What I have learnt about myself is that I sort of held on to some old Catholic beliefs that it was actually a punishment system. So ‘karma’ meant ‘you’re being punished’. Studying in India though, I kept being told, “What, no, karma doesn’t mean that actually, that’s a sliver of its meaning.” Karma means an action that has a bind to it, not just necessarily an individual action, a moment in time, but iterations of smaller and larger versions of that. The focus is more on ‘what now’ then ‘what happened’.
So something happened, who knows when, it could have been in previous lives, but something happened and now there’s the opportunity to work through that thing, which is such a more broad idea. Oh, so whatever is happening, even when you have your astrology read by a Vedantic astrologer, Jyotishi, they’re always saying, “Oh, you know, good things are happening. Or, bad things are happening.” They’re not attached to, you might perceive this as good and you might perceive, this as bad. It’s just like, “Oh wow, aren’t you going through a hard time right now? Whoa.” And they see it as an opportunity to work through whatever that is. It’s so beautiful. And they don’t say it as in like, “Sheesh, you must’ve done something karmically.” They’re like, “Good. Some karma to work through, a marvellous opportunity for growth”.
Can you see the difference? It’s this beautiful difference. And for a lot of us the resistance is, “Oh, this isn’t an opportunity, screw that. It goes against the ideas I made up for myself.”
This was part of our teachings in The DOJO this month, on Resistance and Flow, and I wanted to share some parts of it over a series of Letters. You can sign up The DOJO as an Orange Belt and access all the past recordings as well as attend live each month and as a Black Belt also receive one on one mentoring too!
Sent with love,
Jac