What is Family Karma?
by Ashok Bedi, M.D. &
Boris Matthews, Ph.D.
 Erol
is a proud, driven, successful man. He was raised in a lower middle-class
family, and success was of primary importance to his parents and to him --
more than anything else. Consequently, his work became increasingly
important to him. Erol enjoyed the acclaim and power he gained on the job.
As his son and his daughter entered their teen years, Erol found it more
comfortable to retreat into his work than to deal with his energetic teenage
children. Evelyn, Erol's wife, took on more and more responsibilities for
rearing and disciplining the children as Erol spent ever-longer hours at
work. Rumor had it that he might have been getting too close to one of the
younger women work associates.
Evelyn pleaded repeatedly for Erol to take more interest in their
children and in their marriage, but to no avail. The harder she tried, the
more he thought of her as a nag, and retreated deeper into his financially
rewarding work. His son, at age 14, started doing drugs. His daughter got
pregnant when she was 16 and had an abortion. Evelyn became depressed and
sought psychiatric treatment. Finally, she filed divorce papers, and asked
Erol to move out. Two weeks later, Erol had a major heart attack.
While Erol was in cardiac rehab, his cardiologist insisted he see someone
for psychotherapy. In his therapy, Erol explored the consequences of his
choice to pursue professional growth at the expense of his personal life and
relationships. He admitted there were many possibilities in life he had not
taken time to cultivate. He recognized that his parents' distress at their
very modest circumstances had contributed to the high value they placed on
material success. He remembered how his father's sense of failure as a
provider and his hopes that Erol would have a financially more rewarding
life had driven him since he was in high school. As Erol learned more about
his father's childhood and youth, he saw that his father's parents had
worked hard but had always lived hand-to-mouth. His relentless success
drive, he realized, was part of a family pattern extending back at least two
generations.
Like many women of her generation, Evelyn came from a middle-class family
where her father was the wage earner and mother, the homemaker. Evelyn's
parents had met in college and married soon after graduation. Although
Evelyn's mother had a fine college education, she worked only a couple of
years after marriage. When her first child was born, she quit work. From
then on, she devoted her energies to child rearing, homemaking, and, when
her children got older, she volunteered her services in her church and
community.
Evelyn did not want a life like the one her mother had. She recognized
that her mother felt she had missed out on some areas of personal growth
that a job outside the home, commensurate with her education, would have
offered. Evelyn had often felt the sting of her mother's ambivalent comments
about Evelyn's attempt to balance family and job. On the one hand, her
mother was proud of Evelyn as a mother, wife, and working woman; but on the
other, she criticized Evelyn for not being involved in church and community
work as she had been, and hinted that some of the distress in Evelyn's
marriage was the consequence of not being the kind of wife that Erol needed
and deserved. About a year before she filed the divorce papers, Evelyn had
entered psychotherapy to deal with her increasing depression.
After several months' hard work in individual psychotherapy, Erol asked
Evelyn if she would be willing to go with him to a marriage counselor. He
told her he had learned a lot about himself. He wanted to work with her on
rebuilding their marriage.
In our clinical practice, we have seen many women and men like Evelyn and
Erol who feel they have to make choices that lead to results they hadn't
intended. As they discover more about their attitudes and values, they often
identify family habits and patterns that had influenced them much more than they
had realized.
Of course, your ancestors can and do leave behavioral and attitudinal
legacies that help you actualize your innate potentials. But it is in the nature
of our work as psychotherapists and psychoanalysts that, initially at least, our
clients seek help with their immediate problems and struggles. As part of our
work with our clients, however, we attempt to help them gain a differentiated
view of their parents, grandparents, and other forebears. Mingled with ancestral
legacies we discover blessings as well as curses. You can take a major step
toward maturing when you can see and accept both the good and the bad in other
important people in your life and lineage.
Life is a series of choices. Choices lead to actions. Actions carry
consequences. Action plus consequence is what we call karma. The results of many
of our actions affect not only us, but others as well. The consequences of many
of our grandparents' and our parents' actions reverberate in our lives today. In
this book [article] we will use the term "karma" to refer to our ancestors' and
our own actions and the consequences that necessarily follow. A lot of karma
spans three or more generations. That is why we call it "family karma."
MEANS AND ENDS
When you choose a course of action, you have in mind some desired end or
goal. You base your action on the information you perceive to be relevant to
your chosen goal. Your goal appears to be some improvement, some enhancement in
your life, some valued outcome. Whether or not your actions attain the desired
results may be another question. Like wonder drugs that combat a specific
illness but can have undesirable side effects, your actions can also have
unintended consequences. Be that as it may, karma -- choice, action, and
consequence -- is embedded in an interactive matrix of perceptions and values.
Moreover, every sequence of perception and value-based, goal-oriented action
creates an outcome that is itself a situation, resembling or differing from the
earlier situation in which you took action. Thus, you can see how your life is
an unending cycle of actions and outcomes, all based on what you value and what
you perceive.
At one level, nobody questions this truth: If you kick a dog, it will yelp.
If you treat people badly, you can expect them to respond in kind. But karma
operates at many levels, and the consequences do not always immediately follow
your actions. Karma can pass down through a family from generation to
generation. That is to say, one generation after another may repeat a pattern of
actions and suffer or enjoy the inevitable consequences that follow those
actions. Indeed, we are responsible for much of our karma, but we can also
inherit karma from our ancestors or from a past life.
THREE SOURCES OF KARMA
In our clinical experience working with hundreds of patients, we have found
three sources of karma that each of us must address in order to reach our
fullest and highest soul potential: individual, family, and past-life karma.
First, you must retire the karma you have generated in your present life.
This is your personal karma. As you recognize conditions and situations you have
created that are uncomfortable, that do not serve you well, that cause you
distress, you must take the steps necessary to change those conditions and
situations. Perhaps you find yourself in a line of work that does not really
suit you. Maybe you have become obsessed in an activity, a cause, a
relationship. You may have hurt others and only you can alleviate that pain
through sincere words and actions. Whatever it is, wherever you see the
undesirable fruits of your actions, it is up to you to retire your karma by
taking remedial actions that will lead to more desirable outcomes.
Second, you have to work on the karma of your family -- parents, grandparents,
and other forebearers -- to free your soul from their unintended karma. Perhaps you
are fulfilling the ambition of a grandparent rather than your own. It sometimes
happens that you deal with situations in "family-typical" ways that you later
recognize do not suit you, that may even be contrary to what you deep-down feel
is authentically your way. Or you might engage in behaviors that you consciously
recognize as self-defeating but that you feel powerless to overcome. Many of our
patients have experienced great relief when they have been able to trace such
patterns in their lives to their ancestors who had similar patterns, attitudes,
complexes, illnesses, relationship styles, and so forth. But you cannot change
what you haven't identified. Recognizing the blessings and curses of your
ancestors -- your family karma -- is the first step and often a revelation.
Third, you have to retire the karma generated in previous lives, your
past-life karma. In the last few years, researchers have compiled persuasive
evidence that supports the idea of past lives and karma deriving from them. For
some people, past lives are an article of belief; for other people, the idea of
past lives is nonsense. But if the empirical evidence so far accumulated
continues to be supported by future research, more people will have to take the
possibility of past life karma seriously.
When you realize that your life is encumbered by the results of your and
other peoples' choices, or the residue from a past life, you can begin to make
different choices that heal wounds, right wrongs, and -- we hope -- lead you to
experience a fuller reality in which you live with greater integrity and
authenticity.
Individual Karma
Jim is a recently retired businessman who had just sold his very successful
company. He had amassed a large sum of money, and had hoped to enjoy life with
his wife, children, grandchildren, and friends. In his heyday, he had been a
ruthless entrepreneur who was focused on his work at the expense of all other
aspects of his life. His wife -- though loving and committed -- had found other
interests and friendships to fill the void that Jim's absence had created. His
children had married and moved to the opposite coasts of the U.S. Jim really
had no friends. At age 59, with his stash of money, good health, and a long
life expectancy, Jim was the most lonely man on this planet. He was all
dressed up with nowhere to go. At this point, he called to make an appointment
for psychotherapy. He was caught in his own karmic trap.
We make choices in the pursuit of wealth, relationships, power, success, or
other goals that often result in our neglecting some other possibilities and
innate potentials that do not fit neatly in our chosen success program. Both
what we have devoted our energies to and what we have neglected generate our
individual karma. In realizing that what we attain often amounts to less than we
had envisioned, we can harvest important insights. It is often in the margins of
life that we discover the path to the center. We find the gold in the garbage.
Individual karma is our responsibility: we set it in motion; we pay the
price. For example, consider the person who has no friends. This person might
bewail his or her fate; might blame others; might become cynical, bitter, and
morose. But what does it take to make friends? Friendship develops as we
cultivate it with someone through openness, concern, shared interests, honesty,
and enjoyment of each other. To cultivate a friendship, we must take the
initiative part of the time. We must listen to our friend, as well as need our
friend to listen to us. Friendship is a two-way street. The person who has no
friends has not, for whatever reason, developed the necessary skills of
mutuality. The consequence is lack of friends. Have we not heard people say of a
lonely, grumpy person, "He brought it on himself"?
Family Karma
It may seem weird that we bear the consequences of what our ancestors did.
Obviously, if they immigrated to the U.S., we were not born in the country of
their birth. If they made it big and set up a trust fund for us, we benefit from
it now. But our ancestors made other choices and took other actions that
established patterns or energy fields that may continue to affect our thoughts,
emotions, choices, and behaviors.
The idea underlying the concept of family karma is that the choices we make
affect our children and possibly our grandchildren as well as us. Vice-versa,
our parents', grandparents', and sometimes other ancestors' choices likewise
carry consequences with which we still have to deal -- as curses or blessings. We
are the bearers of an ancestral karma that we must manage, either by retiring
the curse or by enhancing the blessing. Each generation must carry forward the
evolutionary trajectory of the family line, making the best use of the ancestral
blessings and dissolving the ancestral curses. As long as we are unaware of
ancestral patterns, we cannot modify their influence on us. In other words, we
are unconscious of a lot of family karma. To put it more precisely: much family
karma operates outside our awareness from the psychic unknown, unconsciously.
The Karma of Adopted Children
Mutual friends of ours have an adopted daughter who experienced difficulties
as a teenager and young adult. Our friends wracked their brains trying to
understand why their adopted child was dealing with her difficulties in such
self-destructive ways. "What did we do wrong?" they asked themselves, typically
trying to take responsibility.
Yet, regardless how often they searched their souls, they could find no
satisfactory explanation for their daughter's destructive attempts to manage her
distress. In the course of their suffering, the adopted daughter located her
birth parents. To everybody's surprise, her birth mother had resorted to the
same dysfunctional coping strategies by abusing drugs when her life problems
threatened to overwhelm her. Although the daughter had been adopted shortly
after birth, and consequently had not learned these coping mechanisms from her
birth mother, under stress she resorted to the same means that her mother had
chosen! Since this was not a learned behavior, the only satisfactory explanation
was family karma.
Past Life Karma
For the Western reader, past lives may be a very speculative hypothesis.
However, we have found in working with individual patients that even after their
individual and family karma is retired, often there persists a residue of karma
we cannot explain on the basis of these two frame-works. Such karma may be the
residue from a past life.
Testimony to Past-Life Experience
Up until young adulthood, I (Boris Matthews) had a persistent fantasy that
I finally began to understand as possibly deriving from a past life. The
fantasy was that if people knew what I was feeling and thinking, they would
pry paving stones up from the street and hurl them at me. I had never lived
where there were cobblestone streets, nor had other children ever thrown
stones at me. It took me a long time to begin to question the absoluteness of
the fantasy. Only when I experimented by telling "safe" people some of my
fears of being stoned on the street did I begin to discover that they did not
"throw stones" at me. Gradually, I began to see that what I had taken for a
certainty was in fact a belief the origin of which I could not pinpoint,
except to hypothesize that it might have come from an actual experience in
some past life.
Many years have now passed since I last experienced that fantasy. Since
then, I have come to feel much more safe and secure in the world as I have let
other people into my "interior" world and discovered that most of them have no
intention of hurting me. In fact, some of them even like me!
Professor Ian Stevenson has conducted meticulous studies of more than 3,000
cases of possible reincarnation, reporting only those that meet his high
research standards. For example, children between the ages of 2 and 5 years
sometimes exhibit phobias that do not derive from imitating another member of
the family or from any postnatal traumatic experiences. "The phobias nearly
always corresponded to the mode of death in the life of the deceased person the
child claimed to remember."' Play that is unusual for the child's family, for
which the child had no model, also sometimes can be traced to a past life. "The
play accorded with claimed memories of previous lives expressed by the children
when they could speak. . . . In 22 cases [of 66 cases of unusual play] the
child's statement were found to match events in the life of a specific deceased
person. In such cases the play was found to correspond to some aspects of that
deceased person's life, such as his or her vocation, avocation, or mode of
death."
Birthmarks and birth defects sometimes correspond to wounds on deceased
persons. "About 35% of children who claim to remember previous lives have
birthmarks and/or birth defects that they . . . attribute to wounds on a person
whose life the child remembers." Of 49 cases in which a medical report on the
deceased person was available, 43 showed correspondences between birthmarks
and/or birth defects and the wounds of the deceased. In a study from India, the
correspondences between birthmarks or birth defects corresponded to the matching
wounds on the deceased person. "Two subjects had major birth defects. One was
born without his right hand and right forearm; another had a severe malformation
of the spine (kyphosis) and prominent birthmark on the head. The remaining eight
subjects had birth-marks corresponding to gunshot wounds, knife wounds, burns,
and injuries in a vehicular accident. . . . The hypothesis of reincarnation
seems best to explain all features of cases."
As researchers and clinicians investigate this fascinating subject further,
we may get better guidelines for understanding and managing past life karma. But
for now, we hold this out as a hypothesis and a hope for deeper understanding of
human suffering and the evolution of the soul. Regardless where our karma comes
-- personal, family, or past life -- we have to retire it, now or later.
 This
article was excerpted from:
Retire Your Family Karma
by
Ashok Bedi, M.D. & Boris Matthews, Ph.D.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Nicholas-Hays Inc. ©2003.
http://www.redwheelweiser.com
Info/Order this book
About the Authors
ASHOK
BEDI, M.D. is a certified Jungian psychoanalyst and a distinguished Fellow of
the American Psychiatric Association. He is a clinical professor of psychiatry
in Milwaukee, and on the faculty at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He has
practiced psychiatry and psychotherapy in Milwaukee for over 25 years and given
workshops and lectures in the U.S., Great Britain, and India.
BORIS MATTHEWS, PH.D. has practiced as a clinical social worker and Jungian
psychoanalyst in Milwaukee for over 20 years. He served as chairperson for the
Analyst Training Program at the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago and teaches and
facilitates therapeutic dream groups. He has translated several important books,
including Erich Neumann's
The Fear of the Feminine and
Hans Dieckman's Complexes: Diagnosis and Therapy in Analytical Psychology.
| Comments () >> |
 |
 |
