Making Peace With The Past: A Reflection on “Karma”
Making Peace With The Past: A Reflection on “Karma”
Reconciling with the past might be one of the most challenging things to do. Because of this, we might bring unresolved and unprocessed emotions and situations from the past into the present, whether it be from a traumatic upbringing, an unresolved relationship, an argument or the persistent recollection of previous mishaps.
We might develop a habit of mulling over past memories, not only events that might have upset us but also events we enjoyed, maybe in an attempt to recreate the same pleasant outcomes.
Ultimately, when we do this, we can find ourselves bodily re-feeling and re-experiencing the emotions that past situation evoked. The issue is that often, the tendency is to go to painful, unresolved events with the habit of trying to justify and understand why it happened over and over again. It’s as if there is this illusion that the situation will fix itself if we think about it one more time.
This can end up making us feeling dissatisfied, unhappy, and miserable. Unbecomingly, this is a common human tendency, that of revisiting painful memories with a habit of trying to fix them. We all do this to one degree, but unwittingly, this just reinforces negative emotions and self-pity. In the long run, this just hurts us; it doesn’t resolve anything.
As Albert Einstein said,
“Insanity is doing or thinking the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome/answer.”
Ultimately, no one passes through life unscathed. We all have past baggage that drags us down and keeps us stuck in old habits, self-concepts, and habitual reflexive behaviours.
The concept of karma in Buddhism refers to how our present behaviour will affect our future behaviour and how our past behaviour will affect us in the present. Although we will never be able to totally undo our past actions, we can discover the freedom to choose a different course of action by altering how we interact with our emerging karmic patterns.
In other words, even while we cannot change the past, we can alter how we view and relate to it in the present. We always have a choice due to the nature of experience and it being impermanent and it is impermanence that makes change possible.
Soto Zen priest Kyogen Carlson points out that:
“When we talk about ‘cleansing karma,’ we sometimes have this illusion that we’re going to wash it all off and it’s going to go away. But what we really do is cleanse our relationship with it”.
He further explains that this entails that:
“We drop our old ways of responding and our old traps of habit energy. All these things that happened in the past are still with us in some respects. We acknowledge that; we call to them and find a way to respond to them.”
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