Is karma what you think it is?

Wednesday night I spent some time at a friend's house. The sky was dark and ominous, and the trees shook from trunk to tip, but we stepped out for a walk anyway. 

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We've both been going through what I'll call a rough patch, even though that doesn't really do much justice to things of late. As we spilled and sorted out the latest, the rain started to fall in slanted pelts. On some level, it just felt so fitting to our conversation.

So, of course karma came up.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do sweet people get stuck in the stormiest of storms? And why does it seem like sometimes not-so-great individuals are sailing through life with blue skies and hardly a cloud in sight?

I wish I knew.

The next day, my 2012 teacher training popped into my head. "Karma isn't what you think it is," my teacher said. Like many other things, we've taken a concept, and, well, Westernized it. Simplified it into a crystal ball, an all-seeing force. A force that knows everything and either punishes or rewards accordingly.

If this were true, then life would be fair. And we all know it's anything but.

Which makes me feel like karma is different than "If I do good, I'll be rewarded with good" or "If I'm mean, someone will be mean to me later." It's not about good and bad and paying the price. It doesn't promise that bad things won't happen to good people or that there's any fairness at all in the chaotic nature of the universe. 

Karma is about the laws of action. The laws of cause and effect. And, with that, the laws of reaction. The impression, or samskara, made. Perception.

You may interpret something much different, Buddhism may say something different, but what I take from this is that random things happen to all of us – good or bad, deserved or not. These events leave samskaras, or grooves and ruts, in our subconscious (as yogic philosophy tells us). Our samskaras affect how we perceive past and present, other individuals and life as a whole. Sometimes, as all things are interconnected, we even inherit the scars of others. To some degree (but not all), these scars determine how much influence we allow hardships and celebrations to have over our future and to direct other parts of our lives.

In other words, I don't think we cannot stop what happens to us. The ins and out of who gets hardship and who gets calm waters is still a mystery, and again, I wish I knew. But part of karma, I think, is trying to minimize each hardship's effect, so we are ready for the next thing. So we do not act or react in a way that brings in more anger, more fear, more threatening clouds, but in a way where we can see a little light in even the darkest of skies.

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From Steven Cope's The Wisdom of Yoga:

The laws of karma account, too, 

for the fact that our actions are based on our perceptions – 

and our perceptions have been shaped by our earlier actions. 

It's all a great loop. 

Namaste.