That’s a very good question, what is karma and how does it affect us?

Karma is generally thought of as good or bad, the good being the good deeds you do during your life.  the bad being the bad things you do during your life. This sometimes is thought of as being carried over from past lives, especially the bad Karma. So that if during a lifetime we do lots of 'bad' deeds we then suffer the ill effects in our next life. In our next life we are then punished by having 'un-good' things happen or have some ailments punishing us for these 'bad deeds'. With these effected we must balance our Karma or even get into credit by performing more good deeds than bad.

If we look at this from a slightly different point of view, that life is full of experiences and from this human point of view we term some experiences as good and some as bad.

Are we really able to say some acts or experiences are good and some are bad?

At times some of the experiences we go through are termed as bad, and yet later in our lives, as we look back they can be some of the best things that have happened to us. If we could only have seen the bigger picture at the time, we could look at things differently.

Life is full of experiences and yet we continually put the good or bad connotation on these experiences. Experiences are just experiences in life and yet we term some as 'bad' and then hold on to that bad emotion. We tend to hold on to this 'bad' emotion as either a trauma, or just a 'bad' time in our life.

After this 'bad' event we very often believe we have let it go, that it does not effect us anymore. The reality is that we mostly store these 'bad' experiences in our bodies and in our subconscious minds. These 'bad' events turn into rules in our subconscious mind. rules that tell us if 'x' happens then 'y' is the result. As we believe that 'y' will happen we organise or even sabotage our life so that 'y' will be the end result.

The more 'bad' experiences we have the more we sabotage or program our minds to expect negative events to happen to us. This negative programming becomes the 'rules' of our lives and along with our belief that we have done wrong, we punish ourselves, which creates more trauma, creating more negative programming.

What does this have to do with Karma?

If we look at the experiences we go through life. The 'bad' or negative things that we believe happen to us and the rules we create for ourselves; the burden of which could be considered as Karma.

This burden weights us down. It is like a sack our back. When we are born we have an empty sack, as we go through life we start to put all our 'bad' or negative experiences in that sack 'forgetting them', or so we think. Then we draw to us another 'bad' or negative experience to us and the guilt factor comes into play. Because of the 'bad' or negative things that have happened previously in our lives, the rules we have made we feel guilt. Initially we repress this guilt and put it in our sack. Sometimes this guilt stays repressed for years, in other circumstances it keeps niggling in the back of our minds.