How to Fix Your Karma

Four Tiny Steps to Getting Unstuck

You’re stuck. At work, in love, in your career. Try as you might, you just can’t get it right. Meet the one, score the job, write the book.

Here’s the standard capitalist explanation. You’re just not good enough. Tough enough, mean enough, smart enough, ruthless enough. It’s true. But only on the level of if you want to end up a stunted shell of a human.

Here’s another explanation. You’ve messed up your karma. I don’t mean your esoteric karma: what happened in some mysterious past life. I mean it in the pure sense: action and reaction. You acted to harm, and so it’s not that “the universe will get you”: it’s that now you’re already weighed down by fear, guilt, anger, envy, shame. You’re dragging them around – or, more accurately, they’re dragging you around. Maybe it’s subconscious, maybe it’s raging. Either way. How can you do anything really worthy this way? Who can truly love you this way?

The good news is: Because I don’t mean esoteric karma, I also don’t mean you’ve got to light incense, bemoan your fate, and pray that it might be fixed. You can fix it. And only you can fix it. So I mean you’ve got to work. Here and now, in the real world, according to four steps.

1. Make amends with the people you’ve hurt. We’ve all hurt people. Each and every one of us. If you want to clear your bad karma, you’ve got to make amends. Not in the abstract. A form letter sent by an app won’t do, broseph. Personally. With words and actions. Mean it and demonstrate it.

What are you demonstrating? Not just your regret, but your growth. Not “I’m sorry you felt hurt”, but “I’m profoundly sorry for my actions, I know I can’t undo them, and so I will never hurt someone that way again”. Maybe they won’t accept your amends. That’s OK. Their acceptance is theirs. Your intention is yours.

2. Forgive yourself. Now maybe you can be forgiven. By them? That’s up to them. Maybe you can forgive you. Let go of the burdens of anger, jealousy, shame. And now, at last, something beautiful can grow in the light.

I don’t just mean that you can think intellectually: “I’ve forgiven myself!”. Sorry. No free lunches in this universe.

You must go our there, swallow your pride, and make amends with each and every person you have hurt, personally. That’s what really demonstrates that you have grown, right? Therefore, only when you have the courage, acceptance and wisdom to try have you really forgiven yourself. Maybe you won’t succeed. But you must at least try.

For some us, this might take a lifetime. Take the millions of people that the Wells Fargo woman ripped off. She can’t make amends during her lifetime. There’s not enough time. So she’ll always be scorned by us, ashamed by her true self, fighting against the truth of her life. That’s why you shouldn’t hurt people. Not just for narrow moral reasons, but also because everyone you’ve hurt is someone you’ve got to unhurt. And if you can’t unhurt them, a part of you dies too.

3. Forgive those who hurt you. Here’s the third great step on the path. Forgiving those who’ve hurt you. Some of us have been terribly wounded. Am I saying you have to forgive? Of course not. Am I saying you will be happier if you can? Of course.

Forgiving someone doesn’t mean waiting for an apology and accepting it. It doesn’t mean saying everything’s OK. It means, to the extent you can, understanding the suffering that drove the harm you felt. And trying to empathise with it. See and feel that they are, like you, just another confused and lonely person trapped in a great web of suffering, which we are all trying to escape. The paradox is that the only way we really escape it is with forgiveness, acceptance, peace.

It’s tough, painful, arduous. That is precisely why it’s one of the highest levels of human development. It’s easy to empathise with our friends. It’s difficult to empathise with our enemies. And yet, there is no real hope for inner peace until and unless. The dogs of war in us are ever unleashed unless we have the courage to make peace.

4. See the beauty in your suffering. The universal self in you isn’t really developing until you can forgive those who’ve hurt you, and you’ve made amends with those you’ve hurt. Until you do, you are limited to ego, I, teeth and jaws that can never really be satisfied. Whether the appetite is for things, for people, or for vengeance. Because it can’t be satisfied, there’s no happiness here. Only relief.

That’s OK. But remember: it is the universal self that feels searing happiness, incandescent joy, heart lifting awe, profound truth. We feel all those “for”, “with”, “through”. We do not merely feel them “by”. By buying, winning, having, possessing, owning. But through giving, with passion, for a greater purpose. Then we feel truly alive.

Every step of this journey has been suffering, great and vast. The suffering of hurting, of being hurt, of forgiving, of being forgiven. But these are not all the same kinds of suffering. Now your suffering has a fierce purpose. It is redeemed. It is not empty, hollow, futile – which is what bad karma really is. Actions that amount to nothing but suffering in the end. You can see beauty, grace, meaning, hope, illumination, truth even in your suffering now.

Have you guessed what that purpose, that ability to see beauty in your suffering is? It is the mighty hand of love.

Umair