What is karma and how can we work with it? A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi.
first words from the podcast
I want to talk tonight about Karma. Karma is very simple to understand. It is patterns of awareness and energy moving through time, and those patterns repeat themselves. Energy is energy. If you’ve studied high school physics or something, you know that energy can gain momentum in time. So these patterns – as they are repeated and through that repetition – energy is being given to those patterns. They gain energy, and they gain momentum moving through time. So they become, after a while if they get repeated enough, they become habit patterns – that is, not just something that happens, but something that is difficult to stop from happening.
So right now you are showing up in a human body. That is a karmic habit pattern. It is very difficult to break that karmic habit pattern and suddenly appear as something else. Or maybe you have a karmic habit pattern of drinking caffeinated beverages every day. That’s difficult to break also. So the reason these patterns are difficult to break is because they have momentum.
In order to change those patterns, one of two things has to happen. Either you have to apply effort in a different direction, stop giving energy to those patterns, and apply it in another direction so that the momentum shifts. Or something almost magical has to happen, which is called grace, where something just unwinds for unknown reasons even though you didn’t seem to be applying any effort.
