From the blog series, Unlocking Your Karmic Potential
Seneca, a Roman philosopher, once said “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” and this is all the more true with karmic awareness and how we co-create our world. Let’s talk about how you can ‘make your own luck,’ pulling from all that you’ve explored so far, and explore how karma and luck work together.
We are here to evolve and grow from experiences of all kinds, positive and negative. In a world with so many challenges and disturbing events, it can be hard to remember that a utopian world would generate no learning, or evolution. To be entirely in one state – whether positive or negative, is to exist in stasis, and this is not the nature of reality. Better yet, to ride the two as on the edge of the razor, cutting through the ego’s illusions as needed.
Certainly, none of us are perfect, which is why we all are cut so easily when we fall to either side into judgment, demands and assumptions. Always, there is much to learn no matter where you stand on that edge.
If everything were perfect, there would be no need for love.
Sometimes I am asked by clients, “Why do we always focus on the negative lifetimes? It seems like I’m always struggling with the negative patterns and sabotage!” and while I agree, there are reasons.
We tend to focus on the negative ones because, frankly, they’re in our way.
Or we like to think it is this one little niggling issue that is keeping us from being happy, or rich, or successful, or getting what we want.
Remember when I said before that it’s the nightmare that wakes you up, not the dream? There’s a lot of truth to that, and it absolutely applies to our negative or challenging patterns. These are the ones that shake us up. They make us look around and say, “Wait a minute: This isn’t working for me. What can I do about it?”
You can start by making your own luck; because luck is not something that ‘just happens’ to you, just as karma is not.
It’s important that we consider how we ultimately make our own luck – and it’s all about being ready for it, regardless of the cards that you’re holding or what is in your karmic cocktail. You want to be prepared when Lady Luck knocks on the door with opportunity by her side.
How do you do this, though, how can you be prepared?
While I think it’s great to talk about the why -– it’s so important to educate ourselves and bring in that soul awareness, the Eagle Eye perspective – but it’s just as important to understand the HOW… how can we do this? How can we take action in the physical world? Because this is a very real and effectively mesmerizing reality that we’re living in.
You prepare by learning and practicing how to be a discerning, empowered person clearing the pathway. That way, when opportunity arrives, you have a means by which to travel that path of good fortune instead of old default patterns: old pathways from limiting karmic patterns or beliefs that were built from ego’s insecurity and dominating behavior. That said, remember, ego – poor ego who gets a bad wrap! – is just trying to keep you alive, but needs YOU to direct it! It needs you to be in the driver’s seat.
Creating Better Pathways to Travel
We have habits of how we learned to live, to survive, to get by, to make it through. And we know through science, that we do actually lay pathways in the brain; so while I am speaking from an energetic place, there’s a lot of science building around the neuroplasticity of the brain. These pathways are methods of travel for our ways of being, of thinking, of experiencing. And if you have patterns not only from this lifetime, which is influential enough, but also from many lifetimes (imagine!), you have a deeply entrenched pathway that your ego will love to drive all day long. I would argue it is energetically hardwired to, in fact.
However, when you transform old karmic wounds, you open up the possibility of creating new pathways in the psyche, beginning in the energetic system which then filters up into the cellular level. It begins activating on the physical level, and in your day to day life you find you have new ways of approaching challenges and circumstances when they show up. This doesn’t happen overnight – it takes conscious, consistent effort.
Along with the deep healing on an energetic level, you start building the new pathways – new default patterns – by working closely with ego and mindset, cultivating healthy boundaries and self-awareness, along with practical everyday actions so that you create new default patterns that work for you, not against you. In essence, you are overriding old past life patterns of wounding and creating new patterns that are empowering and supportive.
Ultimately, we are generating greater compassion and love when we do this. Imagine if each and every person was able to deeply heal lifetimes of wounding? Think of the level of compassion this could generate. Imagine how different the world could be!
Sometimes we have to create pathways anew for ourselves. For instance, if we’ve had a lot of wounding that blocked or hindered the path of compassion, you may have to recreate those pathways and redefine them for yourself. In this way, when compassion shows up, you know how to be in relationship with it because you’ve prepared yourself for how to respond to it, how to receive it, how it feels to be compassionate, what it feels like to have compassion for others… Or when horrible, hard times or drama shows up – because they will – you know how to work with this and learn from it, because you’ve prepared yourself on how to respond and not just react to it.
Before you know it, you’ve learned new ways to direct yourself that you did not have before. This is crucial work for anyone who grew up with a particularly challenging childhood – whether through abuse, immense stress – those pathways become deeply ingrained, so you have a whole layer added on from the experience in this life, that is coupled with those karmic patterns as well, and the body becomes trained to behave in a certain way and to seek out the stress that it is used to riding off of, in order to survive.
This kind of work, of bringing this awareness into those pathways, clearing the way and creating new ones, is vital for your well being. It’s also crucial for living a life of deep meaning and purpose – and that’s what creates the experience of not just being happy, but truly being full of joy and purpose in one’s life.
The more you learn who you are on all levels – not just the egoic one, but the soulful aspects as well, what the holy parts are that make up the influences you are operating from, the more your capacity to embrace the truth about what you’ve been dealt, and how you choose to handle it. That’s how you ultimately, make your own luck.
You can take a situation where it feels as if you have no luck at all, and you can generate it for yourself, by how you respond to life happening. By how you have prepared the pathway for yourself.
And in turn, you inspire everyone around you.
Curious how to grab the steering wheel of your own life and drive off into a wonderful, brand new day? Let’s get together for a private reading. You can grab a session here, I’d love to support you!
Coming up: seriously, though, what’s luck got to do with it? Look for more on Good Karma and Real Magic (we’re talking the key to manifesting)!
Reader Note: Unlocking Your Karmic Potential … is series of articles I’ve created to help you navigate your journey here on Earth with greater soul-awareness. Think of it as a foundation from which to build a deeper understanding of the karmic lessons you are working through within this lifetime, the roles your spirit guides play, and why understanding things like energy, dreams, shadow work and chakras can make a profound difference in your life – a life lived with clarity, confidence and purpose.
All images via Unsplash, in order of appearance:
Ruben Boekeloo
Elyas Pasban
Birger Strahl
Benjamin Child
Clem Onojeghuo
Katrina Wright
Alfonso Scarpa
