What is the meaning of “karmic?”

Sometimes I make decisions really fast. When I chose my colors for this website, it was in about five seconds. I saw the pastel purple, the shiny black and thought, “Easter Sunday in the underworld, let’s go.” Naming my studio took a bit longer but not much. Knowing that I wanted my interest in astrology to play a role in the classes I taught, two names popped into my head quickly — Cosmic Yoga and Karmic Yoga. I took a walk to mull it over and decided that Cosmic Yoga felt a little gimmicky for what I was hoping to do. Karmic Yoga felt real.

About a year later, when I was movin’ and groovin’ with an alive and breathing yoga studio, I started stumbling upon what I guess could be called new new age spiritualism. Spiritual radio shows, tarot card readers on YouTube, etc. This was a mystical world previously unknown to me. All my learnings until then felt very practical and grounded. Even astrology, for me, was simply a matter of, “Well we are connected to everything, and we are part of the universe, so of course we’re connected to the universe.”

I had just started learning about energy by way of the chakras, which was expanding my consciousness in what felt at the time like mysterious ways, and of course I was doing a lot of yoga and meditation, so I felt primed for tuning into the messages that these people were saying. And I want to be clear, many of these messages were incredibly beneficial to my journey, and I’m grateful I found them. But something that stuck out to me immediately was the way many of them used the word “karmic.” It was as if they were using it synonymously with the word “toxic.” They used it to refer to people, places, and things that they said to get away from, that were harmful, saying things like, “Get off your karmic path, it’s keeping you from your dharma, your abundance and purpose…” or “This person is a karmic who made you feel unworthy...” and so on.

I kind of freaked out. I named my studio, my business, the work I was molding my life around…Toxic Yoga?? I was also confused. Even though I chose the name fairly fast, it came from what I felt was my deep understanding of a law of the universe — karma. A law that, since I was 14 years old and first learned about Buddhism, I thought was beautiful. So I had to do some digging, externally and internally, to reacquaint myself with my understanding of karma and remember why I started all this in the first place.

What is karma?

Karma is a Sanskrit word meaning “action.” Philosophies around karma are found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, but I believe you can find traces of the concept in all religions and even science (e.g. every action has an equal and opposite reaction).

For this post, I wanted to go into the historical origins of Hinduism, which would subsequently be the historical origins of karmic philosophy, but research for that quickly landed me in a political quagmire that I do not have the brains, business, or balls to engage in. (This article gives you a taste of it.) So I’m just going to say this (and even this might be an inflammatory statement to some):

It is my belief that the way popular society and some new new age circles* are using the word “karma” and “karmic” today — that is denoting people, places, or things as good or bad — is a remnant from the understanding of karma that was created and used thousands of years ago to uphold the caste system, i.e. a hierarchical system of social division.

Why do some people live a life of material riches and success? “Because they were good in a past life or this one and deserve it.” Why do some people live a life of material poverty and stress? “Because they were bad in a past life or this one and deserve it.” These answers never resonated with me. Karma is not about being deserving. It’s not about accumulating enough points so you can reach some version of heaven. It’s not about atonement either. Karma is not a system of reward and punishment.**

The law of karma is about the balancing of opposites.

The universe is always seeking balance (remember every action leading to an equal and opposite reaction?). It will use whatever means necessary to get to a state of balance. In the case of most human beings incarnated on this planet, that balance is found through experiential learning. And this learning can take many, many lives to complete.

Let’s talk the astrology of it all.

Astrology is a system I very much believe in and have used for my own healing and understanding. It too has origins in Hinduism. And in thinking about writing this post, I remembered the early days of my astrology study.

Old-world astrology denoted planets as “benefic” or “malefic” — good or bad. If you had a natal chart with a lot of benefic planetary energy, you would have a good, easy life full of riches and success. If you had a chart with a lot of malefic planetary energy…good luck. You were probably gonna die young and penniless.

The biggest baddie of the malefics was Saturn. Saturn rules limitations, fear, and pain.

The problem that this classification system runs into, and why it eventually evolved into other methods of understanding astrology, is that no planet, like no person, is all good or all bad. And, in fact, it is usually the “bad” stuff that leads to the “good” through the process of learning which then leads to transmutation (turning one energy into another). Think of the phrase “There is no growth without opposition” — a very Saturnian phrase if I do say so myself. Saturn does rule what I listed above, but the flipside is that it also rules success and prosperity through hard work, determination through fear and limitations, and wisdom through painful experiences. Guess what else it rules? The law of karma.

What current astrology methodologies teach is not to reject any energies within your chart, even if they could be superficially classified as “bad.” To do so would be a rejection of yourself and your purpose on this Earth, since those energies were placed there to lead you exactly to the lessons you need to learn in this lifetime. Those lessons are based on past lives, but, again, not in a punitive or rewarding way. Simply in a way that allows you to experience all sides of a situation to lead you to a balanced understanding of it.

We are all here to evolve our consciousness by working through the hard stuff and discovering the depth of love and understanding we as human beings hold. Karma is here to help us do that.

Speaking of the hard stuff…

I recently went through a personal tragedy when my 18-year-old dog, Kirby, died. We were brought together when I was 19, and we spent almost 14 years together. As I mentioned earlier, we’re led to the lessons we’re meant to learn in this lifetime. So did my soul choose to fall madly in love with a little Pekingese, knowing that our earthly experience together would be finite? I believe it did.

The week he was to be put to sleep (he was hanging on stubbornly despite a body that was failing him), I went for a drive. I had started taking hour-long drives every week so that I could cry alone in my car. On this drive, I saw the number 666 about 10 times. I wasn’t raised on any religion, but I know the connotation that number has. I felt a heavy weight, like lead, enter my body. I knew what was coming, and I was terrified.

I googled the number when I got home, and the sites I found spoke of compassion and inner strength and unconditional love — the kind that can only be realized through facing the hardest parts of life head-on.

The morning after Kirby died, I woke up early. I spent an hour or so looking at pictures of him and crying and then at some point I fell back asleep. I didn’t want to be awake that day.

I had a dream while I slept. Kirby, with his fluffy beige hair in all its glory, was running through the greenest grass I’ve ever seen. He hadn’t been able to walk in his final few months, and dream me started laughing, saying, “He’s running! He’s running!” There appeared a bright golden light and he ran right into it, sort of dissolving into it.

The scene switched. It was some sort of press conference or interview with Machine Gun Kelly. (Why my subconscious chose MGK to deliver this message, I may never know.) The interviewer asked him, “Do you believe in angel numbers?” to which he replied, “Oh yeah, definitely.” The interviewer said, “What does the number 666 mean to you?” Without hesitating, he said, “It means life’s gonna happen. Bad things are gonna happen that are no one’s fault. There’s problems everywhere. You just have to keep going. Keep living and keep trying.”

I woke up feeling a beautiful kind of heartache.

Karmic balance is ultimately a state of peace.

There are universal karmic lessons we all must learn that come with the territory of just being alive. How can we love in the face of fear and loss? How can we live when we know we will die? How can we find permanent truths in a transitory, impermanent world?

We are all struggling to answer these questions for ourselves. Sometimes in that struggle, we might feel that we’ve lost our way or our sense of self. We might feel chaos. But it’s also in that struggle that we can find acceptance and peace.

The idea of karmic balance reminds me of a revelation the Buddha had soon before he reached enlightenment: the middle way. This was an idea of moderation, that when two extremes were on the table, be they in thought or action, the right choice was somewhere in the middle.

The paradox of opposites is that they really only exist as orientation points to help us find our way to the middle. To find our center. Once we’re there, the opposites become one single continuum. Like the phrase “two sides of the same coin,” from the center, the opposites are one in the same.

In the Buddhist view, this idea of oneness can be expressed as, “Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.”

It might be that human existence is somewhere in the middle.

*I’m referring to Western culture here, as this is where I live and the majority of information I take in.

**I have heard modern Hindu thought leaders discuss the idea that karma is not a system of reward and punishment nor is it necessarily charitable acts, especially when discussing karma yoga, one of the spiritual pathways to union with the Divine self. And of course, the caste system is no longer practiced. Regardless of the origins of the caste system or of Hinduism, I want to say this about the Hindu people: what they’ve done and continue to do, in my opinion, is the same thing they teach all yogis to do which is to take what works and leave the rest. And that, I believe, has led to beautiful evolution.