Understanding karma is a complex subject. First, experts like Teal Swan explain what karma is and why it can affect your relationships. Then we’ll go over some practical steps you can take to reduce the influence of past life karma on your present-day relationships. Understanding how past life karmas affect you in this lifetime and what you can do about it is an important step in your spiritual growth.

Okay, but what exactly IS karma? Karma is not some cosmic boomerang that will slap you around for all eternity if you’re bad. Instead, it’s the law of cause and effect- which means that whatever you think or say or do comes back to you. Karma is the law of cause and effect applied to your thoughts, actions, and deeds. For example, every thought or word, or action that comes from a place of love will resonate with love, whereas a thought or a word or an action that’s rooted in fear will always come back to you being afraid.

When we feel hurt by someone who isn’t trying to hurt us, it can be better to think of that someone as a mirror showing us our pain. In this way, we understand that the other person isn’t causing us pain- they’re simply highlighting an issue within ourselves. We all have our wounds and triggers- and when we step on them, they hurt! There’s no judgment. There’s no blame. We don’t need to understand why we keep encountering the same things or think that “everyone needs to be more careful about how they treat me” because our wounds are not other people’s responsibility.

Your wound is YOUR responsibility- and you have a choice in how you want to heal it: you can either project it onto someone else and blame them, or you can own your feelings and put your energy into getting over it.

It’s generally not helpful to expect people to treat us perfectly. Expecting this from our lovers will only sabotage the relationship- because nobody is perfect! We all have things about ourselves that we need to work on. And let’s think of our partners as being responsible for “fixing” those parts of us. We’re bound to be continually disappointed in them for failing at a task that’s ultimately impossible for anyone but ourselves to do.

Don’t wait until the right conditions appear before putting yourself out there- start putting yourself out there now, even if you see nothing but obstacles. Then, as you continue to put yourself out there, the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place, and all those blocks that seem like they’re preventing something wonderful from happening in your life right now- they’ll start shifting away.

What is the function of karma?

The law of karma (the law of cause and effect) is not made up by some ancient civilizations. Karma is an observable fact in nature, like gravity or electricity, or magnetism. This is because everything IS energy- everything. If you want to be successful with relationships, you need to understand what people are (physical form), how they behave (their personalities), and why they do the things they do (what’s behind their thoughts).

Once you understand this, the question becomes, “how can I have healthy relationships with these life forms?”. The answer to that question begins with introspection. Past lives are impacting your present-day relationships now- so you must recognize that this is a normal part of the human experience. As you begin to let go of certain attachments and fears, your relationships will improve in ways you haven’t yet even imagined.