Freeing Ourselves from Past Hurts

There is a saying that “the hysterical is historical.”

The things that really strike a nerve – that get us going from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds flat – are rarely fresh wounds. More often, the things that feel the most overwhelming, the most painful, are chronic emotional injuries, bruises that keep getting pressed, cuts that never fully scar over.

Karma, that old Buddhist concept, is a system for taking charge of the things that we can control to stop the reruns of historical pain – for not continuing to press our own bruises – and, instead, for blazing a new, different, healthier trail.

Karma is often misunderstood to be a tit-for-tat system. As in: if you tell a lie, you are going to get burned by a lie in the future. While there is an element of “what goes around, comes around,” karma does not have an accountant in the sky doling out punishments and rewards in some quid pro quo system.

Instead, we have some agency over our karma. Karma is the concept that all our actions, words, and thoughts, plant seeds for future actions, words and thoughts.

In other words, if we spend a lot of time fighting, we are sowing seeds for more fighting – maybe we’ll be doing the future fighting, because that is the habit we’re building. Or, maybe we’re creating an antagonistic environment, where there will be fighting around us. Either way, we’re planting “fighting seeds.” On the flip side, if we repeatedly act with compassion and kindness, we’re creating a fertile environment for more of the same.

This doesn't mean that if we're kind, we're owed kindness. It also definitely does not mean that when we experience pain, we must have done something to deserve it. Karma is not tit-for-tat. Rather, as Jon Kabat-Zinn defines karma, it is “an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns.” We get stuck in ruts. We get stuck because we’ve built strong habits and we react without thinking.

Fortunately, as Victor Frankl famously said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

We can find this space that Frankl refers to – and start to change both our habits and our karma – by practicing meditation.

Meditation is the practice of noticing our thoughts without acting. In meditation, we find that space between stimulus and response. The more we meditate the better we get at finding that space. And, the more we can find that space, the more we can get out of the rut of historical patterns to find more freedom.

We certainly can’t change what other people do. But we can change what we do. And that changes how we feel, our habitual tendencies, and the seeds we are planting for our future.

For a little practice in changing our karma:

17-minute karma meditation

26-minute karma meditation