(So often I hear the word “karma’ used in various contexts. Could you please elaborate on that?)
Yes, karma is a word that is much used upon your world, especially in certain societies and especially in the last, perhaps, 50 or so years. But what exactly is karma? The concept of karma comes to you from one of your religions. It says, very simplistically, that, as one has acted, as one has done, one needs to balance it. Literally, karma means “balance”, and therefore if someone has done something that is not “good”, that is perceived as being negative, then somewhere along the path, there needs to be a balancing. It (the action) needs to be brought back to the neutral position. Now, the problem that comes up for most people when they try to understand karma is that karma also involves reincarnation. It is not simply one lifetime’s karma, it is the karma, the balancing, that transcends many lifetimes, and therefore what frequently occurs upon your world is that “karma”, and here karma is being put into quotation marks, “karma” seems unfair. For what is happening is that karma is balancing actions from a previous lifetime.
You might look at is as “karma of the soul”. The soul, which is responsible for each of the lifetimes. Therefore, in this current lifetime someone might be experiencing some terrible event, something awful might be occurring to them. If they are to understand it as karma, it is most likely karma to balance something that happened in a different lifetime. It can seem very unfair for the person himself, herself, had nothing to do with the original action. That was done by a different person, in a different body, in a different time period.
Let us move forward. How to best work with your karma, understanding that it might be a balancing from a different time? It is the involvement of the soul, that makes it easier. It is that connection to one’s deeper, fuller, truer self that then allows for easier conversion, balancing. It allows for a greater understanding. Let us take as an example a person who has contracted a terminal disease as a result of karma. For that person it may seem terribly unfair that their life will likely be cut short as a result of this disease, because of what another person did in another time, in another body. However, viewing the larger picture from the perspective of the soul, it is not unfair, it must be. And if the person affected with the malady can connect, through meditation, or in some other way, through a deep spiritual belief, to their own soul, then they will understand, then it becomes a labor of love. For it has nothing to do with themselves, they are able to transcend the ego and to understand that this comes from a much deeper place, that this is a healing that affects on a profound level.
There are other aspects of karma that sometimes come up, that are seemingly unfair. Perhaps someone who appears to be a scoundrel in life becomes very rich, very wealthy. No one can understand how this is achieved, how it is that they deserved such riches. Again, it might be karmic. It might have nothing to do with the way that they have lived that particular lifetime. One could say that they are simply lucky, but that might not be true. It could be a balancing, perhaps in another lifetime they were desolately poor, they had nothing, and they suffered for that. Hence this lifetime brings those emotions, that energy, back into balance.