Can Karma Be Changed?

There are a lot of misconceptions about Karma. In the West, we often see Karma as a kind of points system, where there are positive points and negative points. You do something nice; you get a good Karma point. You act like a jerk; you get a bad Karma point.

Karma is much more complicated and nuanced than that interpretation. There are also layers of Karma. What I mean by this is that there is your own personal Karma. There’s your family Karma which would include the way your family exists in the world, inherited health or disease, reputation and access to resources, and also ancestral trauma. 

We have the Karma of our neighborhood, our city, our country, our cultures, and our planet. We are impacted by all of these things.

What does that mean? Imagine a child get’s a disease from environmental toxins. We can feel confident that the child’s own Karma didn’t lead to that, the Karma of the place they live is responsible for that illness. This means we don’t have control over all of our Karma, but we do have control over some of it.

There are a lot of situations that we’re not going to be able to explain away. This Universe and whatever divine intelligence there is hasn’t sent any of us a memo that answers all the mysteries. If I had all the answers, I’d be solving world hunger and eradicating war. What I do have is a framework on how to see Karma that can be useful.

Let me tell you a little story that shaped my view of Karma. I was studying in Thailand, and I’d just returned to Chiang Mai after going to a wedding in Bangkok. My skin was a fiesta of acne so I was using a mask to try and calm that down. It was a little later than dinnertime; I was settling in for the night. I hear an unexpected knock at the door. Wait. Let’s pause here and step back to earlier in my trip.

Okay, I hired a Thai language teacher to tutor me for three weeks at the beginning of my first study-trip to Thailand. I had been an absolutely terrible student; I learned almost no Thai vocabulary. Instead, she shifted to teaching me about Thai culture. She introduced me to this scary alien looking fruit called rambutan, which turned out to be delicious, and how to build a flower raft for Loi Kratong.

One day we were talking about her sister. She was in an abusive marriage and it wasn’t her first. My teacher felt little compassion for her sister because, as is common in Buddhist cultures, she felt like it was her sister’s Karma to endure this abuse. This is a multi-lifetime way of saying “she brought it on herself”. They really didn’t have a relationship because of my teacher’s way of seeing her sister.

It’s typical to view Karma in this way. I was new to Buddhism, so I didn’t feel informed, but this sounded fishy to me. To me, this idea that you endure horrible things because you did bad things is something humans would come up with. Not an enlightened force that nudges us towards perfection over many lifetimes. It sounds too vindictive. 

I’m not going to be able to explain away evil, and I don’t know how the Universe deals with things like Hitler. So let’s just accept going in that my theory has a lot of holes in it. 

Anyway. When talking to my teacher, I proposed my theory that Karma is more like the education system. You learn to do addition, then you work your way up to algebra and so on. You don’t do badly at lower math and then get assigned harder math classes as punishment.

There’s the problem of people preferring the idea that they’ll earn a more comfortable life next time around, rather than a set of more difficult lessons. You can see why the conventional belief is appealing.

Maybe people who are given harder lives, with more challenges, are more advanced than those of us with easier lives. Another possibility is that there are people in our lives who need our compassion, that it’s not about whether they brought anything on themselves, but it’s an opportunity for us to become better at being compassionate. 

So if you combine the possibility that people with more struggles are further along, with the idea that it doesn’t even matter because it’s a chance for us to learn to be better people, you kind of can’t go wrong by being kind to them.

My teacher grew quiet. I was afraid I’d said something offensive. We didn’t mention it again. I wrapped up my studies with her, and I wanted to take her out to dinner to celebrate, but she lived outside of town and it was too big an ordeal to come into town. We said our goodbyes.

I take my trip down to Bangkok, and get back into Chiang Mai to finish up my primary goal, which was to learn to do Traditional Thai Massage with Mama Nit. Ok, we’re back to where I started this story with the face mask, and the knock at the door.

So I hear that knock at the door, and I scramble to get the mask off my face to answer the door. 

I open the door and it’s my teacher with her sister. As you can imagine, this was a surprise, knowing that coming into town was a big deal, and that she was with her sister was interesting. 

We found a place to sit, and my teacher told me she’d contacted her sister after our talk about Karma. They’d re-established a relationship, and the family was helping the sister get out of the abusive relationship.

They came to thank me.

It was expensive for them to get a ride all the way in to visit me. They also brought me a gift. It’s this little box with drawers and traditional Thai style details. It’s beautiful, I consider it one of my most valuable possessions. The memory that goes with it makes it priceless.

I learned two things from this experience. One is that the way I see Karma is more constructive than the traditional view. Second, I learned that the stories we tell ourselves change everything.

Karma literally translates to momentum. We can change our momentum by changing the stories we tell ourselves and then shifting our actions to match this new story. I’ll talk more about Karma, and the nuances of it. But for today, what stories do you tell yourself?

*typos and grammar errors provided for your entertainment.