Karma is a Bitch

In my last blog I divulged my fascination, some would say obsession, with love. How it’s my greatest interest in life and what I think about and care about most. And yet, alongside this passion rides my long-standing frustration with wanting a healthy and authentic romantic relationship, and somehow, never being able to find one.

Wait, you don’t understand, I know everybody wants love and everybody wants to have a great relationship, BUT… I’m 29 years old and I have had all of ONE long-term committed relationship in my life, which lasted a whopping 11 months. (NOTE: Since this blog was written I am now 33 years old, and I have added to this a 1 year and a 2.5 year long relationships. Yay!)

Ever since my parents got a divorce and I experienced what I would call “inauthentic love” between them, I have been determined to change the cosmic course of my fate. Perhaps the love that I know, that I experienced and grew up with was only partially genuine. Perhaps it was not the best example of a healthy and fulfilling relationship, but by golly I know there is something better out there and I sure as heck am determined to find it. I want to do a better job than my parents did.  I don’t want to marry for the wrong reasons, I don’t want to throw my psychological issues on someone and expect them to pay for them and I don’t want a relationship because I’m afraid to be alone. That’s not real love, and I want real love.

So I’ve spent my life prepping and grooming myself for real love. Knowing and believing that it exists and that I can do better than my parents. Yet somehow I keep bumping into the same patters. The guys I want don’t want me, I don’t want the the ones that do want me, and when I finally want one who wants me, he’s emotionally unavailable (or moving away). Really?

Here I am, a hopeless romantic (emphasis on the hopeless part) somehow unable to meet my prince. It wasn’t that long ago that I found myself telling my friend Latisha that it feels like I have some sort of cosmic shield that keeps me from having any kind of fulfilling, stable, lasting romantic relationship. I’ve come to the point where there’s only so much responsibility I can take for my failure to launch before I just begin to feel inherently crippled. Why is it that what I dream of most, seems the hardest for me to attain? Is it just my fucking Karma?

Just as I was starting to feel sorry for myself I got to thinking about Beethoven. How he lost his hearing at the height of his career, and yet, he kept composing music. Then I saw a movie about the famous painter Renoir, and how in his old age he had rheumatoid arthritis in his hands. I pictured myself as a sort of Rapunzel with a buzz cut. Stuck in the tower of the love I know (which is false), longing for the grounded and real love I believe in (which is true). Oh the irony, I thought. Karma is a bitch!

But what is Karma really? And are we stuck with it? I’ve had the opportunity to explore this concept further in my yoga training:

Karma is, in a sense, the set of tools we carry physically, mentally and spiritually, to unfold our purpose or life destiny. The cards we were dealt, our fate, both our fortune and our obstacles. Karma is the combination of light and dark shadows that we inhabit on our journey through life and on our path toward self-realization.

Some believe we choose our own Karma before we enter a human life form. We custom build the Karma that best suits the growth of our soul. Others believe Karma is just handed down to us as a set of circumstances that we must inevitably contend with. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

Whatever the case, we often feel that Karma is an external and uncontrollable force that we have no choice but to fall victim to; It’s our cross to bear, our dragon to sleigh, our fear to conquer. In a sense that is true. But ultimately I believe the power of Karma lies only in how much we identify with it.

I’m stuck in a tower of doom, far away from the love I long for, and this is my karma. Though I have a fairly successful career, when it comes to love, I’m useless. My fucking hair won’t grow, or it’s growing so slowly I can’t even tell if I’m making any progress!

On my office wall I wrote out my greatest dream:

“I have a dream… To love somebody, not because I need to, not because it gives my life meaning, not because it shades my past wounds, but because I WANT to, I WILL to. A love that doesn’t need to be loved in return, a love greater than myself, a love that cannot be taken away”.

Sounds like a tall order doesn’t it? But wasn’t Beethoven’s symphony number 9 a tall order? Wasn’t Renoir’s attempt to replicate the beauty of a woman’s body on canvas a tall order? What about Michaelangelo’s “David”? He started out with a big chuck of marble and as he said, just had to “chisel away the superfluous material.”

Then it hit me… For Beethoven to lose his hearing as a musician must have in some ways only made him more attuned to the vibrations and feeling of music. It is said that he would put his ear to the ground so that he could “feel” the music. Though he considered suicide (Eek), eventually he decided to continue living for his art (Phew). It could even be said that his suffering enabled his talent to covey even more truthful and emotionally raw music.

Renoir is rumored to have said about painting with arthritis: “The pain passes, but the beauty remains”.

What sticks with me the most about these men and their Karma is that despite their disabilities they continued to work toward something greater, they didn’t give up. They chose to forge ahead despite their Karma. And perhaps even because of their Karma they were able to truly appreciate the effect and beauty of art, knowing that the truth it projected could change the world and ultimately outlast them.

Much like The Wizard of Oz, Karma is just a man behind a curtain making you fall for the illusion of his grandiose power, vowing to define your experience of truth and reality. You believe in it’s power until you realize that it’s a false projection. Karma only has the power to define your life if you give it that power. Karma can be our worst enemy or our best friend and that choice is always ours.

There is a well-attested story that, at the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, someone had to turn Beethoven around to see the tumultuous applause of the audience because he wasn’t able to hear it. A the end of his symphony he had no idea of the response his music had elicited, though you can bet your ass, as deaf as he was, he heard every note that he conducted.

Sometimes you have to ignore your limitations and push through the CAN’Ts and SHOULDN’Ts and DON’Ts, until the world applauds at how you overcame the odds.

Perhaps it’s absurd for me to compare myself to these artistic geniuses. Perhaps the love I am aiming to attain is a Gandhi or Mother Teresa kind of love, one that I may never be fully capable of. But, I say aim high. Michelangelo said it even better:

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark. ”
– Michelangelo

Despite my Karma I’m going to chip away at my marble with the faith that though I have yet to see it, something great lies ahead if I just keep chipping away. Someday, I might just find that the work I have done on myself has indeed brought me closer to being the person I want to be, a person capable of great love.

“One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.”
—Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“No wise (wo)man ever knew where (s)he was going, (s)he just knew where (s)he wanted to be.”
—Unknown

Ellie Araiza