What Is Karma and How Does It Work?

What Does ‘Karma’ Mean To You?

Is it doing something positive or negative in the world, and then experiencing that coming back to you? Do you believe in ‘good karma, bad karma’, ‘what goes around comes around’, or ‘what you sow is what you reap’?

Or is karma the physical, emotional and mental consequences that follow from your actions and intentions in previous lifetimes - a cycle of rebirth, the Universe ‘rebalancing’ itself, a ledger of credits and debits to be repaid, or perhaps even a kind of divine punishment?

Balance

Karma & Life Purpose

At a basic level, karma simply means ‘all action in the universe, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual’. However, the true meaning and subtleties of karma are rarely understood. The key to understanding karma at a deeper level is the idea that it helps you to achieve your life purpose. But what is your life purpose?

“The consequences of your actions are not randomly good or bad - they are organised in an evolutionary way to move you forward.”

— Deepak Chopra

Which direction

The purpose of your life is to heal limiting beliefs and so regain your awareness of your true nature - that of an unlimited and mind-blowingly magnificent divine being, a part of God, Source, the Universe or whatever word you prefer.

Karma is the mechanism by which we attract the people, events and experiences that we need in order to fulfil our life purpose. We don’t do this consciously - it works automatically via our subconscious mind, the Law of Attraction, and spiritual agents working for us behind the scenes.

A School Called Planet Earth

This ‘school called planet Earth’ is a special place where most of us walk the ‘karmic path’ to achieve growth in awareness. It’s a slow and sequential path, but if we can heal on Earth, then we heal ourselves in our true essence - in spirit. That's the beauty of the dense 3D Earth experience that we have signed up for.

Earth

For example, if an aspect of your spiritual self has a difficulty feeling loved unconditionally, then you may decide to incarnate on Earth to heal that limiting belief. When you arrive, the ‘veil’ ensures that your mind is a ‘clean slate’, but the karmic process guides you to develop the belief that you are not loved. 

This is done by the conditioning you receive at a very young age from your parents and other experiences. As you are predisposed to lean in that direction anyway, it usually doesn’t take much for you to adopt the limiting belief of not feeling loved unconditionally.

Baby

The 4 Steps of Evolutionary Karma

Then, as you go through life, ‘evolutionary karma’ will present the people, events and experiences that you need in order for the following to happen:

  1. Enable you to express the trait of feeling unloved.
  2. Help you to become consciously aware of the trait through repeated experiences.
  3. Give you opportunities to heal the limiting belief.
  4. If you decide to accept the healing that is on offer, then you can start to restore your true nature of feeling unconditionally loved on both the physical and spiritual planes.

A Dance Of Mutual Benefit

At an even deeper level, the karmic path of the people you attract will intersect with yours for mutual benefit. This complex dance of helping each other is planned with these souls before you incarnated.

People network

Becoming Aware - Repeated Experiences

“There is this vibrational basis from which you attract” — Abraham Hicks

You may hear people say, “That’s my karma”, when they keep attracting a certain experience in their life. What they are perhaps unwittingly observing are the opportunities that the karmic process keeps offering them to become aware of what they need to heal. For example, you might hear them say, “Why do I keep attracting partners who love me only when I give them what they want?”

“Karma is neither positive nor negative. It is simply a method by which you are repeatedly presented with opportunities to overcome the limiting conditioning that blocks your awareness.”

— Michael Sheridan

Opportunity

Karma, Free Will & Time

The karmic path can take time and many souls go through life without managing to achieve their life purpose. But that’s okay - it just means that they may decide to ‘give it another go’ once they return to spirit, and reincarnate for another lifetime on Earth. 

You can’t be forced to come to Earth and walk the karmic path. Free will is a universal principle, and you always have the choice to try again on Earth, or find another way (there are other alternatives).

Time is a key component of the karmic path because it gives us a chance for the dance to ‘play out’ and for us to become aware of the link between the causes and the experiences we keep attracting to ourselves.

Watch in sand

“My dear friends, you have come to this school called planet Earth to discover and dissolve the illusions of separation within self and between life. Certainly it is your labour of love to diminish these very same illusions, wherein you will discover that never in your eternal soul have you been the victim, but always the creator. God bless you, indeed!"

— Dr. Peebles through Summer Bacon

Creators Of Our Reality

We are indeed the creators of our own reality, and on the path of discovering who we truly are by experiencing hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of past lives on the Earth.

Time, Birth, Re-Birth

Life is a magnificent ‘dance’ using the density of the Earth plane to promote spiritual growth through limitation. 

However, the journey is often rather bumpy and so we can also pick up limiting beliefs along the way. This is the main reason that we only incarnate with a tiny part of our whole self. It’s a type of ‘insurance’ that if things don’t work out in one lifetime, then only a small part of us has been adversely affected and we can try to regain that aspect in another lifetime.

Many people think that karma is something that happens to them against their will by an external force or a third party. Although this can seem to be true at one level, the reality is that karma is something we planned in advance of our lifetime and agreed to experience for the benefit of ourselves and others.

Planning

“Essentially by choosing karma, you are forcing yourself to learn about yourself and hopefully advance in the process.” — Michael Sheridan

Karmic Debt - Self Judgement

There is another aspect of karma, which we need to consider - that of karmic ’debt’. For example, let’s say that your actions at some point in your life affect someone negatively. When you come to the end of your life and return to the spirit plane, you’ll get the opportunity to have a ‘life review’. This is where you’ll be guided through every moment of your life in minute detail to review the progress you’ve made. You’ll not only experience the feelings you had at every moment in your life, but you’ll also experience the feelings of others that you positively or negatively impacted.

It’s important to note here that there is never any judgement on you at any time. However, you may judge yourself and decide that you need to make amends for your impact on that person - i.e. that you owe them. This may take the form of you  returning to Earth with the soul you impacted to help them grow in some way and ‘pay back’ your self-imposed debt.

Judgement

We can escape this cycle of self-judgement if we truly learn to forgive ourselves, but this is easier said than done!

Karma vs. Dharma

The alternative to the masculine energy karmic path is the feminine energy dharmic path - living from the heart with unconditional love for yourself. More and more people are transitioning from one path to the other as the Earth moves deeper into the age of Aquarius.

When viewed from the karmic path, people who are on the dharmic path appear to make irrational choices that are driven by their heart, feelings and knowledge of what is best for their spiritual growth. 

People on the dharmic path also have a direct connection to their Higher Self, enjoying a clear and tangible intuition. This, however, is a topic for a future post!

Light dove

Karma - A Positive Force For Spiritual Evolution

So karma is always a choice that we have made to help ourselves and others grow in awareness by ‘dissolving the illusions of separation that we have created between ourselves and life’ (Dr. Peebles). As we move along the karmic path, we will eventually ‘get the message’ and become aware of what we need to heal. Then, the Universe will provide the next step.

Ultimately, we will grow lighter, brighter and be more of who we really are - an infinite part of the divine. How cool is that!

“Getting unstuck from your karma is made possible by the human ability to break out of patterns simply by first being aware of them”

— Deepak Chopra

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this post - if so, please share with friends and family, and feel free to add a comment below. I'd love to hear what you think about karma and how it works!

With much light and love,

Olly

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