Reflections on Karma

Lately, I’ve been diving into The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra. Chapter Three is all about karma— the law of cause and effect, or as Deepak puts it, the echo of every choice we make.
And wow… it has me thinking about just how many choices we make every single day. From the big ones like changing jobs or setting boundaries, to the small ones like adding avocado to your lunch or deciding to hit “snooze” one more time.

Karma as Conditioning
What struck me most was Deepak’s point that many of our choices aren’t really choices at all — they’re automatic responses, rooted in years of conditioning.
An experience, a word, or a person can trigger a reaction before we’ve even realized what’s happening, that’s the autopilot nature of conditioning on our unconscious. The body remembers, the mind rushes in, and before we know it, we’re living out an old program on repeat.
No wonder we find ourselves often in the same circumstances or relationships over and over again. The trigger shows up, the conditioned response fires, and the loop continues.

The Power of Conscious Choice
But here’s the hopeful part: every trigger also offers a moment of conscious choice.
When we pause long enough to notice our reaction, we step out of the conditioned pattern. That small breath of awareness is where transformation begins. Conscious choice is like rewriting the script — hard? yes, but beautifully empowering.

Repaying, Transmuting, or Transcending Karma
Deepak says no karmic debt goes unpaid — but we have options. How nice.
We can repay it directly through experience, transmute it by turning pain into growth, or transcend it through pure awareness.
The first sounds painful, the second takes a lot of work, but that third one — transcendence — feels like the soul’s top tier experience for us little ole humans. He says we reach it by entering the gap — the still, silent space between thoughts.

The Mysterious “Gap”
I’ll be honest: I’m still trying to wrap my head around this one. It might take a minute and several pages of journaling to get this one to click into place firmly.
The gap, as I understand it, is pure awareness — a place of no thoughts perhaps? No, not really. Because when I meditate and focus on my breath, I often notice that my awareness is still a form of thinking.
And maybe that’s the point. Awareness doesn’t mean “no thoughts”; it means “no attachment to thoughts.” They come and then they go. Even when thinking happens, something deeper is watching. That witnessing is the consciousness Deepak’s talking about — the space where karma dissolves because we stop identifying with it. Stop attaching to our thoughts.

The Exhaustion of Conscious Living
But then there’s the practical side of me that thinks, “Do I have to consciously choose everything?”
Because honestly, if I paused to analyze the karmic consequence of every sip of coffee, I’d never make it out the door. Sometimes I thank God my brain can run on autopilot!
And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the point isn’t to micromanage every choice, but to bring awareness to the ones that carry the weight — the ones that ripple out and shape who we’re becoming. Or maybe it’s to find a way of flowing with life where every thought is a concious thought but on autopiliot 🤯. (okay, if that made any sense to you let me know your take). And to be totally honest I am currently having to bring conscious thought to my caffeine intake, so even that is making sense to me how every thought can has a karmic recourse.

Bringing It Home
Our automatic habits keep us alive; our conscious awareness keeps us awake. And I guess I am asking myself and you, how awake am I?
We can’t live in the gap all day all at once,, but we can visit it and flow deeper with it — through meditation, stillness, art, or simply taking a breath before reacting. Each visit widens that space between stimulus and response, until eventually, life feels a little less reactive and a little more intentional.

So maybe transcending karma isn’t about leaving the world behind; maybe it’s about bringing awareness into the world — one conscious sip of coffee at a time. ☕️