This afternoon, while finishing up my final exam to graduate from my Yoga Teachers Training program, I caught a portion of "Pay it Forward." Can't believe I haven't yet seen this movie - what an amazing lesson on karma.
In Western culture today, we often misuse the word karma. We think:
Drop a piece of litter on the way to my car : Find garbage strewn across my lawn when I get home
Say nasty things to someone who's irritating us : Someone else says nasty things to us and we feel badly
Even worse:
Lie : Get lied to, Steal : Get stolen from, Cheat : Get cheated on, etc.
Sure, it can be this basic but not usually. It's our misinterpretation of karma that leads us to think that it's bad energy, one negative activity we do brings it back to us in the same way - a semi-celestial rendition of Newton's Law.
Karma is actually, simply translated as, 'action.' Good, bad or neutral action. As abstruse as it may sound, the theory of karma tells us that every action we release into the world weaves into a greater web of issued action. Because this web is so expansive, we have no way of knowing how exactly one actions is going to find its way back to us.
A stranger may react harshly toward us, maybe in the form of road rage on our way to work, and in our frustration, we react the same way to the guy in front of us at the next stop light when he doesn't accelerate quickly enough when the light turns green. In his reaction, that guy may get in to work and unwarrantedly snap at his coworker. Setting off the coworker, she might fire off nastiness to the next sales person who calls, and it continues on from there.
What we forget is that we can never know what may have influenced that driver who prompted us to join this negative chain of action. We also have no way of predicting how this negative energy eventually finds its way back to us, and as a result, how it may then influence us further to issue more negative energy onto others. What we can do is decide to take pause before reacting to harshness toward us and chose to interrupt the chain and set the energy on a new course.
It's almost impossible to expect that we always issue good karma, but we can strive for it. Our actions reach farther than we can imagine, so shouldn't we work for them to always be good?
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