This is my fourth episode on spiritual inquiry. In the last episode I discussed “karma work,” or the process of noticing the underlying reasons for our selfish, harmful, or less-than-enlightened behaviors of body, speech, and mind, and then working to resolve them. I talked about how to identify our karmic issues. In this episode I discuss what to do once you’ve identified a karmic issue you’d like to work on, taking you through the process of delving into the underlying causes of your negative karmic patterns, and then finding greater freedom through insight and through habit change.
Read/listen to Part 3 or Part 5.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Karma Work: Untangling Our Karmic Knots
Identifying Underlying Causes in the Here and Now
Karma Work: Insight Versus Habit Change
How Karma Work Leads to Awakening Work
Karma Work: Untangling Our Karmic Knots
The first step in working on a particular karmic issue is to cultivate curiosity about it. This means arousing your questioning mind and looking closely. As much as possible, adopt an attitude of humility, setting aside your assumption that you already understand this part of your karma. Imagine you’re a psychologist observing yourself; ask respectful and compassionate questions to understand your karma more intimately.
When this karmic issue arises, what is usually going on in your life? What triggers your behavior of body, speech, or mind? What are you thinking and feeling? What happens in your body? Is there any tightness? Maybe a headache, dizziness, nausea? How long does your reaction last? What do you really want in the situation where the issue arises? If you could get exactly what you wanted in that moment, what would it be? As you experience this karma, do mental or physical memories come up from the past? Do you get stuck in a stressful loop of negative thinking? If so, what is the content of that thinking? What tends to alleviate your karmic symptoms?
As we’re closely observing our own experience, it’s important – at least temporarily – to set aside our agenda to change. The temptation to leap straight to fixing things will cause us to jump to relatively shallow and premature conclusions which aren’t helpful. An agenda also skews our attention and may cause us to negatively judge what we observe. The part of our self being observed may respond by being uncooperative, such that our thoughts and feelings go underground and our effort to understand is foiled.
What we discover as we deeply examine our own karma may not be easy to face. We may need to open up old wounds before they can be healed. Our idea of ourselves may be profoundly challenged. We may need to recognize and admit that much of our internal dialogue is childish, self-centered, arrogant, or completely irrational. All of this is okay. It may help to remind yourself that anything unpleasant you uncover in your karmic inquiry was lurking there long before you uncovered it, quietly wreaking havoc with, or compromising, your life.
As we investigate, it’s important to remember how incredibly complicated karma is. An issue we want to address is never going to have one simple cause. Instead of discovering a one-to-one cause and effect relationship, we’re likely to discover what my teachers called a “karmic knot.” One negative behavior entered our repertoire because of another issue we have, which connects back to another cause, and so on. The causes and effects twist back on themselves and reinforce each other. Finding any resolution can seem quite unlikely!
However, karma work is not like straightforward problem solving. It requires patient, gentle persistence. It’s like untangling a large, dense knot in a skein of yarn. If you yank too hard on any piece, you’re liable to make the knot worse. Just looking at the knot, you’re unlikely to be able to follow the thread far enough to make a difference. If you want quick results, you’ll probably give up in frustration. If you keep gently massaging the knot, though – allowing your fingers to get intimate with it, loosening things a little when there’s an opportunity, gradually you may untangle one section of yarn, and then another. Each piece of karma we untangle brings relief and greater freedom.
Another metaphor helps to convey the kind of effort we make in karma work. (This one I credit to one of my teachers, Kyogen Carlson.) Imagine greater understanding and freedom is on the other side of a locked door. It’s an incredibly thick door you can’t break through. If you want to get through the door, it won’t help if you just walk away from it and forget it. What we need to do is maintain contact with the door, perhaps leaning against it or placing the palm of our hand on it. We use some pressure, so if or when the door gives a little, we will notice and take advantage of that. Such effort requires patience, determination, and persistence. When you first begin deliberate karma work, it may seem like a hopeless or foolish endeavor, but over time your faith that change is possible will grow. In my experience, we may have to keep our hand on that door to insight for many years, but eventually something will budge and make the whole effort worth it.
Identifying Underlying Causes in the Here and Now
For the next stage of karma work, I want to introduce yet another metaphor. The karmic issues we observe on the surface – our obvious thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and experiences – are often like symptoms of an underlying illness. We can treat our symptoms, but ultimately the most healing and transformative thing is to address the underlying illness.
If we want to find the underlying causes for our karmic issues, we need to keep delving deeper and deeper. Simple answers may help us a little, but they are unlikely to truly unravel our karmic knots or result in lasting change. If we arrive at an answer or insight, we then ask, what’s underneath, or behind, that?
Note: The underlying causes we are looking for are in the here and now, not in the past! The karmic malady lives within your own body and mind. The issues may have causes rooted in the past, or in the actions of other people, but that isn’t what we are trying to figure out in karma work.
Second note: When we are “looking” for underlying causes, we are not using our intellect. We’re not excluding our minds, and part of our process may involve words or narratives. However, some of the answers we find may manifest in images, physical sensations, dreams, or spontaneously arising emotions. In addition, we are not actively “figuring things out.” Instead, we are shining the light of awareness on our karma and looking. We examine and question what is happening within us as if we were a scientist. “Interesting! Look at that thought? What’s that about? Why do I care so much about that? What am I afraid of?” The answers may not appear to us right away, and they may not be the answers to questions we were asking, but if we keep up this process, eventually insights happen. When they occur, they feel fresh, spontaneous, and often somewhat surprising. Our meditation practice helps immensely when it comes to cultivating the ability to just sit still, shine the light of awareness on a topic, and wait for answers to arise.
I’ll use an example to illustrate the process of taking your karmic investigation deeper to find underlying causes. Let’s say you tend to judge other people negatively. Let’s say this happens often enough, and the judgmental thoughts are so preoccupying, that you really want to understand this tendency and hopefully find a way to change. You start watching your judgmentalism carefully – noticing it arise, what goes through your mind, how you feel at the time, and then noticing when it passes. Looking carefully and patiently, one day you recognize that when you’re judging someone’s behavior, you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t let myself do that!” Surprisingly, you realize you feel a little bit of envy for the other person. Why can they get away with acting like that, when you work so hard to be the right kind of person? It’s not fair!
Just this amount of insight into your karma may help. Maybe you realize that your judgmentalism isn’t so much about the behavior of other people, it’s about your own standards for yourself. This may lead you to give yourself a break sometimes, which subsequently makes you a little more tolerant of others.
But there are many layers of karma beneath such a preliminary insight. For example, why do you feel compelled to hold yourself to such high standards? What do you think would happen if you failed to meet the standards you have chosen for yourself? Let’s say you hold that question for a while, and at some point recognize that some part of you fears you are inherently unworthy of acceptance and love. Starting in your childhood you tried to figure out what kinds of behavior would earn you the belonging and esteem you needed. You gradually created a long list of standards for yourself that feel less like voluntary aspirations than a set of fixed rules, and the punishment for breaking those rules is devastating rejection, humiliation, and alienation from the people you love and depend on.
Again, this insight may help resolve some of your karma. Maybe you recognize that your fear of rejection was formed when you were a child, when you literally depended on the acceptance of others for survival. As an adult, you need positive human relationships but don’t need to worry quite so much about maintaining the approval of others. Realizing this may relieve some of your karmic stress.
However, karma work doesn’t even stop there! It’s possible to keep tracing the karmic connections deeper and deeper. The further down you get, the more basic, primal, and sometimes irrational the karma. Warning: To keep up your karmic investigation at this level is not something our culture generally understands or endorses. It’s not that it’s dangerous, it’s just that most of us would not assume it was worth looking deeper unless a tradition like Buddhism told us it was.
In the example we’re talking about judgementalism and standards, let’s say you keep up the inquiry (keeping your hand on the door to insight). In a meditation retreat, you experience what feels like a full-body flashback to your childhood, when you first perceived acceptance and love were conditional, and fear arose that you would end up rejected and alone. You are suffused with feelings of inadequacy and shame. However, at the same time the wiser, adult part of you responds with compassion, just as you would if you were comforting a child in front of you. The adult part of you sees how this fear of rejection is an unfortunate and universal aspect of human experience, not based in any fundamental inadequacy of yours. As your deep inner wound is recognized and embraced, it is also partially healed.
If you are engaging in karma work, it can take some time. You may end up wondering whether this approach is working for you, whether you’re ever going to find any kind of liberating answers. The description I just gave of deep inner healing may sound like a fairy tale, something beyond anything you’re likely to experience. However, if you don’t give up hope, you will make progress. It might not be exactly the progress you’re looking for. It might not even be progress on the karmic issue you would most like to resolve! But any karmic issue we have does have underlying causes, and because those causes live within us, we can uncover them. A friend of mine – a Soto Zen priest who has been practicing for around 30 years – recently gained a deeper insight into one of his fundamental karmic issues. He observed, amazed, “There really is a bottom!”
Karma Work: Insight Versus Habit Change
Karma work has two aspects, insight and habit change. Both are essential.
Insight is the result of the kind of inquiry I just described, although of course insights may occur spontaneously as well. You gain an understanding of your karma that changes your relationship to it, or opens up some new possibilities. I find it very helpful to contemplate a new karmic insight and then ask, “What can I let go of here?” In any difficult situation there may be things that are beyond our control, or that we are not yet able to change. But there may be just one small thing – one assumption you can question, one attachment you can release, one narrative you can drop – which will make a difference.
The liberation attained through insight can be wonderful, lasting, and transformative. In the example I used earlier, I talked about a deep and primal insight involving re-experiencing childhood fear and meeting that with adult strength and compassion. This kind of experience can forever change you. You may never again feel the same level of anxiety about rejection, or the same compulsion to meet the standards you have set for yourself.
However, karma work also involves habit change. Sometimes insights bring about a significant behavioral change, and sometimes they don’t. And smaller insights may open up possibilities for change, but we still have to act on them. Our karma is carried in our bodies, our minds, and our subconscious. “Habit energy” is the momentum of karma, carrying us along well-worn karmic pathways even when we know better, or want to live differently.
One my teachers, Kyogen, described a situation he experienced which was a perfect illustration of karma and habit energy. He had a cat who wanted to be let outdoors every morning. The door the cat would go to was replaced at one point, and it opened on the opposite side. Although Kyogen knew this, every morning for week or more his hand would move toward the side of the door where the old door handle had been. The cat also went at waited at the wrong side of the door, of course. Eventually, Kyogen’s habit energy changed and he would reach for the new door handle automatically. Curiously, the cat’s habit energy changed on almost exactly the same timeline as Kyogen’s! So, in this case, insight into the situation clearly did not make behavior change any faster.
It’s important not to get dualistic about karma work and think of liberation through insight as being superior to the daily effort of habit change. Both are necessary and valuable. If we don’t manifest our insight though habit change, our insights are fairly useless. And habit change can facilitate insight, as we experiment with different ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving. (See Episode 72 – Taking Care of Our Lives: More About the Karma Relationship Side of Practice for more on Karma Work.)
How Karma Work Leads to Awakening Work
In my next episode on spiritual inquiry, I’ll be talking about homing in on what I’m calling “awakening questions.” As I discussed in the last episode, awakening work involves striving for a direct, personal experience of the deeper truths of our existence – truths we share with all life. Awakening can radically change the way we view ourselves and the world and can make karma work easier. But even when we awaken, we still have to do karma work. Insight still needs to be actualized.
You can think of awakening inquiry as continuing where karma work ends. In a sense, they’re not even two different things, it’s just that awakening reaches a level of our being which has nothing to do with our particular karmic package. As we zero in on our fundamental personal koan, we eventually get to a single doubt mass – a wordless, existential question. Before a direct, personal insight into this question, we are a suffering sentient being who believes we are lacking something essential. After awakening, we recognize and embrace our Buddha-Nature.
Although karma work can be difficult and messy at times, it doesn’t have to be only a hard slog. It can be a fascinating process that leads to greater self-acceptance, stability, moral behavior, generosity, trust, and openness. Our karma work not only brings more peace of mind and satisfaction to our everyday lives, it can allow us to cultivate more stillness in our meditation and mindfulness practices – which in turn facilitates awakening. So, karma work and awakening work are like two feet in walking – both necessary, and complementary.
Read/listen to Part 3 or Part 5.
Photo Credit
Image by Vicki Becker from Pixabay
