Each person gets their karmuppance. We get everything we want—sooner or later, if not in this incarnation, then in another. And often when we finally get it, we don't want it. As the process of karmic fruition speeds up, our lives get freer and freer from attachment and we create less and less karma.”
RAM DASS
Dear ONE,
Our biannual Eclipse season is upon us, ratcheting up the intensity and setting up the themes for the next six months and beyond, as it always does. Can you feel the momentum building yet?
This season, we have a NEW MOON SOLAR ECLIPSE in Neptune-ruled Pisces on March 8, followed by a FULL MOON LUNAR ECLIPSE in Venus-ruled Libra on March 23, just days after the Vernal Equinox.
This means that, with Neptune ruling our Divine heart development and Venus ruling our personal heart connections, we’ll be dealing with relationship karma on just about every level: with the Divine, our self, others and Life itself. This is emphasized even more by Karmic Teacher Saturn stationing retrograde in a challenging dance with philosophical Jupiter within hours of the Full Moon Eclipse.
These energies will lead us to question why and how we choose to be in relationship: “Is it to open our hearts more or is it to have our ego desires fulfilled?” If your answer is more toward the latter, it would be good to reflect on one of the central tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous paraphrased here: “The root cause of our soul sickness (i.e., dis-ease) is defective human relationships.”
So, how do we heal a karmic cycle of endlessly trying to fulfill unrequited ego desires through relationships? Firstly, we need to understand that the law of karma is a perpetual motion machine of action and reaction, cause and effect. This means that sooner or later in this life or a future one, there is always fulfillment of what we desire. But that’s where it gets sticky, as mentioned in Ram Dass’s quote above.
In Buddhist teachings, the root cause of human suffering is dissatisfaction with what is. Therefore, if we continue to create unrequited desires and thus more suffering, it keeps us on the karmic wheel living solely in a world of delusion and illusion, which is the definition of samsara. I call this sleepwalking or automatic pilot.
If we’re ready to wake up, we need to let go of our attachment to the illusion that we need to have all our ego desires fulfilled to make us happy. Then we can take the highroad of consciously choosing to make our first priority being loving and heart-centered with ourselves and all others. For when our heart is open, we can joyfully experience being in heaven all the time (aka nirvana) and remember our True Nature.
This allows us to enjoy being in both samsara and nirvana simultaneously without preference and move to the next level of playing the earth game skillfully. This higher level means joyfully embracing all the Saturnian rules and structures that form the foundation of the earth game: gravity, linear space and time, the laws of karma and the physical senses.
Then, rather than winding our karma deeper (called samskaras—or karmic grooves in Sanskrit), we can actually consciously unwind our karma a layer at a time, here and now. The good news is that our samskaras aren’t bottomless. The other news is that the wheel of karma, if we keep spinning on it, is.
As part of my psychic empowerment teachings, we have power and control over what I call our Inner Kingdom:
1. Our senses
2. Our emotions, once they arise
3. Our thoughts, once they arise
4. The focus of our discriminating mind. For example, is our glass always half full, or half empty?
5. And most importantly our consciousness: Are we awake or sleepwalking through Life on automatic pilot?
For more: Psychic Empowerment Practices on my website
When we’re fired from a job, dumped by a lover or come down with an illness, if we get angry and upset at the “doer”—be it the boss, the lover or the Divine—we’re really getting angry at “an empty boat” ramming into us on our journey along the river of Life. But if we’re vigilantly and consciously aware of breaking the karmic cycle of reaction, we know it’s not really personal unless—we allow a knee-jerk reaction formation to make it so. What we resist, persists.
To unwind this pattern, we need to cultivate the witnessing view of the soul perspective so that whenever something shocking happens to us, for good or seemingly ill in the moment, we can say, as the Zen sages did, “Ah So!” Or as I like to paraphrase, “Oh, wow, look at that!”
Once we’re maintaining the witness as our new normal operating system, we’ll begin to experience instant karma and instant manifestation because we’ve gotten out of our own way in the Flow of Life. Instant karma signifies that we’re clear enough to manifest according to the universal law of cause and effect with no internal obstructions and that we’re operating at a high enough psychic speed to cut through the density of 3D.
This is good news for, rather than playing out our karma over lifetimes, we get to experience what I call either “Boomerang Karma,” where what we put out into the world immediately hits us in the back of the head to wake us up, or “Instantaneous-echo Karma,” where what we put out reverberates back vibrationally within moments.
And while we still have to play out whatever karma is preloaded, we can unwind the karmic cycle of self-abuse by choosing differently how we respond to what is presented:
1. Forgiving self and others for harms done.
2. Not taking anything personally.
3. Cultivating gratitude for lessons received regardless of the price paid.
4. Wishing others well on the heart levels—especially when our ego desires are not fulfilled.
Here is an excerpt from my article:
If This Were Your Last Incarnation, What Would You Do?
“As we unwind our samskaras, i.e. karmic grooves, one layer at a time, from lifetime to lifetime, we get to dissolve three levels of karmic bondage, which most of us have going on simultaneously to some degree:
1. Iron chains: which allow us to experience the balancing karma from past misuse of our energies towards others.
2. Silver chains: which allow us to experience the balancing karma from past misuse of our energies towards ourselves.
3. And finally, golden chains, which allow us to experience reaping the fruits of good deeds we have done, but with attachment, no matter how subtle. This also keeps us on the wheel, because we still have to come back into incarnations to receive the benefits of our good karma.
The ultimate contemplation in action is in practicing being a channel for good, towards ourselves and all others, with no attachment, as if we're walking on sand and leaving no footprints. No small feat.
But once we can get to the point of honoring All Beings including ourselves as aspects of the Absolute, Source, the Divine, or the Flow, then all the good that we do is always and only just for our Self. And that makes it all very cozy.”
In closing, if you’ve started to experience quicker manifestation of your desires in a positive way, congratulations! This means that you’ve begun to clear your channel to Source and open your heart, a spiritual journey that will automatically be supported by the quickening of energies on the planet now.
As we accelerate in the evolution of consciousness, instant karma is definitely gonna get us—to the degree that we’re awake and open. So cultivating optimistic, loving and grateful thoughts with your heart/mind is the key—because the laws of karma give back in exactly equal measure what is put out into the Universe, as they always do—no exceptions. Nuf said.
As a modern mystic, I embrace modern physics’ view that everything in the Universe is made up of energy simultaneously with the perennial mystical philosophy that ALL energy is Conscious. As a Taoist sees the Flow of Life, or the Divine, in all things, so does the great pantheist, William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.”
If the game of Leela, cosmic or Divine play, is truly infinite, then that means we’re always at halftime, or midpoint in the game, and that our point of power is always in the present moment, aka the Eternal Now. For more: LEELA
Wishing us all a joyful Spring of claiming our birthright of power over our Inner Kingdom,
J o a n
“If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself.
If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself.
Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”
Lao Tzu
You can contact Joan at: 212-982-6820
JoanPancoe@aol.com
or visit her website at http://www.JoanPancoe.com
Joan Pancoe is a spiritual teacher, trance channel, karmic astrologer and psychic therapist in private practice in NYC since 1976. Her services include soul readings, karmic astrology, psychic therapy, phone consultations, spiritual counseling, Taoist energy arts and psychic empowerment.