Written by Rebecca D'Onofrio

Karma quite simply means “action.” It refers to the natural law of cause and effect: if you plant an apple seed (cause), an apple tree will grow (effect).

In Buddhism, karma is the driving force behind all of our thoughts, emotions, and actions. With continuous repetitive use, they form our karmic conditioning and behavioral patterns. If I keep thinking someone is a terrible person (cause), I will only see them as a terrible person (effect). With time, these patterns become solidified in our mind to form a rigid conceptual overlay that we impose onto reality.

But this overlay creates pain and suffering for us because it is not rooted in reality, the way things actually are. Things are actually much more open and fluid, subject to impermanence and interdependence — the fact that all things only exist in constant relation to everything else.

So when we overlay a very fixed and rigid concept over reality, such as seeing someone as a terrible person, it leaves no room to include the fact that this person is capable of change, and that how we are choosing to see them is interconnected with our own personal biases.

Meditation practice directly addresses our karmic conditioning by disrupting fixed mental patterns and redirecting the mind to see and experience things from the lens of our true nature and interconnection.

For example, with metta practice, we learn to identify and acknowledge our emotional conditioning so that we can liberate ourselves from perpetuating the cycles of pain and suffering that arise from it, while simultaneously becoming more and more familiar with the natural qualities of our human heart: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

With mindfulness practice, we learn how to stabilize our sense of presence and awareness in any given moment so that we don’t remain continuously caught up and swept away by the impulsivity and speed of our mental projections.

Both practices help us cut through all of the karmic momentum and conditioning we have built up over time. It takes time and patience to work through all of this conditioning in order to create new ways of approaching and understanding our world, ways that are rooted in how things actually are.

When we move through our lives in this way, we are freeing ourselves from so much unnecessary pain and suffering associated with our karmic conditioning and opening ourselves to a much more vast, expansive, heartfelt, and genuine experience of the world — one that is honest and true — and consistent meditation practice is always at the heart of this transformation.