This is the third part of three of my episodes on “Learning the Self,” one of my Ten Fields of Zen. In the first episode I discussed why we “study the self” in Zen, and what “self” we’re talking about if – according to the teachings – the self is empty of any inherent nature! In the second episode I talked about what is meant by “studying” or “learning” the self. I also explained the idea of Karma and discussed why it’s valuable to work on it. In this episode, I cover how we do Karmic Work.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Taking your Karmic Inventory
Untangling your Karmic Knots
Identifying Underlying Karmic Causes in the Here and Now
Karmic Insight Versus Habit Change
This Very Body is Buddha: Karma Work and Realization are Not Two
Taking your Karmic Inventory
The next step in Karma Work is becoming intimately familiar with your Karma. You look for your Karmic issues – those ways in which you are compelled toward harmful behaviors of body, speech, and mind, and those ways in which your capacity for beneficial behaviors are constrained. How do you identify your Karmic issues?
You know you’re not perfect. You may feel like you’re fairly familiar with your faults and shortcomings. However, few of us are in the habit of examining these things as closely as Zen practice invites us to. Of course, you may already have done a fair amount of “work on yourself,” whether through introspection, psychotherapy, or a 12-step program, but many of us tend to react to evidence of our issues with denial, blaming, defensiveness, or self-recrimination. In practice, you need to learn how to examine your Karmic issues with objectivity, setting aside your self-concern as much as you can.
Instead of getting all wrapped up in a narrative about who you think you are, who you should be, or who you want to be, it’s best to relate to your Karmic issues almost as if they belonged to someone else. Instead of thinking, “I’m a terrible person because my mind is so full of judgements about other people,” you think (as much as possible), “Interesting! Look at all those judgements about other people. What’s that about?” This kind of objectivity can be difficult, but you might find it liberating to be invited to view things this way. As long as you’re still wringing your hands about your Karma – miserable that you ended up this way or wallowing in self-blame – you won’t get much Karma work done! It’s very helpful to find your own Karma fascinating, and even to develop a sense of humor about your shortcomings.
Karma work begins with what Alcoholics Anonymous calls “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” If you’re not currently facing a life-or-death matter like addiction, such an inventory may seem like a negative, burdensome, and unnecessary project. However, such an inventory is an essential part of Buddhist practice. This work is part of what Zen master Dogen called “studying the self.” Although your negative Karmic patterns may feel more like annoyances than emergencies, any negative Karma you remain unaware of, or refuse to work on, controls you to some extent. You continue to perpetuate it and affect others with it. Your experience of life is constrained by it – compromising your peace of mind, your intimacy with others, and your ability to settle deeply in meditation and engage in awakening work.
A mature Buddhist practitioner is intimate with their Karma, good and bad. You might say they have done a thorough cleaning of their Karmic closet. They’ve discovered the skeletons that were hidden in there, and done their best to bring them out into the light of day and give them a proper burial. If skeletons remain, you are well aware of them and how they affect your actions of body, speech, and mind. Ideally, you also learn how to compensate for your Karmic issues – not excusing or enabling them, but minimizing the harm they cause for self and others.
As you take your Karmic inventory, some things may immediately jump out at you. Obviously harmful behaviors like addictions, stealing, lying, cheating, or abusing others are definitely Karmic issues that need to be part of your practice. Depression and anxiety are Karmic issues (although they may also have a physical component).
Other Karmic issues are more subtle. When you pay careful attention to your life, where does dukkha – dissatisfactoriness or suffering – arise? Where do you find yourself behaving in ways you know are unhelpful? In what ways do you fall short of your own aspirations? Where are your relationships marked by conflict? In your relationships, where do you find yourself manifesting defensiveness, avoidance, resentment, or an effort to control? (In some senses, other people bring out the worst in us, which in the case of Karma work is a good thing!)
In what ways are you inhibited from speaking or acting in a way that feels authentic? What negative thought patterns do you tend to get caught in, such as catastrophizing, nurturing resentments, or building the case for a nihilistic worldview? What are your greatest fears? What fears are beneath those fears? What issues keep showing up for you in life, in one form or another? What needs or beliefs drive your harmful behaviors? What are you attached to and why? Why aren’t you completely and utterly satisfied with yourself and your life? What gets in the way of your intimacy with others, and with all of life?
The list of possible lines of Karmic inquiry are infinite. You learn to pay careful attention whenever you break Precepts, feel dukkha, cause suffering for others, feel negative emotions, act contrary to your aspirations, or feel like you’re being inauthentic. At a more subtle level, you learn to notice when any tightness or reactivity arises in your body or mind.
You turn your attention to your Karmic issues not because you’re embarking on an endless self-improvement project, but because noticing any tightness in the flow of your life is an opportunity to achieve greater freedom, wisdom, compassion, and skillfulness. You don’t have to tackle all your Karmic issues at once. You don’t have to add judgement and self-recrimination when you recognize one of the skeletons in your closet. You don’t have to fixate on an ideal about who you should be, and constantly compare yourself with it. If, as I discussed earlier, you can be somewhat objective about your Karma, you can roll your sleeves up and engage in your Karma work as a way of taking care of this precious human life. You’re not asked to flagellate yourself for being flawed, you’re encouraged to realize your full potential.
Untangling your 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 you’re closely observing your own experience, it’s important – at least temporarily – to set aside your agenda to change. The temptation to leap straight to fixing things will cause you to jump to relatively shallow and premature conclusions which aren’t helpful. An agenda also skews your attention and may cause you to negatively judge what you observe. The part of your self being observed may respond by being uncooperative, such that your thoughts and feelings go underground and your effort to understand is foiled.
What you discover as you deeply examine your own Karma may not be easy to face. You may need to open up old wounds before they can be healed. Your idea of yourself may be profoundly challenged. You may need to recognize and admit that much of your 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 you investigate, it’s important to remember how incredibly complicated Karma is. An issue you want to address is never going to have one simple cause. Instead of discovering a one-to-one cause and effect relationship, you’re likely to discover what my teachers called a “Karmic knot.” One negative behavior entered your repertoire because of another issue you 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 you untangle brings relief and greater freedom.
Another analogy helps to convey the kind of effort you make in Karma work. 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 you need to do is maintain contact with the door, perhaps leaning against it or placing the palm of your hand on it. You use some pressure, so if or when the door gives a little, you’ll notice and take advantage of it. 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, you may have to keep your hand on that door to insight for many years, but eventually something will budge and make the whole effort worth it.
Identifying Underlying Karmic Causes in the Here and Now
For the next stage of Karma work, I want to introduce yet another analogy. The Karmic issues you observe on the surface – your obvious thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and experiences – are often like symptoms of an underlying illness. You can treat your symptoms, but ultimately the most healing and transformative thing is to address the underlying illness.
If you want to find the underlying causes for your Karmic issues, you need to keep delving deeper and deeper. Simple answers may help you a little, but they are unlikely to truly unravel your Karmic knots or result in lasting change. If you arrive at an answer or insight, you then ask, what’s underneath, or behind, that?
Note: The underlying causes you 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 you are trying to figure out in Karma work.
Second note: When you are “looking” for underlying causes, you are not using your intellect. You’re not excluding your mind, of course, and part of your process may involve words or narratives. However, some of the answers you find may manifest in images, physical sensations, dreams, or spontaneously arising emotions. In addition, you are not actively “figuring things out.” Instead, you are shining the light of awareness on your Karma and looking. You examine and question what is happening within you as if you 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 you right away, and they may not be the answers to questions you were asking, but if you keep up this process, eventually insights happen. When they occur, they feel fresh, spontaneous, and often somewhat surprising. Your 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 your 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 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 were looking for. It might not even be progress on the Karmic issue you would most like to resolve! But any Karmic issue you have does have underlying causes, and because those causes live within us, you 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!”
Karmic Insight Versus Habit Change
Karma work has two aspects, insight and habit change. Both are essential.
Insight can be the result of the kind of inquiry I just described, although it can 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 your control, or aspects of yourself you 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. Smaller insights may open up possibilities for change, but you still have to act on them. Your Karma is carried in your body and in your conscious and unconscious mind. “Habit energy” is the momentum of Karma, carrying you along well-worn Karmic pathways even when you know better, or want to live differently.
One of my teachers, Kyogen Carlson, described a perfect illustration of the relationship between insight and habit energy. He had a cat who wanted to be let out the back door every morning. At some point, this door was replaced and opened on the opposite side. Although Kyogen knew this, every morning for a week or more his hand would move toward the side of the door where the old door handle had been. The cat also went and 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 the hard work of gradual habit change as being separate from, or inferior to, the liberation of insight. Both are necessary and valuable. If you don’t manifest your insight though habit change, your insights are fairly useless. And habit change can facilitate insight, as you experiment with different ways of thinking, speaking, and behaving.
This Very Body is Buddha: Karma Work and Realization are Not Two
If you want to be transformed by Zen, Karma work definitely needs to be part of your process. Sometimes, depending on your life circumstances or the trajectory of your practice, you will feel neck-deep in Karma work. It may feel like something of a slog. At other times Karma work may seem less relevant to you, but keep in mind that until you’re a completely enlightened Buddha, you always have more Karma to clean up, resolve, or gain greater freedom from. The beautiful thing is that Karma work leads into, supports, and flavors the other aspect of Studying the Self – Realizing your True Nature, which will be discussed in the next chapter as part of the Zen Field of Realization.
It’s easy to forget that absolute and relative, or the independent and dependent dimensions, are simply two aspects of one Reality. It’s useful sometimes to speak of Karma work as being one effort while Realizing your True Nature is another. Practically speaking, the aims of these activities are different and we employ different tools for each of them. Ultimately, though, there is only one Reality. As you become intimately familiar with your Karma and take responsibility for it, you eventually come face to face with the spiritual obstacles that lie beneath your Karma; it’s precisely those obstacles that will become your gateways into Realization. When you catch a glimpse of your True Nature, you will be surprised to find that it is inseparable from this skin bag here and now. As Hakuin said, this very body is Buddha.
