they did what they did out of love, the best things is to take their word for it DESPITE how your own hurt feelings say is not true.  Set that aside because this is a way to see things differently.  When you do this, you give someone the benefit of the doubt and the old argument actually ceases for a moment in time as the world hangs silent and still as you consider that perhaps what hurt you was actually done out of love.  Then, by feeling into this, and perhaps using your mind's ability to examine the facts in all of this (something it is good at), perhaps you can find yourself entertaining a different way to feel about this. 

I have someone in my life who has a karma that has to do with being a victim. This person is determined to believe that he is not loved by me.  He is determined that not only do I not love him, but that I never loved him.  The interesting thing is how I can watch and see how this person has been blind to the facts on the ground. There were plenty of them, and yet this person will often go on telling me why I feel a certain way, and I find this amazing that anyone would feel as though they know how anyone else feels inside of them.  I often protested explaining that I very much loved this person, but I was told that no, I did not feel that way at all. The truth was, this person was blinded by his own hurt so that he could not entertain for one moment the very depth of my love for him.  If he had done just as I have suggested earlier, he might have suddenly been surrounded with proof of my love, and he could have begun to actually see events very differently.  The things I did with this person, the lengths I would go to to be involved in his life.  And yet, somehow, it would never be enough.  On my side, I felt very much like our defensive father.  I had to learn to take the target off my back and learn how not be play the victim in all of this. I could in the moment choose to play or not play into this.  By being very clear about how I felt, I could begin to shift how I saw and responded to this type of behavior.

Resolving karma is an act of self honesty. Its not that we are bad by being dishonest.  Its just that our feelings often do not match reality. This is perhaps why we call karma and the pain it creates as being illusion.  In this way, I would agree that karma is the result of the illusions that we spin in our lives.  Misperceptions, biases that blind us, misunderstandings about what was at work....

The root of this is feeling, and back to feeling we must go, diving into an old hurt and being willing to offer it up to the gods or our higher self to heal. Sometimes we just do not have the means to heal it.  Being willing to step back and look at events with a fresh perspective and to not always fall for the bias or leaning, we can be like impartial judges in the process and absent the emotional factor, see things more as they were than how we preferred to see them.  The Observer is HUGE in this process and can actually move you beyond hard places within you where you cannot let go.  The Observer never DID grab hold of an issue.  Its present in both your spirit as well as your brain.  This is the frontal cortex that is non-emotional.  While cool and calculating perhaps, its the next wrinkle in our development that moves us beyond mammals.  It allows us to step back from a situation and consider that another alternative is available  Sometimes a simple realization, which is that our father was just doing the best he could in the moment and that while it didn't turn out right, it was what it was, and it does not change his love for you.  Years and years of time can be caught up in dealing with this misalignment.

Divine Alignment is all about learning how to let go of those things that are not in alignment with our higher being. this higher being is available to us through the gift of an Awakening.  It brings to light in brilliant fashion all of those karmas that need to be dealt with.  If you feel pain in a certain part of your field, it may be a sign of something unresolved.  This is a gift.  By feeling into this, you can learn to approach this in  way that brings all levels of your awareness into the mix. Ultimately, though, it may be the result of your higher self stepping into the breech in order to resolve the issue.

This is where this deep abiding love can help.  This is not a love that clings but frees. It asks for nothing but is happy to simply be itself and to give and radiate its presence all through you.  It is above and beyond all concern of these little scuffles in our lives and seeks only that we come into its alignment.  Since it is so perfect, it does not need to change itself in order to conform to our notions of what we feel we might need.  In a sense, I think you could say it is beyond all karma.  By being this radiant self that it is, our own energy fields will feel pain when it flows through us and encounters places where its perfect flow is disrupted.  our higher awareness, which is present in the background reads this as a misalignment, and the energy field relates this as pain which can sometimes feel entirely physical. This is a sign because the purpose of pain is to no longer feel the pain.  It can train us how to stay out of the pain and remain in the bliss.  Because I know my love to be perfect for this person in my life who feels I do not love him, I no longer feel compelled to get down on his level to prove my love to him.  If I have to become a martyr to his cause, then I am only investing myself in a sense of being less than I am.  I am also buying into being a victim.  I know that there is nothing that can weaken me more than doing that. I am left, then, waiting, holding this perfect love for the time when he comes around to realizing the deeper truth to this thing that he has misperceived, something that at so many turns showed him how I cared and loved him.  Ultimately it may be that for the time being, we are speaking different languages.  Perhaps when he is able to bring clarity to his own process he might begin to see more clearly.  But this is a choice.  I cannot make it for him, and neither can I continue to hope and hang on the possibility that something might happen.  I offer my hopes in prayer, that the highest is served for him and for me, and if it means he never sees the truth in this life, then perhaps it is what he needs to do for now as part of his development.  I must remain like this pillar of love, not moving or bending.  Like kundalini, we can become these resolved beings as we wake up to the reality of our situation.  By moving out of the fantasy of our feelings and looking with clear eyes, we can begin to give others' the benefit of the doubt and see things from their perspective.  Doing so can help us to understand how we were not in alignment with the reality of the situation that served to cause is the pain.  Beyond that pain lies freedom.  Beyond that lies a flow in our energy field for this energy which was better than before.  By learning to see things differently that through our hurt, we are that much closer to resolving the issue.  What resolves it is a special thing that I think is grace. Its what brings us to the simple truth of the moment beyond all arguments, all positions, just a drive to know the truth.  No attitudes, biases, hurts; just what is. 




Exercise:  Healing your Energy Field

I want you to think about your energy field. Do you have an area where there is pain that has been brought about by Awakening?  Do you have pain that you are not sure what the source of it is that maybe causes you worry?  This would need to be something that isn't just a sore muscle or misaligned vertebrae.  But whatever the case I want you to take your left hand, which is most often the "receiver" hand and place it over your heart center.  I know this might be a little tricky to do, but it should just barely work for you.  Then I want you take your right hand, which is most often the sender hand and place it over the area that hurts.  Its good to do this while lying down.  As you do this, I want you to just relax and not think about doing anything in particular because the energy will flow without any effort on your part.  If you feel deep down that your right hand is the receiver, try switching hands.  This might work better if you are somehow not feeling differently.  If you think of anything, thinking of how you would like the flow of your perfect heart energy to flow into that spot and begin healing it. 

Now just let your hand cover the center or area that hurts.  Let it rest there for a good ten minutes. What do you feel?  Trust that whatever is happening is happening for a purpose.  I wont suggest to you what you will or might feel.  After spending a good ten to fifteen minutes doing this in a relaxed state, how do you feel?  Do you feel a loosening of the pain or tension in that part of your body?  You can spend as much time as you want doing this.  You can even fall asleep while doing this.  Spend as much time as you need, and you might want to try this a number of times over a period of time, too.  It might help that you tell yourself that your higher vibration will be able to do the healing so it will make it all simpler for you.  Then your mind can simply rest and not feel the need to monitor too much.  Just feel into it. 


I hope that by considering how to begin seeing things that you feel you are overly invested in emotionally, that you can begin to see the old hurts differently. By doing this, sometimes we have to see the junk that another person is invested in themselves, but instead of doing that, I am asking you to consider that what they have done was not always done with the intent to hurt or maim or kill. I understand that sometimes the actions of people can be nothing short of cruel.  Still, for as hard as it is, being able to understand in a straightforward way why the person felt as s/he did, it can sometimes give us insight into why something happened. Sometimes it can provide our mind, which is unable to budge from its hurt and pain, just enough room to move and make the change it needs.  Realize, too, that our hurts can manifest as addictions when they have become deeply ingrained.  Its awfully hard sometimes to see them for what they are, and sometimes you might need to feel like you are at the end of your rope.  the really great things about the end of the rope is that beyond it is either letting go or learning to deal with what is in front of you.  It feels pretty final, and in those moments we can change on a dime, surrendering and hoping to just see the truth because of how the old karma makes us feel.  If you can come to this without feeling like you have reached the end of that rope, all the better.  By approaching this honestly within ourselves we can dissolve the karma through forgiveness.  Sometimes it means asking forgiveness of another, other times it means forgiving yourself and wiping the slate clean.  If its an ingrained beast that you feel is hard to work around, tell yourself that there is nothing that is stronger than you.  Karma creates more attachment, so the best way is to consider that a better way is possible.  FEELING how better you would feel is sometime enough to loosen that hard knot inside of you.  I held onto a knot like that since the mid to late 1300's that very recently was released.  It was the biggest blessing.  I achieved it by considering something I had not considered before, that the old way of going about this was not working and that I needed to see this differently.....because I very much felt like I was at the end of my rope.

And then I let go.

And I soared.

Imagine that.