Theloopylululog

Do I believe in karma?

This is like asking me to choose my favorite bluest inch of the sky.

I am a spiritual healer and karma to me, is a broad spectrum of choices, decisions, actions,repurcussions spread over lifetimes. ( yes, obviously I do believe in afterlife and reincarnations and all that jazz.). It is not a simple thing to explain away. It is a lived in experience.

But to put it simply, YES I DO.

Karma to me is the spiritual equivalent of a blend of Newton’s third law and the Butterfly effect. Every action/deed/choice/thought of mine has an equal and opposite reaction and it ripples across the universe.

I don’t necessarily believe that if I do something good or bad to someone, the same action will come back to hug/ bite me from the same source. I believe it will come back to me through someone or something in one form or the other, either now or in the churning of time someday, some life.

I certainly don’t believe in the dogma and fear mongering surrounding it.

Giving a personal example, I make sure I am helpful in any way possible to people around me. Even if it’s a sip of water offered to a stranger on a hot sunny afternoon or buying someone a bus ticket when they are struggling for small change.

Karmic repurcussion? I always find someone offering me help in unexpected ways when I am struggling myself and least expecting it. I have never found myself stranded either emotionally, physically, mentally or financially.

The seeds I sow reap and offer their bounty when needed to anyone in need.

A reflection from the time I was a kid of probably 9 or 10 that cemented this belief:

I remember going to a fancy store for a birthday or something and my mother bought my sister and I earrings. The shop keeper had spread an array of cheap enamel coated earrings on the counter and we liked a couple of pairs.

For some reason, he went through an inner door to elsewhere for a few minutes. While he was gone, the naive child I was, I hid one pair in my fists. I had no intention of stealing it. I loved the blue and pink coloured enamel and I wanted it for myself. That’s all. I didn’t even know it amounted to stealing. My mom and sis were unaware of what I had done.

While billing, only one pair was billed. The man was clueless of what I had done too. I am talking about a time when items had no bar codes and that metallic thingy attached to them that brought the building down with an alarm that went beep, beep, beep at the exit if items were being stolen while hidden under a blouse or fist, did not exist.

On reaching home, I showed my mom and sis those earrings. My mom scolded me. My sis was 11, so even she didn’t think of me as a criminal. The store wasn’t close by. So we didn’t go back to pay for it.

In time we forgot about it. From time to time, I would make sure the earrings stayed hidden safely where I hid them. I found them too precious for wear and tear although they barely cost 15/- back in 1990.

But one day, I found to my horror that only one of it remained. The other one went missing. No one knew it’s whereabouts. It was just gone. I searched for it high and low. I cried for it. To this day I remember the cobalt blue and baby pink enamel earrings as if they went missing just yesterday.

The incident taught me many things about life.

I learnt a lesson that what is not meant for me will never be mine.

I took something that I hadn’t paid for. Meaning I didn’t earn the right to enjoy it. If I take something forcefully, it will be snatched away from me, no questions asked. I created a loss for someone so obviously I will have to bear the consequences of the act. Maybe the shop keeper learnt that he couldn’t just leave the counter without someone handling it in his absence.

The guilt and shame that followed me made sure the lesson dug deep into my soul and remained there for the rest of my life.

This is probably a small incident, maybe not a crime as such. But to me it remains that one small step in life that had me turn into someone who gave freely and thought about consequences a hundred times before taking anything from anyone for free. Unless I was sure I had earned it in some form.

Am I grateful to my younger self? YES! She helped me learn the most profound lesson in a simple manner. I chose to lead a life of paying it forward whenever I can, since then. And applied them to the broad spectrum of life from the smallest thought to a biggest deed.

Does karma come back to bite us? Yes. Does it come back to reward us? Oh yes sure!

Just not in the rigid way we think it does. Karma is fluid — it is like a river, it keeps flowing. Dynamic, never static. Constantly moving, changing, transmuting, evolving with time.

My favourite thing to say when I realise this is to say karma kicking ass! Because it does. Always.

What goes around, comes around. In the best of ways if we are open enough to see its everlasting effect in the grand scheme of creation itself.