Karma is the law of the universe – it is cause and effect – and as such, it is basically the foundation of Buddhism and all the Buddha’s teachings. You would think any ‘good Buddhist’ would have a good grasp of karma, or at least try to consider it, and mind it on occasion…

So, I will begin this blog chapter with an honest confession… until rather recently, I just ignored karma. Yup, alana-the-striving-to-be-good-Buddhist, came-up against questions of karma and balked; I considered it a black box, a topic so impenetrable, that every time my practice pushed-up against it, I froze, and put the topic aside for another day.

In truth, what I came to realize was that karma wasn’t necessarily an impenetrable topic for me, so much as it was a scary one. Karma to me was about punishment, it was an indictment of me, of my worthiness as a person and a practitioner; when I bumped up against the topic of karma, some part of me worried that if I looked too closely, what I might find would steer me off the course of practice for good. Afterall, why practice when that practice is definitely doomed to fail? So, to ‘defend’ myself, my practice, I choose to just ignore karma altogether.

My strategy worked great, until the end of 2020 when a conversation with Mae Neecha about beauty took a turn toward karma, and for once I felt both frustrated and brave enough, that instead of balking at that karma black box, I decided to try and pry it open a bit and have a look. This next chapter will cover my karma contemplations, mostly by recounting an ongoing line chat with Mae Neecha in which she helps guide me on my karmic-ventures.

I will give you a spoiler alert here: At the end of this chapter, you will not find  Alana the great understander of karma ( I have come to see that is synonymous with enlightenment). You won’t even find an Alana with a super clear working knowledge of karma (that came later too). But, you will meet an alana who was finally ‘brave’ enough to start trying to unpacking that karmic black box, and who, in the process, discovered karma isn’t a personal punishment, a personal indictment, a personal anything at all…

Imagine that, the law of the universe just isn’t all about me…