THE MOST DIFFICULT, demanding relationships in our lives are karmic relationships. At a spiritual level, karmic relationships represent an opportunity to resolve a spiritual debt that we have with another person, a debt that was generated in another lifetime, another life circumstance. Karma is a third-dimensional experience – you kill me in one lifetime, I will kill you, or at least do my best to try to, in the next. Then, you kill me in the next lifetime, and so it has continued throughout most of humanity’s experience on earth. It is karma that keeps us enmeshed in difficult, destructive relationships across many lifetimes. It is karma that keeps our focus on the human side of our earthly experience. When we maintain our focus on the karmic nature of our life, we are unable to access the spiritual tools that we require to resolve the karma, because the resolution of karma requires a spiritual focus and the application of the Shift principle of forgiveness.

Our karmic relationships are often those that we suffer the most in, desperately want to leave but may not know how to or be able to. Although we are generally unaware of it, we deal with our karma every day. We are born within a ‘soul group’ or a ‘soul family’ and they are part of our karmic circle, the souls with whom we have karma. This is a combination of entities with whom we have experienced many lifetimes and with whom we have a variety of karmic debts. We may have a karmic debt with the father who abused us, an overly critical mother, a sister or a brother, a husband or boyfriend. Our friends are part of our karmic circle and we may have very supportive and loving friends who nurture us and who sustain us during our entire lifetime. Or, we may have friends who betray us. Our own parents or family may be the ones who betray us. Our employers may also be part of our karmic circle.

These karmic experiences apply to all of our human relationships and we have karmic experiences with our parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, lovers, husbands, wives, employers – every relationship that we have in our lifetime has a karmic vibration attached to it. Some of these experiences may be pleasant, some may not. We often reel from the pain that someone can cause us through a karmic relationship, not remembering that in a prior lifetime, we may have been the ones responsible for similar experiences in their lives. It is because we do not remember these past experiences that we continue to inflict karmic pain on each other and to suffer from the results of those experiences. It is the duty of those who are in our soul group to engage us in these relationships in order for us to grow. It is our inability to shift our consciousness so that we can learn to forgive our karmic partners that have kept us in these relationships. We have an opportunity, in each lifetime, to release the karma. So far, most of us have been unable to because we are emotionally attached to our karma and our karmic relationships. The Shift will help us change that.

There are two interesting principles about healing karma. One is that we have to be willing to forgive the members of our soul group in order to stop the karmic patterns and the other is that we have to be willing to end the karma and to find a new paradigm for our lessons. That’s where the Shift gets interesting. We are far more comfortable with the familiar, even if it is painful than the unknown. Even to the point that our most painful relationships are far better alternatives than those that we are totally unfamiliar with. So we are willing to continue karma because we are unaware of another way of being. But karma and karmic relationships can only end when one of the parties involved is willing to forgive the other, for it is the emotional ties, generally centered around highly charged emotional energies, that keep karma alive. Once we forgive the karmic debt, which is a central message of the Shift, then we can move past karma and into higher dimensions of consciousness where karma does not exist.

The issue of creating relationships that are free of karma means that we have to learn to connect with people on other than a lower chakra level. How do we do that when all we know is how to connect on levels where exchanges center around anger, sexual or power energy? How will we be attracted to someone if there is not some kind of energy exchange? How can we learn lessons if there is not some type of emotional component to the attraction? Before we get too far ahead of ourselves on that issue, we must remember that we do not stop learning lessons, we only create new and different ones based on our evolving energy levels. So once we accept the Shift energy and forgive our karmic attachments we will be able to learn lessons without the benefit of the pain and distress that others can cause us because our lessons will be with ourselves. That is not to say that we will never have another difficult relationship, but that we will be able to choose these relationships with people who contribute to our lives in a different way, without the dramatic energy exchanges and long-unresolved karmic issues based on forgotten emotional dramas.

It is difficult to believe that healing karma can be as easy as applying forgiveness to our most difficult relationships but it is true. And it has always been true. Until now, we have been unable to even consider this as a possibility because we have not been able to achieve the level of spiritual awareness that would enable to consider forgiveness as an option to karma. But here we are, thanks to the Shift, and it is time. The earth is evolving and we must evolve as well. For too long we have allowed karmic relationships to become the focus of our existence. Now, more than ever, we are interested in creating true peace on earth and that can only happen once we are able to apply forgiveness to heal our karma. Our only problem will be what we will do once karma is no longer a dominant factor of our existence.

So as we encounter karmic relationships during this time we have an option—to continue the karma or to simply forgive the entire process and move on. Whatever choice we make is the right one for us at that moment—we can always choose something different with the next encounter. The Shift compels us to see things differently, to change our perception, to embrace the concept of unconditional love, and apply it to all areas of our life. Wherever we apply unconditional love karma cannot exist. And that then moves us along the evolutionary spiral that is our spiritual path, into new dimensions of consciousness and new paradigms for living, one that includes peace on earth and good will to all humankind.