I think life is one long practice of noticing patterns and doing something about them. Mine took me a while to see.
I nearly died twice. The first time I was 4 months old. The second time I was 18. Both times I came back.
You would think that after two close calls the rest would be easy. It hasn’t been. Since then my life has had one steady theme, and that theme is health. Something comes up and I deal with it. Sometimes I get a year of peace, sometimes a few years. Sometimes only a few months, and then something else pops up. My body is a whack-a-mole. I hit one, and another one appears somewhere I wasn’t looking.
Half joking, I tell my husband I must have hurt a lot of people in my past lives. Many, many people. How else do you explain it?
Then I came across a story.
The story
A very pious man is walking home one evening. He has never harmed anyone in his life. Suddenly a mob comes running after him with knives. There is nowhere to go. He closes his eyes, and in that moment he finds himself in front of Lord Krishna.
“I have never done anything wrong in my entire life,” he says. “Why is this happening to me?”
Krishna answers, “In your past lives, you killed every one of these people. Because of the good you did in this life, I decided to settle it all at once. Instead of you dying again and again, once for each of them, you die one time, by all of them together.”
I want to be honest about this story. You won’t find it in the Mahabharata or the Puranas. It is a folk telling, the kind our grandparents told, and there are many versions of it (a well known one has Dhritarashtra asking Krishna why he was born blind and lost all hundred sons). But the idea underneath it is very much in our scriptures.
What the texts say about karma
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad puts it plainly: “As one acts, as one behaves, so one becomes. The doer of good becomes good, the doer of evil becomes evil.”
The tradition also splits karma into three parts, and this is what finally made my whack-a-mole make sense.
Sanchita is the whole stored account, everything carried from every past life.
Prarabdha is the slice of it that has started to ripen in this life. This is the part that has to be lived through.
Kriyamana (also called agami) is what I am creating right now, with what I do today.
Prarabdha doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes in pieces. One a year, one every few years, sometimes two in a few months. That is exactly what my body has been doing. The man in the story got his settled in one evening. Mine, it seems, is on an installment plan.
Souls don’t go anywhere
The Gita says, “As a person throws away worn out clothes and puts on new ones, the soul throws away worn out bodies and enters new ones.” (2.22) And a few verses earlier, “It is never born and it never dies.” (2.20)
I think of souls as energy. They take birth in a body for a while, but the energy stays in the universe. So the people I may have hurt in some other life are still out there in some form. So are the ones who hurt me.
That changes what I can do about it.
Asking for forgiveness
One piece of advice I got was to do a forgiveness prayer, and to mean it. Not as a ritual you rush through. From the heart.
This isn’t a new idea. In the Mahabharata (Vana Parva), when Draupadi pushes Yudhishthira to take revenge, he tells her: “Forgiveness is dharma. Forgiveness is sacrifice. Forgiveness is the Vedas. Forgiveness is scripture.” (kṣamā dharmaḥ kṣamā yajñaḥ kṣamā vedāḥ kṣamā śrutam)
And the Gita gives hope that karma is not only something to sit through: “As a blazing fire turns wood to ashes, the fire of knowledge turns all karma to ashes.” (4.37)
Find your own mole
Mine is health. Yours might be something else. Money that never stays. Relationships that end the same way. A job that turns sour every few years, no matter the company. The same fight with the same person, in different words.
I’ve come to see a repeating pattern as a signal to stop, learn, look inward, and change. Our scriptures call these patterns samskaras, impressions that keep replaying until we see them. Seeing them is what gives us a choice.
If you want to find yours, here is what helped me:
- Write down the hard things that came back. Not the one-off bad days. The ones that returned, maybe in a different form each time.
- Look at the gaps. How long did you get between rounds? A year? A few months? The rhythm tells you something.
- Ask what it keeps asking of you. Patience, letting go, looking after yourself, saying no. Nobody can answer this one for you. It is personal, and it takes time. Give it that time.
- Do both halves. Deal with what is in front of you in the real world. Then do the inner work, whether that’s prayer, forgiveness, or just sitting quietly with it.
The first step alone can take a while. It took me most of my life to see mine.
What I’m taking from all this
None of this means blaming myself every time I get sick, or anyone else for theirs. Karma is cause and effect, not punishment. The Gita asks us to bear the pain that comes and goes (2.14) and to focus on our actions, not the results (2.47). So I still see the doctor. That’s hitting the mole. The prayer is the other half.
When the next mole pops up (and it will), I’ll hit it. Then I’ll close my eyes like the man in the story and ask for forgiveness, from whoever I owe, known or unknown.