Though a survivor’s traumatic experience cannot be undone, nor can its cause be explained, the survivor can choose how they live their moving forward. For instance, one can use their talents to serve others or channel wisdom gained from trauma to help others heal from trauma thus, accumulating good karma.
Daryna Skybina
I want to learn from everything, in case you haven't noticed. So, I am bringing this recent and somewhat traumatic incident into my understanding of karma. Ironically, I come across this amazing paper, written by a Masters of Professional Studies student on karma and trauma. It blew me away that someone was doing the same thing I was doing...attempting to understand karma in a way that would support the trauma survivor. Please read the linked paper below.
I know karma is involved in this and I also understand karma enough to know that what happened is not "my" fault. I, as a survivor, am not to be blamed for this. My family was not attacked this weekend past because of something "bad, wrong, or negative" that I did in this life or a past life. This attack was not the result of me violently attacking a family in a previous life. (Though I could have done that?) Who knows? And I am not to blame for the way the support systems handled this crisis. ( That is where most of my post trauma comes from...not the actual incident but feeling responsible that it was handled in the way it was because of something I might have done in this lifetime or a previous one. "I seem to be getting the same kinds of reactions when I seek help from the support systems so it must be my karma!")
Though I see Karma now as a universal law that cannot be denied, I also realize that I will never completely understand it or the way it works, I see how confusing it can be for us westerners who were brought up to see it as "woo-woo" . Karma is explained differently by different teachers from different backgrounds. I like to go back to Buddha and his explanations as the author of the paper has done.
Buddha in the Accinitta Sutta warned others not to spend too much time trying to understand why negative things were happening to us in terms of karma because this cannot really be understood by our limited minds. Attempting to do so so could bring "vexation and madness".
But here I am trying to understand just enough to bring some semblance of peace.
In my experience with this "individual" trauma I see how my mind wants to go back to blaming me. "So many challenging things are happening now because of some karmic debt I must have to pay off", I tell myself. That allows me to feel a certain relief..."Oh great, I am burning off karma!", and it also brings a lot of shame and guilt, "My family seems to be the source of karmic consequence. My karma is about making them and watching them suffer?" So if I look at this as an individual trauma, I feel both relief that I get to burn off my sins from this life or another, and shame that the suffering consequence is having to watch my children suffer.
When I take my lens of perception away from the individual focus of karma regarding this incident, however, and see it as a source of collective suffering, I get a clearer perspective.
The teaching of collective karma encourages us to view situations of injustice as “a symptom of an underlying social malady that is exacerbated if not caused by entrenched social and political habits.
I see why the individual acted as he did. I see why individuals in the systems acted as they did and I feel less karmic responsibility. I can look at this with skillful compassion and a certain degree of wisdom and I can see the need for others to do the same, in order to reduce the accumulation of collective karma.
All is well!
Daryna Skybina(n.d.) A Trauma Informed Approach to Discussing Karma in Buddhism. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cjtmhd/article/view/39547/30122
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