The Life Lessons of Karma and How to Stop Taking on More of It
Karma is something that we’ve use casually in conversation, but when it comes to awakening and understanding how to utilize the concept of karmic energy to shift your energy and life, our use of karma deepens.
Maybe you’ve awakened to the concept of energy, soul, or spiritual alignment and you’re ready to deepen your understanding of karmic energy and how to be more mindful of it.
There are many different concepts of energy including karmic energy, feminine and masculine energy, soul energy, divine energy to name a few. Personal energy can consist of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual energy comprising the energetic field and aura.
One major perspective of energy is understanding it from a karmic lens. When to immerse yourself in the world of understanding your own energy, learning and understanding your energy from a karmic perspective can be helpful on guiding you of some dos and don’ts to energy management.
An individual’s energy includes their conscious and subconscious thoughts, emotions, intentions and actions. Energy can manifest itself as thoughts, memories, feelings, emotions, physical sensations, behaviors, and actions. When we consider an individual’s energy, we’re often considering the state of their well-being, the reality they’ve created or are living in, and their relationships.
The concept of karmic energy describes the culmination of all of the energies generated from intention, thought, emotion, words, and actions. Karmic energy can be mental, emotional, physical, and energetic. Karmic energy serves as a cosmic balance, meaning that every energy generated above can result in consequences. There is always a cause and effect. Negative karma results in negative consequences in the future. Positive karma results in positive consequences in the future. Cosmic balance is an energetic return to the natural order of balance. You can tip the scale, but eventually, the scale is going to level out again to regain balance.
For example, a negative karma can occur if you harm someone else. This creates a karmic debt and an unbalanced scale so that debt must be paid as a consequence of your actions to regain cosmic balance.
Now you may wonder, can people avoid paying their karmic debt?
Yeah, absolutely. However unadvisable, this can be done through control, manipulation, evasive maneuvers, blaming others, avoidant behaviors, etc. to avoid facing oneself or facing one’s consequences. Karmic debt can be paid instantly, but it can also take one or several lifetimes to pay it off depending on how much karmic debt accumulated. The longer you run, the more debt you can collect. Even if one runs from it, the universe aligns many opportunities to regain its balance, so it can only be outrun for so long. And often times, more negative karma is generated in the process of avoiding paying the debt, so the consequences can become more severe. For some people, it can end up being paid as periods of a lifetime, or even a whole lifetime of being in miserable or in disfortunate states.
How can karma be “paid?”
Most often, karmic debt or karmic balance is achieved through taking responsibility of one’s actions, financial giving (charity or giving without asking for anything in return) or through time/service.
Karma can be cleared through internal actions of increasing a practice of using positive intentions, improving mindset, releasing old emotions, and acting from a state of loving compassion to balance some internal karmas. Even if it doesn’t fully clear the karma, it certainly always speed up the karmic balance.
Negative Karma
Karmic balance may also arise through external actions. For example:
it may result in scenarios like karmic debt accumulation due to stealing, and it can be paid by giving back financially to those in need.
Hurting others through selfishness or judgement can be paid through service to others.
Karmic disease or karmic physical pain can be paid through spending time/energy on healing the body. Many of the people I work with are struggling with pain. One of the most empowering things that people can realize is that your physical pain can and will resolve once you’ve put enough time and effort into taking care of your body. I can’t tell you how long it will take you to get out of your specific pain, but I can tell you once you spend enough time, energy, and potentially money on it, you will be out of pain at some point after you’ve paid your karmic debt on it. I hope that it is within this lifetime, and hopefully it’s within this year! Karmic physical pain and disease is so common these days, especially with increasing generations of worsening physical activity and physical care habits. Recent generations have inherited not only unfavorable self care habits that cause an accumulation of their own health karma, but they also inherited all of the unresolved karma from their ancestors whom didn’t take care of their health either.
Remember that karma and karmic debt can also accumulate from negative/ill/judgmental intentions or thoughts.
For example, if you have a history or habit of thoughts that judge and shame people for being fat and not taking care of their bodies, you can develop your own karma of being fat and learning how to not judge yourself, take care of yourself body, and accept it for the beauty that you still are (and also have to work your butt off to pay the debt and burn off the fat). The more you perpetuate the thought habit of self judgement or self shame for being fat, burning off the fat will continue to be difficult until you change that mental habit.
Which, this is a lesson in itself - viewing others and the self with loving kindness and compassion is so important.
Positive Karma
A positive karmic debt is typically paid as a reward or blessing for doing something good. Something many women can relate to - spending years, decades, or lifetime(s) single and working on being the best version of yourself, and not settling for a partnership that was unhealthy for you or did not serve your highest good. That time spent alone is often times too a negative karma of spending time losing or giving too much of yourself to a partnership that was negative for you, or one that you lost yourself completely. Every karma serves a purpose to teach a lesson and/or to trigger you to grow. Everything happens for a reasons to regain karmic or cosmic balance. Finding this balance is all about releasing the energy that no longer serves your highest good and embracing energetic lifestyle habits that promote your growth and alignment with life situations that serve your highest good.
Although it is a common female perception these days to assume that independence is better than relationships, but since we’re talking about balance, it’s important to remember that every relationship serves a purpose. Hyper-independence has its own consequences as well. Female and male energies are meant to learn from each other through polarity and mirroring, and to help each other find balance. Hyper-independence is often a sign of internal imbalance of feminine/masculine qualities internally. Allowing space in your life to be open to the right relationships when they arise is important because physical union between feminine and masculine energies (which happens in relationships) results in lessons for each other, and restoring cosmic balance within connection between individuals too. Cosmic balance ultimately seeks balance internally within an individual and their energy, as well as balance and harmony between people and partners as well.
One may also ask - well, can someone else pay the debt for an individual?
Yes, but typically only with generational karma. Many karmas are transmitted from one person to another through genetics. This is why many families have multiple generations of the same financial troubles, relationship troubles, career troubles, health troubles, etc. Those are karmic energies that are asking to be acknowledged, paid, and changed. The original person cannot resolve the karma or pay the karmic debt because they pass away. So the debt is then transferred to the next person in the bloodline. The easiest way to understand this concept is materially - when an individual passes away, their spouse or children inherit the deceased person’s financial debt or savings.
When it comes to willingly helping others with their struggles or karma, it can negatively result in a negative consequence. When done the wrong way, we can absorb the other person’s karma by taking it upon ourselves to help relieve them of their burden. However, that other person will still have to go through the struggle and learn their lesson on their own anyways. This results in the helper taking on additional karma while also delaying the other person’s process of resolving their own. It’s kinda like a wildfire spread.
When it comes to helping others, it can be helpful to view the struggles of others through the lens of “live and let live”. To witness them, but you can offer guidance if they ask you for it. Depart your wisdom on them, based on your own experience or expertise (only if it applies - be helpful, don’t add additional unnecessary noise to their headspace). But don’t do the work for them, otherwise you both with still have to work through it. Although an individual can have position intentions, doing the work for someone else doesn’t truly relieve them of their karma.
Some simple steps to start resolving your own karma and stop taking on either people’s karma:
Accept responsibility for your wrong doings, blaming others just delays your own karmic resolution.
Be the change you wish to seek. Embody that energy, and lead others to do the same for themselves by example.
Live and let live - allow yourself to live your own experience, and to witness others living their own experience.
Assist others through guidance and servitude, not through unsolicited advice or doing the work for them.
When someone asks for help, wait for them to formally ask for it before you offer help. Some ideologies recommend to wait for the person to ask for help 3 times. Or, wait for them to pursue you for a service exchange.
If you feel like you are an empath, work on your energetic and interpersonal boundaries. Empaths are more prone to unconscious energetic exchange and can unconsciously absorb other people’s karma.
You can clear your karma by becoming a mother or father to the world - departing your care, kindness, compassion, servitude, and wisdom. Take care of others without separating between what it yours and theirs, but don’t intervene in others lives to help, fix, or heal.
All types of energy, including karmic, can also be transferred unconsciously through energetic exchange, leakage, or absorption. Learning common situations on how this can happen and how energetic boundaries can be placed and strengthened can decrease the unconscious exchange or absorbing other people’s karma or passing yours onto them.
