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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Healing Karma

The act of healing karma is the single most powerful act you can be involved in.  It is an act of love, compassion, and truth to your higher self.  Being able to heal karma, though, can seem to be akin to sending yourself to the moon with a slingshot. It just doesn't seem possible. 

So lets look at what happens inside of you that serves to create karma.  I am not going to look at positive karma but the type of karma that is the result of attachment to certain feelings, most often hurtful ones. It isn't that positive karma is of little concern, it isn't.  Positive karma is a very good thing, and cultivating it is just as important as knowing how to root out negative karma; they go hand in hand and as you root out negative karma, it makes it much easier to build a more positive framework for your life and what you attract.  The issue with negative karma is how much it can hang us up, making us do what we do not want to do and keeping us from doing what we want to do.

Ego is a largely unemotional part of you, and yet it can cause all kinds of emotions to fire off in you as a result of a sense that it has, based on a judgement it is making about what it THINKS it sees, as being the reality of a situation in life.  Because of how ego works, it often identifies with things having to do with past hurts and laches on to details that are then used as the filters for experience going forward.  What this does is it keeps us from seeing things as they ARE.  We can often have these distortions running inside of us for lifetimes, and they can wear deep grooves in who we are, creating a kind of recursive effect to our feeling and reactions.  It governs what we do, how we create, how we think and respond to the world around us. Dealing with this aspect of ourselves is the single most productive thing available to us in reaching a better place.  It can win freedom for you from a range of rough feelings and ways to seeing and responding to the world. In a very real way, ego keeps us from seeing the larger picture because that old hurt was just too important to it than what they truth might be.

The thing about ego is its been given a much broader place than it should have had in the psyche.  We have allowed this important filter in our being to really go overboard. Because the ego is always comparing and dividing things out, its almost always seeing differences between what one person gets and another.  Your sister gets a differently sized piece of cake, and you notice this, note it, and then wait for it to happen again.  There is karma in this. Suddenly, your ego decides the the world is just out to get you.  Because you believe this, you attract it.  That is how the Law of Attraction works. But because you are so convinced that the world is out to get you, you don't consider for five seconds that it could just be your belief system, your bias or prejudice, that is causing all of this.  As you refuse to see the truth, you dig a still deeper hole for yourself. This is a big loop and it loops round and round ad infinitum if you let it.  How does it feel to let go of a karma?  Its freedom.  Its a very simple, sweet moment of letting something go, of effectively snipping the string of a looped piece of behavior or belief in your being that has eluded you for a long time.  But no matter how long this has turned around in you, looping and waiting for the right set of circumstances that activate it, you can at any time snip the loop and watch as it simply falls away as though it had never been.

The way out of karma is not by using ego.  To do this means letting the ego slip backwards within you.  It can be a gradual process for some.  Those who are most mental will have the hardest time.  This is much easier for those people who can handle a little mystery, who don't need to control every little thing and who are happy with not always knowing what is going to happen next.  By realizing that your egoic self is but a small subset of a still larger self that is huge, you can realize that your egoic self is like a small child being led by an infinite self, almost invisibly, yet always there. Just because you cannot see where you are going does not mean that where you are being led isn't a good place.  Its a perfect place for where you are not, but this takes some trust.  If you realize that your belief fuels your experience, then you can probably appreciate that if you do not trust the world or the universe to bring you the right things, then most likely it wont.  However, if you open yourself to not needing to know every detail, and consider that while you may not see results immediately, but can trust that you are being led out of the harder parts of your life, you open up to the universe in a whole new way.  You make room in your belief that the universe isn't just out to get you but that you COULD have been influencing the universe all along.  Taking the leap, you open a door that may have been closed previously.  If you wish it, all of it can change toward something more aligned with your core being.  To do this means removing those beliefs and unresolved issues that are in truth attachments to hurt, negative karma, and once you do this, your landscape will begin to change.  Healing karma is instantaneous, and either you do or you don't, so there is no in between.  Its not a gradual thing but instead happens in a twinkling.  And once you DO heal something its amazing how it will change how you feel and react to all of the things that used to cause you to react.  But how does one achieve this kind of healing?

First, you have to feel safe about doing it.  I think you have to realize that life will be better without it turning in your life.  This can be subtle.  Sometimes I think we almost need to be at the end of our rope in order to reach that place of surrender.  Not all of us are like this, but I think its something about human beings that keep us involved, holding on, unsure of what this letting go is all about. Second, I think that the presence of a part of yourself that some call the Observer can often play a critical role in helping you gain some perspective on the drama that you wind up feeling as a result of the karma.  This portion of yourself, in the midst of a very emotionally tied up time, is critical it seems in allowing the self to feel differently by offering a different solution to how to feel. You see, most negative karma makes us feel crappy.  What the Observer does, is it removes all of that investment in feeling away.  This is a remarkable change that can take place and it is mirrored in the brain where we take our emotional centers and balance them with portions within the neocortex, the prefrontal lobes which provide us with the ability to step aside from our emotional issues and look at the impact some emotional response will have on others as well as our own selves.  Its a unique part of us, and is the next wrinkle in our development....For as much as I go on about feeling and how important it is, this part of the Observer self is just as useful and important also.  Without it, we can often get so tied up in our problems that we have a hard time seeing a way out, or where we are.  The Observer is like a neutral party that enters the scene and then asks "And just what is the problem here?"

By bringing in the Observer, the Observer can calmly teach you how to feel different in the midst of much turmoil.  It may also lead to releasing any old material that you had been hanging onto.  The Observer shows you how to BE different.  While it is calm and unemotional, it seems important for these times when we are shedding those layers. It has been in my experience that the Observer state has most often been the most use when my emotions were the highest.  I cannot speak for others, only for myself, but I suspect that there may be triggers in our brain as well as our own consciousness that bring on this aspect of our being during times of stress.  People often describe feeling an amazing sense of calm in the midst of very chaotic and even scary events.  Think of the man whose car goes down an embankment and with his child trapped in the back seat, he very calmly breaks open a window and gets the child out.  A son sees his father trapped under a car that fell off the jack and lifts the car off him. All describe a feeling of immense calm overtaking them.  They feel as though something inside of them took over but not in an emotional way.  I often wonder how we can learn to cultivate this Observer in ourselves during day to day experience.  It may be that its always there, but its presence is more obvious when we are upset.  Perhaps it seems more calm in comparison to how we felt before.  It may be a coping mechanism, even a survival mechanism.  It seems that by getting to a point where you realize all the old things you have tried have not turned up any results, you simply call on the universe to take on the problem, and you ask for help.

Consider that it may be possible that you do not know HOW to fix a problem, but if you remain open to the idea that there is a way through it that is above your own "pay grade" then you give yourself an out.  There is real merit in giving it all to God, or to some sense of a larger being, self, or universe.  If you are very process oriented, maybe you imagine that you are putting all your problems into a trunk and giving it to the universe to sort.  Consider that you are putting your deepest secrets in it, entrusting your most fragile thoughts and feelings in there for the universe to take care of.  Ask for help from a higher power.  So often, people are healed in just such a way.

Now, for the cutting of the loop. Even if you feel invested in an old hurt, tell yourself daily that you are working on cutting the loop of the karma. Imagine a pair of scissors cutting a loop of string inside of you that is this karma, and then watch how the string just drops away.  Now tell yourself that this is what you want to be able to do with the karma.  You may not know how you will do this, but consider that there is a way that you yourself may not know of just yet but that is within you to do (you just don't know it yet). Consider also that the feelings that keep you invested in the karma might be built on misunderstanding.....and that the reason why things are hard for you and another person caught up in this same karma is the result of just not seeing eye to eye.  You THINK you know that this person only wanted to hurt you, or maybe they did something so hard and difficult that its hard to get past.  For the most part, this is the thing that keeps a karma active, which is the inability to forgive someone.  When you are able to step back and use that Observer, sometimes you can gain perspective. In one case it took going back to a past life to see events and how they had happened to another person to understand WHY they always responded the way they did to me.  In one case, a child had died....and that person wound up having a common karma with their family members that resolved around the fear of losing a child, the fear that someone would not pay enough attention and they would lose the child....which had actually happened.  As a result of this, this person and their family line had reinforced this common karma.  What this meant was that these people would wind up with people who would mirror the behavior that this person had who was around when the child died.  This was replayed over and over until the karma was healed.  Until then, though, the people would respond in a very exaggerated way to events. Small things would become big.  It would SEEM as though the world was out to kill the child....and sure enough, events would happen in such a way that it seemed this was so, even though in truth, no one was dying.....they were just playing and replaying that old hurt over and over and it had its effects on everyone around them.  Being able to see that they were responding because of THEIR karma helped to lessen the reaction to MY karma in this regard. It helped me to see and understand that it really wasn't personal, and in many ways, it really wasn't about me....even though I have managed to become inculcated because of my OWN karma which had nothing to do with having a child die. What held me to them, though, was my inability to forgive myself for things I had done earlier in life, and it was the similarity of this hurt that bound me to them.  The release of the karma lay in my being able to see things for how they were, instead of taking a defensive posture.  By doing this, I was able to reach into a place of understanding.  I was able to have compassion for how much of a hurt this might have caused.  I was able to look upon my own qualities that led to our being attracted and realized that this was just the universe working in its usual way, which wasn't to punish, but to be the mirror that it had always been.  So what was the way out of this tangle of feelings?

The answer is forgiveness.  In this forgiveness, there is a willingness to let it all just go. Analysis in this moment stops, working through the details stops.  Finding a way to forgive stops.  Being ready to make that change, being willing to JUST let it go begins to move and turn, and its in this movement, this willingness to feel differently, that we do.  And as we do, we can feel how freeing this is for us.  Its simple, though, much like how a child can forgive so easily, and let bygones be bygones.  The forgiveness is made for the people who seemed to have created this mess to begin with (in the mind of the ego) but it spreads until you realize, no, I must forgive myself.....for in that moment, perhaps you realize that you had a hand in creating this and the deepest forgiveness must be within YOU.  And its this that binds you to the world of effects and phenomenon of a particular kind.  You see?  Without being entirely aware of it, your inability to let go of an old hurt kept it fresh and vibrant in your life so that the world simply formed itself around that hurt since like attracts like.

Want to be free?  Forgive.  Forgive yourself.  If its easier to do it by forgiving others, then do so.  Its good for them.  But I think you may find that this will lead to forgiving yourself.  Its letting it go, allowing it to go. You may well find that the feeling was there because you weren't able to forgive yourself of some past hurt or trauma, and the very act of holding on to it served to bring all these people who had been hurt by others as a result of similar actions you had been involved in merely served to bring you into the realm of this same drama. Like attracting like.  Again, the way through it, the scissors that cut the chord, is forgiveness.  Forgiveness allows for the old cord to go. 'Fessing up and forgiving takes all the power out of the karma and it drops away.  Its a nonissue from that moment onward and you can feel it dropping away as you realize you have quite literally a new lease on life.  Sometimes just feeling exhausted over this mystery of why things keep cycling over and over is enough to make you throw up your hands and cry help.  And this is the best place to be in.  HAVE no resolution!  HAVE no answer!  Its when you have not rational way around all of this that you actually find the one thing that will work.  And, again, this is why handing your problems over to God or to some higher power whatever that might be, is a powerful way of doing the same thing.  In it is the trust that whatever this higher power is, it is infinitely more capable of taking care of it.  Its enough to get the problem off your back, and when you can do this, you have sprung from the clutches of a very worrisome karma.  Yes, we are little, yes we are limited, yes we are like children.  Some things, are simply above our pay grade.  Don't TRY to solve the problem.  Let it go.  Free your mind, free your heart, because its only in this place that you can feel the rush of love that is the universe.  By punishing yourself, you literally cut yourself off from the love that IS the universe.....that you ARE....that we ALL ARE!

The way that you reach this self is by grace.  Grace allows it to happen.  It means that compassion is more important that one-upmanship, that love is the divine pulse for all life.  When you awaken to this, you will not just know it, you will feel it running all through you. By lightening your load, you literally provide more space for the divine to live within....and I promise that what this divine thing is, is beyond any religious teaching on this earth....for the experience has been so rare an event that most are guessing about its transformative power sometimes.  And yet, you can make this room in your life for it.

I will add in parting that my awakening was fueled by a choice to "work through" an old issue that I had been carrying around for years.  I thought I had a problem to somehow solve, but in the midst of trying to solve it, I found that my problem was about solving what I thought I had to solve or understand (like some math problem or riddle of the universe).  What I most needed to do was to JUST get that old burden off my back!  In Christianity, we see this as a confessional.  We have this way of getting things off our backs that have been bothering us, and when we do, we feel lighter.  When I spoke to the man who listened to my story for the first time in an understanding way, I realized I hadn't come to him for some kind of advice, I came to be heard....to confess in a sense.  When I did this, I magically felt a hundred pounds lighter.  I had not realized just how burdened I had been previously.  In being lighter, I made way for something even more powerful to come into my life.  I can't say that this will work for everyone, but it certainly catalyzed a big shift in my own experienced and launched me onto the path I am on now.

So I hope that this has helped.  I hope that it may serve as a tool that you can use in working through your own stuff, in finding that place where you can simply give it up and let it go.  When you do, you do yourself the biggest favor.  Trust me on this.  Some things are simply above our pay grade!

Nemasté

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