Scrubbing Your Karma

news flash: we all need to

I have a complicated relationship with collaboration.

Not because I don’t value it. I deeply do, or at least I want to. Yet every time I have entered into a significant partnership in my life, something has gone….sideways. A co-founder relationship that started with shared vision and ended in mediation. A first marriage that began with excitement and dissolved into resentment. And even smaller collaborations of any kind, have a way of surfacing something in me that I haven’t fully resolved.

For a long time I pinned this as bad luck. But, let’s be honest, at some point the pattern became too consistent to keep blaming my circumstances on something external. When the same lesson keeps showing up in different setting, wearing different faces, it is usually trying to tell you something. As my mom would say: you are the common denominator, Kari.

That something, I have come to believe, is my karma.

What Karma Actually Is

Most of us grew up with a watered down version of karma. Do good things, and then, poof! Good things happen. Do bad things…well you know what happens next. A universal cause and effect. Taylor Swift even has a song about it.

But the original understanding of karma, came from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and is significantly more interesting and useful to me. In Sanskrit, karma means action. It believes that every action or thought or intention leaves an energetic imprint (i.e. a pattern), and those imprints accumulate across all fields of consciousness that follow you like a shadow until they are resolved.

Karma in this sense is not punishment. It is a curriculum!