Q & A with Robina

QUESTION

Hi Robina!

I hope all is well and sorry to have missed your latest teaching.

I have a question around my karma that I’m trying to get a better understanding of and I hope you can help me. Over the last decade I’ve been involved in several car accidents, all of which were not caused by my direct actions. I’ve been hospitalized several times because of these accidents.

Well, it happened again yesterday! Fortunately, the accident and my injuries aren’t severe this time but this keeps happening and it’s frustrating and confusing.

Why does this keep happening? Can I address this karmically or is this just something I have to burn off?

With love,

M

QUESTION

Robina,

Well, since my last email I have been in another accident! Same scenario with me not sustaining serious injuries.

I'm truly at a loss for words. My partner has no explanations either. This keeps happening. Do you have any insight you could share with me? I would really appreciate your perspective.

Incidentally, I am more and more careful on the road than I’ve ever been. I’m more and more conscious of my thoughts than I’ve ever been (watching like a hawk, as you say). And although I was disturbed and grumpy for a short time immediately afterwards, my mind went to a place of curiosity and inquiry instead of floundering in self-pity and upset. I know that this is the path to follow.

With love,

M

ANSWER

Wow, M!

Please be careful! This is amazing.

If you have the view of karma, then understand you’ve got some seeds in there from past actions that are now ripening as your suffering.

But you can also say that you’re not suffering so badly — Amazing! And I'm so pleased for you! — so be delighted that you’ve got off so lightly! You’ve now finished that karma.

And it’s great that you have responded so wisely. This is special.

It’d be good to do the purification practice — do you know it?

When you do the first step, regret, strongly regret from your heart all the harm you’ve done to others in the past.

Then in the next step, reliance, have compassion for those you’ve harmed, and certainly for those who’ve harmed you.

Then the remedy and say a few of the Vajrasattva mantras, and then resolve not to harm again.

Regret purifies the kind of karma of something happening to us, such as your experience. Reliance included refuge and compassion for others. The remedy is, in this case, a visualization and recitation of a mantra. And finally there’s resolve, the determination to change.

It’s good to understand more deeply the workings of karma. Given it’s a natural law of cause effect, then it follows that whatever happens to us is the fruit of past actions. And as a law things must be coherent. Events, good or bad, can’t be random. It’s important to think about this.

We hear this and always only think of the bad things. No! It means every tiny thing we experience, all the good, is the result of past actions. Every day hundreds of good things happen to us but we never wonder, “Oh, why do good things happen to me?” We only wonder why the bad.

This is the crucial point to understand if we choose to work with the concept of karma.

Love,

Robina