How do we know when a situation in our life has a particularly karmic flavor to it?

Lucile Yaney, a psychotherapist who believes in reincarnation, says one clue is a pattern of emotional overreaction, including unexplained fears or phobias. “A person may be responding to past situations from this life or other lifetimes when he has a greater reaction than the current reality calls for,” says Yaney, who has been counseling for thirty-five years.

The current circumstance that triggers the reaction is not nearly as threatening as the past event, she says, but we perceive it and react to it the way we did originally.

For instance, if we were tortured in a past lifetime, we might find ourselves in a situation today where we react to criticism as if we are being attacked or tortured. “In a case like this, we might be reticent to speak up,” explains Yaney. “We might have an excessive need to please others. We might not be able to take a stand for ourselves when we come under scrutiny. Instead, we would constantly take the position of victim, becoming defensive, shutting down and, in effect, ‘dying.’”

Another sign that we may be dealing with past-life issues, says Yaney, is the intensity of our emotional release once we have resolved a situation. “It may be a small thing that we triumph over,” she says, “such as confronting someone we have been afraid of. But when we do it, we feel an intense elation. It’s as if all the energy we were using to repress past-life memories becomes unblocked and is now available to us.”

Although we don’t need to know the details of our past lives to successfully work through our karma, we do have to be willing to self-observe and to watch how we react to events.

We have to be willing to understand that there are no accidents or coincidences in life. Whatever is before us is there for a reason. Each encounter is our opportunity to bring karma to its highest resolution.

There may be six different ways to deal with a situation and all may accrue some good karma and good feelings, but only one will be the highest resolution for you, and you will sense it.

For example, let’s say that in a past life your mother was a child you had abandoned. Now your mother is getting older and needs special care.

“Because you abandoned your mother in the past, you will feel strongly compelled to personally care for her while your siblings may not share those same feelings,” says Yaney. “Your brothers and sisters may feel fine discharging the duty of care to someone else, even putting her in a good home where she will be properly cared for. In fact, if your siblings had timely contributions to make to the world through their professions, they could actually be doing a disservice to themselves and others by becoming their mother’s caretaker.”

You would be able to sense your karmic duty by observing how you felt in this situation, says Yaney. Because of your karmic responsibility, you would probably feel strong and energized by personally caring for your mother.

In the case of your siblings, whose foremost duties lay elsewhere, they might feel bitter and unfulfilled if they had to assume that job. Thus our duty may be entirely different than someone else’s even though we are in the same situation.

It all depends on our karmic history. Our job is to use our free will to follow the inner direction that will lead us to the highest choice.

The Role of Compassion

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved in one another.

—THOMAS MERTON

Compassion is integral to our karmic transformations—compassion not only for ourselves but also for others.

When Michael was growing up, he had trouble trusting anybody, including his parents. At fifteen, he decided he wanted to be an emancipated minor.

He informed his mother that he had gone to the library to check out what it would take to become legally free of his parents.

Instead of reacting with anger, his mother took a compassionate stance. “I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “I was very aware of his struggle. I could understand what he must have been going through. So I put my arm around him and said, ‘You know, if you had bad parents, that is exactly what you would need to do. But, honey, in this lifetime you were given good parents that do support you and are on your side. We’re behind you. You don’t need to emancipate yourself from good parents.”

The next day she overheard her son on the phone explaining to a friend that he had been planning to fill out the forms to become an emancipated minor, but he had figured out that he had really good parents and he didn’t need to do that.

“All the energy around that situation disappeared,” said his mother. “It never came up again.” She had the feeling that someone Michael had trusted deeply in a past life had betrayed him.

Not until his parents supported him through some tough experiences, where he expected them to abandon him, was he really able to trust them.

Toni also had an issue of trust that was solved through a different kind of compassion. Ever since Toni could remember, she was uncomfortable around guys.

When she was a little girl, she never spent much time with boys. As a young woman, she had her share of boyfriends but always maintained a certain distance.

Toni married relatively late in life. “Though my husband was strong and masculine, he was also very gentle,” she says. “Even so, if he would raise his voice even slightly or get a bit irritated, I would get frightened and retreat into myself. Gradually, because of his loving, attentive and protective nature, I began to soften. Still, a part of myself remained unconnected to him. When I wanted to be vulnerable and fully open with him, I wasn’t able to. I never understood why.”

One day, after being married for over ten years, Toni decided she wanted to find out why she felt the need to put up barriers between herself and men, including her husband.

She worked with a counselor who used a technique that allowed Toni to access events from this life and past lives without hypnosis. This is her story in her own words.

“As I closed my eyes and tried to contact my feelings of mistrust, I saw myself as a girl in another lifetime. It was a sunny day and I was playing outside. The world seemed beautiful and good, and I was carefree and happy. I had been playing too long and I knew I would be late for supper. To get home more quickly, I decided to walk through the woods. The sun was already going down and there was a slight chill in the air. As I entered the woods, I felt a bit uneasy. But I kept walking, telling myself that there was nothing to be afraid of.

“Then I sensed that someone was there, not too far away. In the shadows of the approaching nightfall, I could make out the shape of a man. I soon recognized him as someone who worked at my parents’ farm. He had always been nice to me, but now there was something strange about him. I didn’t want to be near him. I wanted to be safe at home. He came closer and touched me, and everything that followed was in a haze. Blackness covered the whole scene. The next sensation I had was that I was lying in icy swamp water and everything was cold and dark. I was dead. But I remembered my final thoughts: ‘I will never again trust a man, and I will never give myself to him.’

“With some coaxing, I went back to the moments when I first recognized who the man was. I realized that this wasn’t the first time he had done this to someone. And yet, I don’t think he was actually a mean or bad man. He was just very disturbed. He wasn’t in his right mind. To him it was as if someone else, not himself, had hurt me and the others. Understanding this, I was able to have compassion for him and forgive him, and I prayed that he would be healed.”

Toni realized that ever since the experience she had in that life, she had believed the lie that she could never trust any man.

In that terrible moment, she had made the decision to always withhold a part of herself, even from the one who now loved her the most. She understood at last that she could trust men discriminately, depending on the individual and that she could love and trust her husband without reserve.

“A great burden was lifted from me,” says Toni. “After the session, I returned to the arms of my husband, and I could feel the love for him that I always knew was there. My love merged with his. It enveloped us and expanded beyond us both. I learned that if you can understand, have compassion and forgive another, even for what may be a heinous crime, then you can be free to love and be loved.”

When we hear stories like this, we tend to think of the poignant issues of our karma and our psychology as stemming from a single outstanding or traumatic event that caused us to mar or scar another or vice versa.

Yet it is also the larger pattern of day-to-day influences and our responses to them, in this and past lives, that have created our karma, our character and our psychology.

Psychologists tell us that we are molded by the build-up of our traumas and that the daily pounding of harmful influences, such as criticisms or stinging remarks, can be more detrimental than any one shocking event.

Whatever dramas of the past we carry forward, we are the final arbiters of our destiny. We are not victims.

We can approach our soul work from a point of adult responsibility and compassion and say, “Okay, this unfortunate situation existed in my childhood or in a past life, but I am who I am. I am a son, a daughter of God, and I am determining the course of my life. Yes, I may have had a dysfunctional family, but I will send them mercy and forgiveness. My parents and others I have known are responsible for their actions, but I am also responsible for how I react to them.

“I will make certain that I correct those elements in myself that have caused me to create negative karma, and I will make sure that I give my own children and those I meet along life’s way a better opportunity to become who they are. In the process of experimenting in the laboratory of self, I may make mistakes, but I will not criticize myself. I will learn from those mistakes and move forward. And I will not forget to love myself and to celebrate those elements within me that have helped me to create good karma.”

Someone once gave me profound advice when I felt I had made the worst decision of my life.

The advice was: you learn more from a wrong decision than a right one. As James Joyce once wrote, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”

Yet many of us are unforgiving when it comes to our own mistakes or errors in judgment. We can’t seem to forgive ourselves for not meeting the illusive and slippery standard of “perfection.”

Robert Kennedy once pointed out that “only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” On this daring adventure we call life, we are inevitably going to make a wrong turn here or there.

That doesn’t make us any less valuable. It is necessary to contact the pain we may have caused others through our mistakes.

It is necessary to feel, with the full sensitivity of our heart, the remorse that convinces our soul never to hurt another part of life like that again. But it is also necessary to get over it. Guilt is the enemy of growth.

No matter what mistakes we’ve made, we were doing the best we could at the time. Now it’s time to forgive ourselves, to get on with our life and to keep our eye focused on the vast spiritual potential we have inside of us. Therein lies the crux of the issue.

We all have that vast spiritual potential, but we don’t always accept it, especially when others belittle us or we belittle ourselves.

To make it through the everyday initiations of our karma, we need not only a higher perspective of the situation but also an inner perspective of our own divine reality. We need to affirm and reaffirm the gold that shines at the very core of our identity.

Both the Buddhists and the Christian Gnostics used the image of the “gold in the mud” to help us understand our spiritual essence.

They said that the gold of our spirit may be covered over by the mud of the world, but the mud never destroys the beauty of that innate spirit.Buddhism teaches that each of us contains the germ, or seed, of the Buddha, and that therefore we are all Buddhas in the making.

The Buddhist text Uttaratantra explains this truth with the following analogy: “The Germ of the Buddha has a resemblance with gold. Suppose that the gold belonging to a certain man was, at the time of his departure, cast into a place filled with impurities. Being of an indestructible nature, this gold would remain there for many hundreds of years.”

The text goes on to say that “the Lord perceives the true virtues [the “gold”] of the living beings sunk amidst the passions that are like impurities.” In order to “wash off this dirt,” the Buddha lets the rain of the highest teaching descend on all that lives.

The Gnostics also spoke of our golden nature. According to the second-century Greek Church Father Irenaeus, the Gnostics taught that our “spiritual substance” could not be corrupted, just as “gold, when submersed in filth,” does not lose its beauty but “retains its own native qualities, the filth having no power to injure the gold.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter what you’ve been through. It doesn’t matter how much mud (karma) has splattered onto your soul and shaped your outer personality on the road of life. It doesn’t matter what other people say about you. You are still a child of God—pure gold. You are capable of that grand spiritual adventure that is your birthright. And the pilot of that journey is your Higher Self.

Your Higher Self is part of your treasury of gold. Your Higher Self is your innate higher consciousness and guiding light, your wise inner teacher and dearest friend.

Jesus discovered that Higher Self to be “the Christ” and Gautama discovered it to be “the Buddha.”

Thus that Higher Self is also called the inner Christ (or Christ Self) as well as the inner Buddha. The Hindus refer to our Higher Self as the Atman and Christian mystics sometimes call it the Inner Light or the inner man of the heart.

When we are in the midst of a difficult situation, our Higher Self is our greatest ally and teacher. We can consciously go into our heart, which is the seat of our higher consciousness, and attune with the inner voice of wisdom that flows from our Higher Self.

We can ask our Higher Self to show us the spiritual dynamics that are at play in any circumstance, what steps we must take to resolve our karmic challenges, and how day by day we can make the most of our good karma.

Think Deeper: The Grace of Good Karma

One cannot escape from the effect of one’s past karma. But if a person lives a prayerful life, he gets off with only the prick of a thorn in the leg where he was to suffer from a deep cut.

–SRI SARADA DEVI

Sometimes the momentum of our good karma brings us what we call “grace”—a break that we didn’t expect but we sorely need.

The Indian master and teacher Paramahansa Yogananda relates a story about the master Babaji that describes how grace can work. One night, Babaji’s disciples were sitting around a bonfire that had been prepared for a sacred ceremony.

Suddenly Babaji grabbed a burning brand from the hot fire and lightly struck the bare shoulder of a disciple who was near the fire. “How cruel!” exclaimed one of the master’s disciples.

But Babaji responded, “Would you rather have seen him burned to ashes before your eyes, according to the decree of his past karma?” Then the master put his hand on the disciple’s injured shoulder and healed him, saying, “I have freed you tonight from painful death. The karmic law has been satisfied through your slight suffering by fire.”

We’ve all seen the good karma of grace in action.

Take these recent examples. While Jan was hiking in the mountains, she took a bad fall and hit her head hard against a rock. Fortunately, her hiking buddy used to teach first aid and knew exactly what to do.

When two tourists overturned their car, the first person on the scene was an emergency medical technician, who was driving by with his family. If you have to deal with returning karma, what better way than to have the immediate help and comfort that your good karma affords?

Rob, whose three-and-a-half-year-old daughter was diagnosed recently with leukemia, marvels that both he and his wife were able to help diagnose her disease before it became a life-and-death situation. His wife had been a nurse and he had helped research leukemia treatments during summers as a premed student, even though he never pursued medicine as a career.

“It’s amazing to me how my daughter was born to two parents who would recognize her vague but life-threatening symptoms in time,” says Rob. “Our past medical experience also took away some of the shock most parents feel in this kind of situation, and we’re well prepared to run a small ‘clinic’ at home during the next two years of her care and treatment.”

While Rob and his wife were in the children’s hospital where their daughter stayed during the first days of her emergency care, Rob commented to one doctor that he and his wife had discussed leukemia as a possible source of his little girl’s distressing symptoms a month before her actual diagnosis. “Many of the parents or relatives of children diagnosed with leukemia are actually nurses or are in the medical profession,” the doctor told him. God’s grace in action.

I, too, learned something about the nature of returning karma and grace when I was a college student at Boston University.

The example may seem minor, but the impact of the lesson was lasting. I was hurrying out the door of my dorm when I heard an inner voice tell me to put on my heavy winter coat and gloves. It was a beautiful spring day, so I thought to myself, “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of. Okay, I’ll put on the coat but not these heavy gloves. It’s just too hot!”

So I threw on my coat and ran down the street so I wouldn’t be late for my class. I crossed a street between some cars that were stopped at a light and bam! A bicycle came speeding alongside one of the cars, ran right into me and knocked me to the ground. I caught myself on my bare hands. The fur-lined coat insulated my body but my hands were scraped. If I had put on my gloves, I wouldn’t have had a scratch.

There is a time and space where we converge with forces we have set in motion in the past—our karma—and that’s exactly what happened to me that day. My Higher Self had tried to mitigate that karma by giving me a direction. But my stubborn reasoning mind was not able to accept it, so I lost the full benefit of the blessing, although I certainly didn’t lose the lesson.

Another factor in mitigating karma is that karma takes time to cycle into the physical. First it passes through the etheric, mental and emotional planes of being.

So, before it hits the physical—before the fruit of our karma becomes fully ripened—we have time to either slow down or mitigate the result. For instance, before disease becomes a physical reality, we may be able to turn it back if we resolve the emotional or karmic causes behind it.

There are other possibilities of grace.

As we saw in the story of Babaji and his disciple, we may merit some kind of dispensation whereby we receive only a token of the full karma that was originally slated. We may be allowed to balance a certain karma in some other way than being crushed by it. Or we may be given an extension of time before the karma comes due.

Say someone’s karma dictates that he meet with a certain setback or calamity at age forty-nine. The Karmic Board, that group of spiritual overseers we spoke of in Part 3, may make an adjustment based on his sincerity, his good works and the light he has garnered through his spiritual practice. They may decide that the karma will not come due for another ten years so that he has more time to spend with his young children or to develop his spiritual gifts.

Grace, however, doesn’t mean that our past transgressions are erased altogether. Just as the concept of forgiveness has been misunderstood, so has the concept of grace.

Advanced spiritual beings, like Jesus, Gautama Buddha, Kuan Yin or Mary, can and do intercede for their devotees so that karma can be held in abeyance. But that doesn’t excuse us from our accountability.

The extension gives us time to grow stronger and become better prepared to gracefully deal with our karma when it finally lands on our doorstep.

Unfortunately, many of us have grown up with a fundamental misunderstanding of the principle of grace based on what we were taught about Jesus. Jesus has indeed played a special role.

He was and is the great spiritual master chosen to incarnate as the sponsor of the Piscean age. His mission was to demonstrate how to become the fullness of “the Christ” (another term for the Higher Self, or the “Son”) so that we, too, would know how to become one with our own Higher Self.

That is the real role of a “Savior”—one who is empowered to help us reconnect with our Source, not one who replaces our connection with that Source.

In his role, Jesus did bear the weight of the negative karma, or “sins,” of the world for the past two thousand years. That means he shielded us from the full consequences of our misdeeds.

In essence, he gave us a kind of reprieve. He volunteered to help carry the weight of our karma until we were strong enough to bear it ourselves.

In the course of earth’s history, other adepts East and West have also held in abeyance mankind’s negative karma for thousands of years by their spiritual consciousness. This does not mean they canceled the debt; they only postponed our payment of it.

As we move from the age of Pisces into the age of Aquarius in this new millennium, we must now face our karma. Every one of us must assume the responsibility of bearing our own burden. It’s a time when we are called to demonstrate our spiritual maturity.

During this period of karmic summing up, we can all expect the harvest of good karma as well as negative karma, personal karma as well as group karma. This is why so many of us are seeing and feeling an acceleration in our lives.

There seems to be more to deal with in even less time, and the stakes seem to be getting higher. Yet as never before, we have the spiritual tools and techniques to successfully navigate the karmic straits on our voyage of self-discovery.