Can Mindfulness change Bad Karma?

What Is Karma?

Let’s start with a definition. Karma means that this happens because that happened. Overall, when we speak of a person’s karma, it means the sum total of the person’s direction in life and the substance of the things that occur around that person, caused by antecedent conditions, actions, thoughts, feelings, sense impressions and desires.

Karma Is Not Destiny

Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behaviour patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature.

So, it is easy to become imprisoned by our karma and to think that the cause always lies elsewhere – with other people and conditions beyond our control never within ourselves.

You Can Make New Karma

But it is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. It is always possible to change your karma. YOU CAN MAKE NEW KARMA. But there is only one time that you ever have to do it.

Can you guess when that might be?

You are correct if you answered… in the present moment!

How Mindfulness Changes Karma

Here’s how mindfulness changes karma. When you sit in mindfulness meditation, you are not allowing your impulses to translate into action. For the time being, at least you are just watching them.

Looking at them, you quickly see that all impulses in the mind arise and pass away, that they have a life of their own, that they are not you but just thinking, and that you do not have to be ruled by them.

Not Reacting to Impulses

Not feeding or reacting to impulses, you come to understand their nature as thoughts directly. This process can actually burn up destructive impulses in the fires of concentration and equanimity and non-doing.

At the same time, creative insights and creative impulses are no longer squeezed out so much by the more turbulent, destructive ones. They are nourished as they are perceived and held in awareness.

Mindfulness as Liberation

Mindfulness can thereby re-fashion the links in the chain of actions and consequences, and in doing so it unchains us, frees us, and opens up new directions for us through the moments we call life.

Without mindfulness, we are too easily stuck in the momentum coming out of the past, with no clue to our own imprisonment, and no way out.

The Blame Game

Our dilemma always seems to be the other person’s fault, or the world’s fault, so our own views and feelings are always justified.

The present moment is never a new beginning because we keep it from becoming one.

In one form or another, you see it over and over again in relationships gone sour or missing something fundamental from the start, the absence of which invites sadness, bitterness, hurt.

Reaping What We Sow

Sooner or later, we are most likely to reap that which we have sown. Practice anger and isolation in a relationship for years, and you wind up imprisoned in anger and isolation. No big surprise. And it is hardly satisfactory to apportion blame here.

Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us.

We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming.

The Chain of Karma

Usually it’s a long chain of events that result in bad karma, starting with parents and family, poverty and violence, trusting people you shouldn’t, looking for an easy buck, soothing the hurt and dulling the senses with alcohol and other chemicals which cloud mind and body.

Drugs do it, but so do history, deprivation, and arrested development.

They warp thoughts and feelings, actions and values, leaving few avenues for modulating or even recognising hurtful, cruel, and self-destructive impulses and cravings.

One Irreversible Moment

And so, in one moment, which all your other moments led up to, unbeknown to you, you can ‘lose your mind’, commit an irreversible act, and then experience the myriad ways in which it shapes future moments.

Everything has consequences, whether we know it or not, whether we are ‘caught’ by the police or not. We are always caught. Caught in the karma of it.

What Is “Unawareness”?

What Buddhists call “unawareness” is the ignorance of how unexamined impulses, especially those coloured by greed or hatred, however justified, rationalised, or legal, can warp one’s mind and one’s life.

Such mind states affect us all, sometimes in big dramatic ways, but most often by more subtle paths.

We can all be imprisoned by incessant wanting, by a mind clouded with ideas and opinions it clings to as if they were truth.

Changing Your Karma

If we hope to change our karma, it means we have to stop those things that cloud mind and body and colour our every action from happening. It doesn’t mean doing good deeds.

Mindfulness means knowing that you are not your karma, whatever it may be at this moment. It means aligning yourself with the way things actually are. It means seeing clearly, getting in touch with your values and let them direct your committed efforts.

Where to Begin?

Where to start? Why not with your own mind?

After all, it is the instrument through which all your thoughts and feelings, impulses and perceptions are translated into actions in the world.

When you stop outward activity for some time and practice being still in mindful meditation, right there, in that moment, with that decision to sit, you are already breaking the flow of old karma and creating an entirely new and healthier karma.

The Power of the Present Moment

It is only by being fully in the present moment that any future moment might be one of greater understanding, clarity, and kindness, one less dominated by fear or hurt and more by dignity and acceptance.

If there is no mindfulness or equanimity or compassion now, in the only time we have to contact it and nourish ourselves, how likely is it that it will magically appear later, under stress or duress?

Reference: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life, by Jon Kabat-Zinn