Saturday, 18 June 2011

How To Heal Your Karma

Someone asked a very good question on Facebook, and rather than losing the answer in a sea of quotes my intuition tells me to write about it on my blog. The question, complete with smiley faces is the following:

How could I be able to pay karmic debt if I had never read the passbook ? :)

If I translate the question to Regina-Speak, I would ask, how can I identify the lessons I need to learn to balance out my karmic debts? The idea is that over time, or even over the span of many lifetimes we accumulate a debt of karmas to repay. These often manifest as difficulties in our life. If I understand correctly, Prono's question was how will we know what we need to do if we haven't seen the passbook that lists all of these karmas?

My philosophy professors would be proud, now that I have spent a paragraph setting up the question we can get to the good part: the answers! The debts in our passbook are written into our lives, they appear in the form of challenges and difficult situations that we keep running into. We do not need to identify them as karmas to beat them, but it helps to think about it from this point of view because looking at things symbolically allows you to remove your emotions from the equation.

A classic example is a person who needs to learn to stand up for themselves and defend each individuals right to live a life free from harassment. Standing up to a bully might be really difficult for them, and if you look at their childhood experiences they might have run into a lot of bullies on the playground. Whenever a bully approaches he might go quiet, retreat or even just take it in fear. Having a bigger kid taunt you is a lot of suffering for a kid, but he is running into that bully because he needs to learn a lesson. This has more to do with managing his own reactions and learning to react differently: stand up to the bully and stop taking his abuse, even if you're scared to. In a symbolic world, he will keep running into bullies until he learns to stand his ground. When he finally starts to push back he will begin to gain confidence and each time the bully will become less of a problem. Eventually, bullies won't push him around because of his reputation and the bully karma will disappear (or the fear will disappear).

This is an over simplified story, but the principles apply in real life to adult challenges (even bullies in the workplace, or in the family). I am not going to go into the details of the past life behaviours that might have caused this karma to occur, i.e. was he a victim or an aggressor in a past life? This message is about how we get over our karmas, not why they are there. :-)

Here are a few tips for identifying your own challenges:

Observe Yourself: Realize that your reactions and your behavioural responses are the problem, not the other person or the situation. The 1st step is to take responsibility for your situation and to stop blaming the other person. For example, you might have a problem with anger management, rather than blame the person or the situation that makes you angry you need to accept that they will not fade. Look into yourself, and ask what makes you different, so that you get mad when others do not. You are the only person faced with the problem of learning how to express angry emotions. This applies for the person who bottles it up inside, as much as for the person who explodes.

Is there a pattern?  Pay attention to recurring themes in your life, what are the challenges that you keep running into? I know a man who is very good at his job, but he has still been fired at least 3 times from positions that he did well. Rather than blame each of his bosses for being unfair or even breaking the law, he looked at what he was doing to cause it - and it all came down to ego and his relationships with co-workers.

Ask for Guidance.  We can all identify patterns on our own, but sometimes we also have blind spots. So what can we do to identify the behaviours we can't see ourselves? Ask!!! Think of 2 people that know you very well and ask them to tell you one thing that you do to make your life harder. The best person to ask is usually the one who has probably been dying to tell you, but hasn't because of conventions (or because you won't let them). I asked my mother.

Guiding Stars: We can also look to our birth chart for guidance. Most people focus on the sun sign but there is a lot more to astrology. My favourite so far has been the North Node, a karmic placement. There is an amazing book by Jan Spiller called Astrology for the Soul and I can't recommend it highly enough. The idea is that our south nodes sign incorporates many past lives in which we have reinforced one aspect our spiritual dna and neglected another. Part of our karma involves us exploring the zodiac sign that was neglected. 

In my case, the effect was multiplied because my south node, my ascendant and my sun sign are all Aquarius. This book described me better than anything I have ever seen, the effects will not be as strong for everyone but it is still a really good cheat sheet.

Pace Yourself: Try to focus on one improvement area at a time, otherwise you will drive yourself mad. We will have plenty of changes to balance our karma, so enjoy your life and do your best not to add anything to this karmic passbook.

The first suggestions were based on techniques that I learned at the Kabbalah Centre. You can learn more by reading Yehuda Berg's Living Kabbalah book

Please join me on Facebook or YouTube
Reiki hugs, Regina


  1. Hi Tyler,

    I noticed that you deleted your comment, maybe it was too personal for a public forum? I posted a link below that might help you decide for yourself. There is a trick we can use to access our subconscious, cutting through all of the thoughts and the feelings that confuse us in our daily lives =)

    It's fun giving and getting psychic readings, but the most important thing is to learn to connect to your own Higher Self. This is one way to do that:!/note.php?note_id=150493228348296

    Love & Light